Top Myths of College Admissions, and What Really Matters
This week I attended a free talk that promised to cover the Top 10 Myths About College Admissions from well-known admissions consultant Mimi Doe. As expected, the room was overflowing with eager parents trying to figure out what they could do to help their children gain admission into the top colleges and universities. Most of them already knew that college admissions is a game that can be played, and they were no doubt hoping that Mimi would let slip some of the secrets to the admissions game that she typically charges families tens of thousands of dollars for.
Mimi did a fine job during the presentation. She provided them with some basic facts about the admissions process, demonstrated knowledge on some of the finer points of college admissions, and most importantly, she induced enough anxiety within the attendees about the college admissions process that surely one or two of them will retain her. The only meaningful “secret” she really let slip was how to leverage early action/early decision to improve one’s chances of admission.
While she was right on many points, such as half the class at top schools being taken by applicants with hooks, she was factually incorrect on a couple of points. One glaring example was the remarkable claim that young people have a better chance of getting into top colleges from public schools than private schools. She pointed out that schools such as Harvard typically fill 55-65% of their freshman classes with students who attended public schools. What she failed to tell them is that although private high schools only enroll about 8% of all high school-aged students, they represent about 35% of the incoming Harvard class. From a sheer numbers perspective, it is significantly more likely to gain admission into Harvard from a private high school than a public high school, especially if it is a non-parochial school.
Diving even deeper, we find that not all public and private schools are created equal. The Harvard Crimson did an analysis of where the Class of 2017 went to high school and found that one out of every 20 matriculating freshman went to one of only seven high schools![1] Of those seven schools, only three were public, and only one of them did not require students to apply to gain admission (i.e., a local district school where many Harvard faculty members send their children). While these seven schools placed the most students in the freshman class, there were plenty of other feeder schools. Only 11% of the high schools represented filled one third of the freshman class. These schools, which are disproportionately private schools and large public magnet schools, are well known to college admissions staffs, and one can reasonably expect that in any given year they will have at least a couple of students gain admission. Meanwhile, three quarters of the high schools represented sent only one student to Harvard, filling less than 50% of the freshman class.
These numbers make clear that from a statistical standpoint, it is much less difficult to gain admission into Harvard from a private high school than a public high school. But people would say that there is less competition at regular district public schools, so perhaps it is actually easier to get into Harvard from a regular district public school. No, that is not the case. At the feeder schools, which are predominantly private schools, one does not have to be the best student every several years to be able to get into Harvard. One just has to be in the top tier of students, and have a good story. However, for unhooked applicants from the overwhelming majority of the 37,000 high schools in the country, to be seriously considered for Harvard you have to be the best student to have come through the school in years. Even in public schools that send more than a few students to top schools every year, such as Westlake High and Lake Travis High in Austin, TX, one still has to outcompete hundreds of other students to have a shot at securing a spot at these schools.
Perhaps Mimi made the claim about public schools to assure the parents in the room that their children still had a chance, if you retained her. Who knows.
After she was finished her presentation, Mimi opened up the floor for questions. Most questions followed the typical overanxious parent narrative, eager to squeeze the one helpful nugget of information that might allow them to work their overstressed child into the college of their (parents’) dreams. When I give my speeches on college admissions, I hammer home the point that college admissions is not only a game, it is an unnecessary game, and it does not guarantee those who play it well a great outcome.
Not expecting to hear any particularly good questions, I began surveying the room to see who else attended. I recognized a couple of parents who had previously attended my prior talks, and I wondered if any of them took my advice on how to allow their children to be free to lead remarkable lives.
Then all of a sudden, a woman spoke up who said she was stressed out by the college admissions process. She wanted to know what she could do as a parent to help her child succeed in college, not just get into college. It was such a relief to hear a parent asking a question that acknowledged that life extends beyond the college admissions process.
Mimi suggested that those applicants who were able to take control of the admissions process were the ones who would perform the best once they got to college. Sadly, it was pretty clear that most of those in the room were not the type of parents who would step back from the admissions process so that their children could take the wheel. But Mimi was right, applicants who take control of the admissions process do tend to do better in college.
Most young people spend their primary and secondary years just following the directives given to them. The “best” students are always doing exactly what they are told, neurotically shooting for perfect grades, and continually endeavoring to make their teachers happy. They are told that so long as they do what is expected of them to perfection, that they are setting themselves up for future success. But they are never given the time and space to figure out who they are, to engage in learning experiences that they find meaningful, and they never learn how to take charge of their lives because their lives are being directed by others.
Unfortunately for the woman who asked the question, she asked it several years too late, and she asked the wrong person. The best way to help prepare children to thrive in college (and beyond) is to trust them to lead their own lives while they are young. When they are the ones who are expected to decide what, why, and how they are going to learn, and they are expected to deal with the consequences of their decisions, they are much more likely to take their lives much more seriously. Those young people are more likely to go college with a plan. To identify the resources available at a college and utilize them. And to see the course catalog and syllabi as tools to be used in pursuit of a larger goal.
Unfortunately for all the attendees that evening, no one pointed out that allowing young people to lead their own lives while they are still young is also the best way to position oneself to get into a top college.
1. “The Making of a Harvard Feeder School,” The Harvard Crimson http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/
Donald Trump Cannot Read? The Profound Dangers of a Fixed Mindset
This past fall, I bought copies of Carol Dweck’s Mindset for two of our new Learners.[1] Each of them, who spent most of their school-aged years in traditional schooling environments, demonstrated proclivities for what Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” This mindset was holding them back from taking risks that would allow them to grow intellectually and emotionally. Specifically, they would avoid engaging in learning experiences they did not feel they already had mastery over, they would shut down the moment someone else realized they did not understand something, and they would place immense value on whether others thought they were smart, popular, or attractive.
Dweck states that a fixed mindset is a fundamental belief that qualities, traits, and talents are largely unchangeable. That they are inherent, or inborn. The opposite of a fixed mindset is a “growth mindset” which is a belief in the ability to change and cultivate qualities, traits, and talents through deliberate effort and experience. And while people are not completely fixed or growth mindset oriented in every facet of life, some people tend to stand out as one or the other significantly more often than the rest. As I revisited Mindset for the benefit of our two Learners, I could not help but notice that then presidential candidate Donald Trump was a perfect fixed mindset case study.[2]
The mindset of a king
In 2015, Trump himself laid out a compelling argument for his fixed mindset orientation in an interview with Michael D’Antonio of the Los Angeles Times.[3] “I’m a big believer in natural ability,” Trump said. The belief in natural ability is a cornerstone of fixed mindset thinking, and it also defies what we know about human development. He later added, “the most important thing is an innate ability.” In Trump’s eyes, innate ability, which one cannot control, is more important than what one has significant control over such as effort, education, and experience. It was once accepted that the best people to rule nations were royalty, the people who were preordained to lead. Befittingly, the LA Times piece was titled, “Donald Trump believes he was born to be king.”
As the campaign season wore on, Trump became notorious for attacking those who questioned him, no matter who they were or how insignificant their opinion was. Trump would go on public campaigns attacking and attributing negative characteristics to the members of the news media, politicians, and celebrities who dared to critique him. Rarely did he address their arguments; he just attacked. But he also made time to attack random Twitter users who had little to no audience, calling them losers, dumb, and failures. While politicians are not necessarily known for their incredibly thick skin, the ability of people to (often gleefully) so easily get on the nerves of the future leader of the free world was remarkable. It was as if he could not possibly stand being critiqued.
Growth mindset oriented people are more willing to hear critiques; they seek them out. They more often value diversity and feel more comfortable populating their teams with contrarians who will challenge their positions. Growth mindset people facilitate and improve communications within their teams, as they see everyone, including those they disagree with, being a part of their learning process. Fixed mindset people, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with yes men who will always agree with them. They view critiques of their beliefs or actions as attacks on their ability, competence, and intellect. And unlike growth mindset people who will try to understand the critiques of outsiders, fixed mindset people immediately label those outsiders as the enemy who must be dealt with swiftly.
We did not have to wait until the campaign season shined a light on some of Trump’s more impertinent social behaviors to find evidence of a fixed mindset—the evidence was there all along. As much as Trump talked about The Art of the Deal, it seemed much of his financial success came after deals were made by way of broken contracts and non-payments to contractors for services received.[4] He has also demonstrated an eagerness to threaten lawsuits against people who upset him or get in his way, and a willingness to follow through on many of those threats.[5] Additionally, he has been accused of assaulting women multiple times, and has been caught on audio joking about assaulting women.[6]
While all of these actions should be seen as troublesome, unsavory, or unethical on a one-off basis, that Trump keeps revisiting them is what screams fixed mindset. As Jamie Loftus writes, “Throughout [Trump’s] life, there are examples of his making the same mistakes, ignoring criticism, being threatened by others, and not accepting the challenge of self-examination.”[7] In other words, he does not learn from experience because he does not see any value in the introspection that growth minded people use to try to improve their behavior or performance.
Fake it ‘til you make it
A fixed mindset does not necessarily preclude one from success, riches, positions of influence, or fame, as Trump rising to the most powerful political position in the world shows. Already having power and privilege, as Trump did growing up, can certainly help one overcome shortcomings they are unwilling to address. What a fixed mindset does, however, is limit opportunities for success, place successes on a weak foundation that can be exposed at a later date, and it can lead fixed mindset people to engage in dangerously self-defeating behaviors.[8] By virtue of Trump being a billionaire and president of the United States, let’s accept that he has had his share of successes. But now he is in the precarious position of taking on more complex challenges without the support systems that he has benefited from and grown used to.
People have often built their successes on false foundations. Success is everything in our society and it is dictated by the perception of others: getting into Harvard or Stanford, working for the right consulting or law firm, buying the right house in the right neighborhood, getting your children into Harvard or Stanford. My list starts and ends with school for a reason. School is where society is best conditioned to focus on attaining arbitrary measures of success and avoiding failure at all costs. Schools drive this lesson home early and often with gold stars, report cards, and class rankings. By the time students arrive in high school, they know that their success requires them to be perfect in class; there will be no time for experimenting and growth because a perfect GPA does not allow for it. This is why so many students cheat, and why so few students are genuinely excited to learn.
Apropos of the previous point, there is a persistent rumor that highlights how Trump the fixed mindset president may have built a false foundation and positioned himself for an inglorious downfall in a way that a growth mindset president would likely avoid. Can Trump read? David Pakman recently produced a 12-minute video laying out compelling evidence that Trump may not be able to read, and has since followed up with another video really pushing the issue.[9]
Has School Ever Gotten in the Way of Your Learning?
Do you remember what you learned in school? Was it useful in your life? Did it help you understand who you are and where you fit in this world? For me the answer to all of those questions is a resounding no. Sometimes I whip out my protractor and draw a perfect angle … just kidding. Now, I’m not saying the ability to use a protractor is useless for everyone. Surveyors, drafters, engineers, architects protractor on. However, I am saying that the overwhelming majority of children’s primary and secondary experiences are focused on developing a shallow base of knowledge that society deems meaningful. A wonderfully hilarious example of this is the article “If You Only Knew The Amazing Things Your Child Does In School All Day” written by Merete Kropp.[1] At least I thought the article was going to be hilarious until I realized it was not satire. The opening paragraph begins:
“As she prepares to enter the school building every morning, she knows exactly where to line up and what she needs to carry with her. Perhaps she even knows her precise position in line: in front of number 16 and behind number 14. She stops playing, turns off her voice and is swallowed up behind the doors before you turn away …”
Is this your definition of amazing? Amazing means exchanging your name for a number, turning off your voice and becoming a robot? Interesting. I thought amazing would be finding her voice. I thought amazing would be figuring out how she can contribute to her society.
“She makes choices on how to spend her free time both in the classroom and outside during the limited free time the class may have or earn through positive behavioral choices.”
Does this make anyone else want to vomit? In school, free time is not a right. One has to earn it by way of “positive behavioral choices,” meaning sit down, shut up and listen. In school, children are not free. Their every move is scheduled, watched, and judged. But America is the land of the free! They say, “Oh but it’s for the best. Think about their future!” My response: I am.
When did learning become rote memorization of facts? When did it become more about controlling children than learning? In school, every minute of the day is planned: what they learn, how they learn, what time they learn, when they eat, when they play, when they go to the bathroom. Students have no time to think for themselves, they are too busy memorizing mindless drills and procedures. They are too busy being obedient. Schools are producing robots that follow orders, not critical, independent thinkers with a developed sense of self. Schools are teaching young people that they are incompetent (e.g., “we know what is best, sit down sweetie”). Schools are teaching young people not to question, to act only for rewards or to avoid punishment, to be cookie cutter. Schools are teaching young people that life is a series of judgments. How boring. How will these young people be able to make decisions for themselves if they are being trained to be dependent?
At Abrome, we recognize that our young people are capable of controlling their own lives. We are here to create a psychologically safe space where they can take control of their learning, and their lives. That requires us to get out of their way.
Schools Focus on Teaching Shallow Knowledge, But Fail
I currently lead a reading group focused on topics of education and schooling at our local library, with an emphasis on the science and psychology behind learning.[1] This month’s reading was Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham.[2] The book failed to address the many reasons why students do not like school, but it did serve as a good primer on how students learn.[3] Much of the book centers on the mental processes of thinking, and the limitations our working memory places on it.
As Willingham points out, the “lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition.” In spite of the awesome potential of the human brain, we simply cannot engage in higher order thinking unless we have sufficient factual knowledge, find ways to chunk information, and automate certain functions of thinking.[4] Factual knowledge is the knowledge of terminology, details, and elements necessary to engage a topic. Factual knowledge is the base level of knowledge that is needed on which to build off of.[5] To convert a variety of information into chunks (and less complex chunks into more complex chunks), we typically go through the process of active thought in order to coalesce that information into chunks that are placed into long-term memory so that we can access them in the future.[6] While it may seem inefficient to have to convert information into chunks that reside in our long-term memory if we are only going to utilize them on a one-off basis, it makes higher order thinking much more efficient and possible by freeing up working memory capacity.
All of this makes sense, and there is little to argue with in terms of his broader explanation into how learning works. However, there is much to take issue with when it comes to his views on the role of schools. Willingham spends an entire chapter on the importance of factual knowledge and how to acquire it. He clearly articulates how shortcomings in factual knowledge hampers thinking and learning in various ways, with an appropriate focus on how it undermines reading comprehension. And he makes clear that he believes it is the responsibility of schools to fill the minds of young people with the factual knowledge necessary to do higher order thinking in the future.
At the same time, he recognizes that there are some serious shortcomings in the actual delivery of education through schools, and even he seems to shrug his shoulders at the reality that the overwhelming majority of what students learn is soon forgotten.[7] He offers some suggestions for ways to mitigate this problem, but he does not see the problem as serious enough to question the medium. Although he would probably protest this claim, he goes so far as to suggest that all of the wasted time in schooling not really learning much is not necessarily bad because “shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge.”
But do we need to subject young people to years of schooling in order for them to have a broad but shallow store of knowledge? He thinks the answer is yes because he sees learning and young people primarily through the lens of school. He does not consider that deep and meaningful learning experiences can happen outside of school or in lieu of school. His view of students is a view of incompetence and a lack of belief in their ability to do serious work while they are still young. This unfortunate view does not just carry itself through primary or secondary school, but even into college and graduate studies.
The reality is that his views are handicapped by his failure to recognize that traditional schooling is not the preferred medium for intellectual development. When students are subjected to age-based standardized curriculum in oppressive environments that prioritize classroom management over dynamic learning, then the best we can hope for is a large store of shallow knowledge for the overwhelming majority of students. But after 13 years of captive schooling, the education establishment fails to clear even that very low bar.
Willingham should know better than to believe that we need schools for transmission of shallow knowledge, because he points to a better way in the same book. He recognizes that one of the best ways to pick up factual knowledge is to read. He states, “Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity [emphasis added], and persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime.”
If reading books (and newspapers and magazines) is superior to lectures, assigned homework, quizzes, and tests, then why not just give young people access to libraries and forgo all of the pain and trauma associated with schooling? Instead of trying to find ways to supplement schooling with required reading, why not supplement reading with opportunities to discuss ideas and experience the world?
1. http://www.abrome.com/blog/2017/1/9/conversations-about-schooling-smart-schooling-book-group
2. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Dont-Students-Like-School/dp/047059196X
3. The reason Willingham did not answer the question as to why students do not like school may be because his goal was to sell his book to teachers and school administrators, who do not want to be reminded that the practices and structures of schooling are the primary reason that students do not like school. I could have written an essay on how Willingham could have answered the question, but Peter Gray has already written that essay: http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/peter_gray2.html.
4. We will forgo a discussion of automatizing mental processes in this essay. However, the ability to tie shoelaces, ride a bike, operate a manual transmission vehicle, type on a computer, and read prose without having to sound out every word are all examples of automatized mental processes that allow one to engage in complex behaviors without having to actively think about them.
5. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, factual knowledge is the lowest form of knowledge, which is associated with the lowest form of cognition (remembering).
https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
6. Although there is disagreement as to how many “chunks” of information can reside in working memory at one time, and acknowledging that it fluctuates from person to person, it is generally accepted that a normal span of chunks ranges from seven digits to six letters to five words. More complicated ideas, principles, or theories further reduce the number of chunks that one may be able to efficiently hold and utilize within working memory at a time. See work by GA Miller and Nelson Cowan for more on chunking.
7. The failure of students to remember the overwhelming majority of lessons they are taught in school is not a secret, and has been written about extensively. A recent essay by a father of straight-A students covered this reality. Unfortunately, this father did not begin searching for a solution to the problem after identifying the problem.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2017/01/13/my-kids-are-straight-a-students-and-they-know-nothing/#4392775f325e
What does the average Abrome student look like?
We are often asked what our average student (we call them Learners) looks like. Well, there is no such thing as an average student, so we cannot describe what the average Abrome Learner looks like.[1] But we can share some facts about the makeup of our learning space.
This month we’ve grown from five to eight Learners. Two of our new Learners are girls, which helped ameliorate our boy to girl ratio from 4:1 to 5:3. The boy we brought in is six years old, giving us an expanded age range of six to fourteen years old.
Abrome profile as January 24, 2017
In terms of race and ethnicity, 50 percent of our Learners are considered students of color.[2] We do not yet have any African American or Asian American Learners, nor do we have any foreign nationals or stateless Learners in our community. From a socioeconomic standpoint, three eights of our Learners are economically disadvantaged.
In terms of neurodiversity, we have one Learner on the autism spectrum who has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. The rest would be classified as neurotypical; however, we recognize that those identified as neurotypical are by no means a homogeneous group, and that every person has a different learning style.
Religiously, we have Learners that come from families that range from Christian to atheist. We do not yet have any of the non-Christian major religions found in the United States (e.g., Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism).
Politically, our Learners come from families that seem to be more progressive or anti-authoritarian than the general population, although we have not formally asked them to identify their political ideologies.
In terms of prior schooling, 63% were formally public schooled, 50% were formerly private schooled, and 63% were formerly homeschooled. Five of the eight Learners experienced more than one type of schooling before coming to Abrome.
Because we have two sets of siblings, we have a total of six Abrome families. Four of those families live in the same neighborhood as Abrome, and two of them live a considerable distance away. The two families that commute come from Round Rock and Liberty Hill. Both families commit to driving over 30 miles each way twice a day for their Learners to attend Abrome.
Those who look into Abrome as a potential learning space for their children, or as a place of employment, often take notice of our stated emphasis on diversity in admissions, hiring, and daily practices. It stands in stark contrast to the efforts of most schools which tend to throw the word diversity around, but do little to embrace it.[3] Abrome currently sits somewhere in between our ideal of a learning community that reflects the broad diversity of the wider population and the norm amongst public and private schools. At this point, only five months into our first year, we are proud of the diversity within our inaugural cohort, but intent to improve upon it.
1. Parents, teachers, and other interested in education should read Todd Rose’s stellar book The End of Average, which bursts the myth of average people.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Average-Succeed-Values-Sameness/dp/0062358367
2. Percentage of students that are African American, Latino or Hispanic American, Asian American, Native American, Middle Eastern American, or Multiracial. International students are excluded. Does not include foreign nationals who hold citizenship with countries other than the US, unless they are naturalized or permanent residents.
3. See our blog post on leveraging empathy to combat school bullying for some of the myriad of reasons schools struggle with diversity.
http://www.abrome.com/blog/2016/12/19/five-steps-to-end-school-bullying-empathy-essay-5-of-6
Conversations About Schooling: Smart Schooling Book Group
The majority of the parents we talk to are not eagerly looking to provide their children with a rich, self-directed learning environment. Sadly, most of the parents we talk to are trying to save their children from the trauma that is so often associated with schooling (e.g., testing, sleep deprivation, depression, bullying). One of the greatest challenges we face when talking to those parents about Emancipated Learning as an alternative to school is that it is often the first time that they have heard of an educational environment that does not rely on coercion. Most of them have never been introduced to the notion of self-directed education, or they believe that self-directed education can be achieved by allowing a student to pick a topic they are expected to write a report about. They might have heard of homeschooling, but have never heard of unschooling, Sudbury Valley, or Summerhill.
Instead of being able to highlight how we are creating a psychologically safe learning space where young people can engage in deep, meaningful, and enduring learning experiences that will allow them to lead remarkable lives, we are left trying to educate them on human psychology, the history of schooling, and the science of learning. Needless to say, a 30-minute conversation covering such deep topics is typically not enough to compel parents to take meaningful action to improve their children’s learning experiences in their current schools, to move them to alternative schools that better meet their children’s needs, or to opt out of schooling altogether.
At the same time, there are a lot of teachers and administrators who know that something is not working at their schools, but do not know what they can do to substantially improve the situation. They have most likely never been introduced to much of the research that proves that self-directed learning is the best way to deepen learning, promote lifelong learning, and eliminate much of the trauma associated with coercive schooling. It is not their fault, as the organizations they work for and the education schools that they attended go out of their way to ignore these topics, and instead focus on marginal reforms while pushing the baseline assumption that young people need to be forced to learn, and that schooling environments are where that happens.
In an attempt to spur the necessary conversations around education that are currently not being had, we will be hosting the “Smart Schooling Book Group” at the Laura Bush Community Library for the duration of this year. We will read one book each month that focuses on education, with an emphasis on the psychology that would ideally inform how we approach education, and then come together to discuss it on the last Thursday of each month. [Each Thursday during the Covid-19 pandemic]
We hope that young people, parents, future parents, teachers, and school administrators can all benefit from these readings and conversations. Hopefully some school board members will also drop in.
2024 Reading List
Jan – Brain-Body Parenting by Mona Delahooke
Feb – How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Mar – A Different Way to Learn by Naomi Fisher *
Apr – Immeasurable Outcomes by Gayle Greene *
May – Totto-chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
Jun – Deep Play by Diane Ackerman
Jul – Walking with Sam by Andrew McCarthy *
Aug – An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
Sep – Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Oct – I Never Thought of It That Way by Monica Guzmán
Nov – Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown
Dec – Thrivers by Michele Borba
2025 Reading List
Jan – Learning to Imagine by Andrew Shtulman
Feb – Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen by Michelle Icard
Mar – A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado
Apr – What Happened To You? by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey
May – A Place to Belong by Amber O’Neal Johnston
Jun – Tiny Humans, Big Emotions by Alyssa Blask Campbell and Lauren Elizabeth Stauble
Jul – Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
2017 Reading List
Jan 26 – Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham
Feb 23 – The Price of Privilege by Madeline Levine
Mar 30 – Wounded by School by Kirsten Olsen
Apr 27 – Free to Learn by Peter Gray
May 25 – Overschooled but Undereducated by John Abbott
Jun 29 – Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman
Jul 27 – The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
Aug 31– Drive by Daniel Pink
Sep 28 – Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood by A. S. Neill
Oct 26 – The End of Average by Todd Rose
Nov 30 – Old School by Tobias Wolff (novel)
Dec 28 – [holiday break]
2018 Reading List
Jan 25 – Mindset by Carol Dweck
Feb 22 – Creative Schools by Ken Robinson
Mar 29 – Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Apr 26 – Free to Learn by Peter Gray *
May 31 – The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey
Jun 28 – Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz
Jul 26 – Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
Aug 30 – How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims
Sep 27 – Most Likely to Succeed by Tony Wagner
Oct 25 – Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
Nov 29 – Schools our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn
Dec 20 – The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith
2019 Reading List
Jan 31 – The Self-Driven Child by William R Stixrud and Ned Johnson
Feb 28 – Educated by Tara Westover
Mar 28 – How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
Apr 25 – The Creativity Challenge by Kyung-Hee Kim
May 30 – Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn
Jun 27 – Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Jul 25 – Small Animals by Kim Brooks
Aug 29 – Lifelong Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick
Sep 26 – Troublemakers by Carla Shalaby
Oct 24 – Mindset by Carol Dweck
Nov 21 – Opening Minds by Peter H. Johnston
Dec 19 – Teacher Liberation Handbook by Joel Hammon
2020 Reading List
Jan 30 – The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King
Feb 27 – A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz *
Mar 26 – Hacking School Discipline by Nathan Maynard
April – Raising a Screen-Smart Kid by Julianna Miner
May – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
June – The Years That Matter Most by Paul Tough
July – Education and the Significance of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurti
July – Learning in Depth by Kieran Egan
August – Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
September – Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
October – Breath by James Nestor
November – Republic of Noise by Diana Seneschal
November – Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman
December – Raising Free People by Akilah Richards *
2021 Reading List
January – Curious by Ian Leslie
February – Raising Good Humans by Hunter Clarke-Fields
March – The Teenage Brain by Frances E Jensen, Amy Ellis Nutt
April – The Game Believes in You by Greg Toppo
May – Creating Cultures of Thinking by Ron Ritchhart
June – Balanced and Barefoot by Angela J. Hanscom
July – Readicide by Kelly Gallagher
August –Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau
September –The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath
October – Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff
November – Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
December – Range by David Epstein
2022 Reading List
Jan – Upstream by Dan Heath
Feb – Untigering by Iris Chen *
Mar – Humankind by Rutger Bregman
Apr – The Playful Classroom by Jed Dearybury and Julie Jones
May – How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg
Jun – Wonder by R.J. Palacio
Jul – When You Wonder, You’re Learning by Gregg Behr
Aug – Raising Critical Thinkers by Julie Bogart *
Sep – The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile
Oct – Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman *
Nov – Changing Our Minds by Naomi Fisher
Dec –The Orchid and the Dandelion by W. Thomas Boyce, M.D.
2023 Reading List
Jan – The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
Feb – Trust Kids! by carla bergman
Mar – Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman
Apr – The Art of Talking with Children by Rebecca Rolland
May – The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl
Jun – The Enchanted Hour by Meghan Cox Gurdon
Jul – Good Inside by Becky Kennedy
Aug – ADHD 2.0 by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey
Sep – Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin
Oct – Sensitive by Jenn Granneman
Nov – Growing Up in Public by Devorah Heitner *
Dec – Ban This Book by Alan Gratz
Note: We changed the name of the group to Education Conversations to emphasize that we would be going well beyond the confines of schooling.
* author will be / was present for the book group discussion
Five Steps to End School Bullying: Change the Context (Essay 6 of 6)
Bullying is not the only problem with schooling, but it is one that literally brings violence into children’s lives, and in worst case scenarios it ends lives. In this essay series we laid out five actionable steps that schools need to take to end school bullying. First, schools must incorporate age-mixing as a means to reduce hierarchy and competition, and increase empathy.[1] Age-mixing in three or four year batches is helpful but not sufficient. For maximum benefit, schools should consider age-mixing from Kindergarten through 12th grade, and perhaps even more broadly than that. Second, schools must eliminate competition, starting with grades.[2] Grades do not aid in the learning process, but they can shut it down, and they almost always create an unhealthy rank ordering of students. This ordering ultimately leads to various forms of bullying. Third, schools must give students full agency over their learning.[3] Allowing students to pick from some electives or to determine the sequence in which they learn something is not sufficient. The adults must be willing to step aside so that students feel as though they are in control of their lives, which lessens the likelihood that they will try to control the lives of others. Fourth, schools must respect their students.[4] This requires that schools commit to the principles of anti-oppression, trust students to take full control over their learning, and avoid manipulating student behavior through punishments and rewards. And fifth, schools must promote empathy in their communities.[5] They can promote empathy by embracing diversity, modeling empathetic behavior, and tearing down hierarchy within the schooling community.
In this series we have pointed out how these five steps promote superior learning and academic achievement, as well. That schools continue to reject the five steps to end bullying, when those steps would also improve the quality of education, raises some serious questions about the motives of the various stakeholders in the traditional schooling industry, both public and private. What could possibly be so important to traditional school administrators, school boards, politicians, accreditation agencies, and content providers that they would refuse to advocate for and take the steps necessary to build intellectually vibrant environments free of bullying? Part of the answer can be found in the realization that the bullying in schools does not come only from other students, it comes from the adults, as well.[6] Such bullying can range from a vice principal berating a student for violating a rule to a teacher embarrassing a student for not knowing the answer to a question, and in some of the more backward schools in America, to corporal punishment or the threat of criminal charges against students.
So what is a parent to do when their children are trapped in schools where the adults bully the students and where peer bullying is promoted directly or indirectly through the practices and structures of schooling? Politicians, bureaucrats, and school administrators can talk about school reforms that will help reduce bullying over time, but parents do not have the luxury of waiting for years when their children are being subjected to environments of bullying in the here and now. Fortunately, parents can do for their children overnight in one simple step what tens of thousands of schools refuse to do by way of the steps we laid out. Parents can change the context.
If the waiters at your favorite restaurant made fun of the way you ate your food every time you went there for dinner, you would stop going to that restaurant. If you found out your trainer was telling everyone at the local gym what your weight is and how you are too lazy to get it down, you would stop using that trainer. If your neighbor’s dog attacked you every time you went over to their house, you would stop going to their house. We know that if something is hurting us that we should remove it from our lives.[7] We change the context. Yet when our children are being bullied at school, the idea of removing our children from school is unfortunately considered by too many to be an unnecessary overreaction that does more harm than good. Instead, society tells us to teach children how to cope with the bullying, to work with the school staff to find ways to limit the incidence of bullying, and to lobby the school board to address the problem of school bullying.
Life is far too short and far too precious to leave children to suffer in schools, especially when we know that pulling them out of school will eliminate real harm from their lives. Change the context. Identify a local alternative school that has incorporated the five steps we have laid out. Change the context. If you don’t live near such a school, move. Change the context. If you cannot afford to attend an alternative school, downsize your life so that you can, or homeschool or unschool. Change the context. In doing so you will allow your children to recognize their personal worth, to feel in control their own lives, and to lead healthier and happier lives. As a bonus, your relationship with your children will improve considerably. They will recognize that you are on their side, proactively working to help them enjoy life. Change the context.
(1) http://www.abrome.com/blog/2016/10/3/five-steps-to-end-school-bullying-age-mixing-essay-1-of-6
(2) http://www.abrome.com/blog/end-bullying-collaboration-not-competition
(3) http://www.abrome.com/blog/2016/11/25/five-steps-to-end-school-bullying-agency-essay-3-of-6
(5) http://www.abrome.com/blog/2016/12/19/five-steps-to-end-school-bullying-empathy-essay-5-of-6
(6) Unfortunately, the media and education schools largely restrict their focus on bullying to that committed by students, not by educators. However, the bullying that comes from adults, the ones young people are told to trust, can be far more pernicious. This has parallels to how the media and education schools often focus on students and their families to explain away academic shortcomings, instead of turning the focus on the adults who run the system. Here is a report from Australia that provides examples of how adults often bully children in schools: https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/emotional-abuse-hidden-form-maltreatment#sch.
(7) We are not suggesting that standing up to bullies or trying to influence change in systems is not a worthwhile endeavor. In fact, the course we are suggesting in this essay will force schools to address bullying.
Five Steps to End School Bullying: Empathy (Essay 5 of 6)
The fifth step schools can take to end bullying is to focus on promoting empathy in the school community. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. When people are able to see the world through the eyes and emotions of others, concern for others increases and bullying decreases. Unfortunately, of the five steps we have presented, promoting empathy is the most difficult to implement because it requires not just a change in the structure and practices of schooling, it also requires a change in mindset. To promote empathy, adults must embrace and incorporate diversity into the DNA of the school, treat young people with empathy and respect, and model the behaviors that they would want to see in young people.
Diversity is a critical driver of empathy that is rarely found in schools due to a combination of institutional priorities for individual schools and socio-economic factors. More specifically, public schools have a variety of concerns that push them to limit diversity. In addition to the structure of modern schooling that segregates students by age, schools manage their student bodies to maximize revenue and minimize complications. Historically, the concern with complications trumped the focus on revenue, and problem children were pushed out of the schools. The children may have been deemed problematic because of behavioral issues, academic performance (or more specifically, inability to test well), or they simply required too much individualized instruction.[1] The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) helped shift the priorities for schools so that they became more inclusive.[2] Many of the students the schools were previously trying to push out the door all of a sudden offered more revenue than students without disabilities.[3] Unfortunately, it did so in a very overt manner that singled out and identified these students as slow or special needs, when in reality every student deserves educational experiences tailored to their unique needs.[4] Schools went from rejecting neurodiversity to abusing it for their own needs, never stopping to celebrate it as a fundamental benefit to the learning experience.
Another problem for public schools is that racial preferences and “islands of poverty” have left schools more segregated today than they were 40 years ago, despite the population of America being more diverse today than ever.[5][6] Public schools are not only left less diverse because of these socio-economic factors, but they help drive it. The “quality” of public schools is determined in large part by the race and class of the student body, not by the quality of teaching.[7] This creates an unvirtuous cycle in which families with means opt out of poorer performing schools and move to school districts with so-called “better” schools (e.g., whiter, more affluent).
Private schools have simpler and more obvious motives to limit diversity. Private schools, especially those that have a waitlist for admission, get to pick and choose which students will make up their student body. This is good in that it helps the school better control and shape their school culture, but it is potentially bad if it is used to limit diversity. Unfortunately, most private schools use the application process to limit diversity. It is a given that private schools will be limited with regard to economic diversity, as families in poverty simply cannot afford the tuition associated with private schooling. The more expensive private schools need either large endowments or to use the tuition of full-pay students to subsidize lower income students, while the less expensive private schools typically cannot entertain bringing in more than a token scholarship student.
While some private schools have made racial diversity a priority, they most often do so by catering to upper class families of color.[8] This class problem is even more pronounced for schools that cater to foreign students, similar to most American colleges and universities, because foreign students are expected to pay the full cost of tuition without any financial aid. Aesthetic and geographic diversity in a predominantly wealthy class is not really diversity.
Further, private schools are less likely than public schools to take on students with learning differences, particularly if they adhere to traditional educational practices. Those that are willing to take on students with learning differences are often quick to discharge students who struggle to fall in line with the academic expectations of the school, allowing the school to artificially inflate their academic profile.[9]
From an educational perspective, diversity greatly enhances a learning environment, allowing for interactions that result in leaps in learning and understanding that cannot be accessed through lectures or textbooks. As Stanford University acknowledges, “a diverse community of scholars asks unexpected questions and contributes divergent insights.”[10] It is a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Beyond the benefits to learning, exposure to diversity also amplifies empathy and inspires people to take action to address the ills of society. Meanwhile, the absence of diversity in public and private schools inhibits the ability of students to develop the type of empathy that would ward off bullying, or benefit society more broadly. For these reasons, schools must proactively embrace and incorporate diversity into their communities, from hiring to admissions to daily operations, in order to promote empathy.
Diversity in an environment is necessary to instill empathy in young people, but it is not sufficient. A learning environment also needs to treat everyone in that space with unconditional respect. NYU professor of psychology and empathy expert Martin Hoffman points out, “You can enhance empathy by the way you treat children, or you can kill it by providing a harsh punitive environment.”[11] In short, punishments for undesired behaviors such as bullying can actually make young people less empathetic, and more likely to bully.[12] But it is the reaction to bullying that provides schools the opportunity to model empathetic behavior. For example, instead of focusing on arguing that bullying is wrong, school leaders should concern themselves with helping the bully acknowledge how the victim feels, as well as recognizing the emotions that the bully experienced that spurred them to engage in bullying behavior.
Convincing young people that they are respected unconditionally is virtually impossible in a hierarchical environment, however. Compulsory schooling, where adults make the rules, brings with it automatic skepticism to the intention of the adults. Showing concern for young people while simultaneously demanding obedience and doling out punishment does not engender a feeling within them that adults are their equals and co-learners in a space that respects them fully as people, even if sometimes a young person may engage in antisocial behavior.
Developing empathy in young people requires ensuring the conditions that allow it to flourish. Schools must embrace diversity, model empathetic behavior, and tear down hierarchy so that young people feel fully respected as equals.
(1) Historically, schools have identified students of color and those in poverty as the most problematic. This can be attributed in part to the racism of school leaders and teachers, institutional racism, and a disregard for addressing the needs of students who faced trauma in their personal lives.
(2) http://www.nea.org/home/19029.htm
(3) Many also argue that young people who were not identified as problematic were also being identified as learning disabled for the purpose of generating easy revenue for the schools, with certain doctors and pharmaceutical companies also benefiting. http://childmind.org/article/schools-driving-adhd-diagnoses/
(4) The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has a provision that requires public schools to develop an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for every student with a disability who is found to meet the federal and state requirements for special education.
(6) http://www.milkenreview.org/articles/charticle-3
(8) Unfortunately, even where race and class diversity is a priority in the admissions process, poor students of color often find themselves harmed by environments of privilege that convince them that they are not capable, competent, or worthy of a great education. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/when-minority-students-attend-elite-private-schools/282416/
(9) To prevent the essay from running too long we limited our discussion of diversity. However, other notable forms of diversity include religious, political, cultural, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical disability, and life experience. Both public and private schools find themselves segregated along many of these lines, as well. For example, depending on if a school is rural or urban, or if it is in the deep south or the northeast, it is likely that the school may skew hard one way or the other with regards to religious or political diversity (especially for parochial schools).
(10) https://vpge.stanford.edu/diversity-initiatives/commitment
(11) http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1982190,00.html
(12) Punishments for behaviors unrelated to bullying (e.g., being late to class, not doing homework, talking out loud) can also create similar effects.
Five Steps to End School Bullying: Culture and Philosophy (Essay 4 of 6)
Nothing carries the day in education quite like culture. A great culture allows all members of a community to feel valued and loved, it promotes and contributes to learning, and serves as a bulwark against bullying. But in order to experience all of these benefits, a learning community and their culture must be built upon the foundation of a great educational philosophy.[1] Unfortunately, the structures and practices of traditional schooling corrupt even the most well-intentioned philosophies of education.
At the core of a successful philosophy of education is respect for the learner. Most parents, administrators, and teachers demand respect from young people, but they rarely focus on respect in the other direction. When young people are not respected, the learning process is subverted, and the seeds of bullying are planted.
In order for learners to be respected, three conditions must be met. First, a learning space must be committed to principles of anti-oppression and they must reject hierarchy. Second, learners must have full control of their learning. And third, learners must not be manipulated through punishments or rewards.
The easiest and most immediate action schools can take is to commit to principles of anti-oppression within the learning community. Whether adults want to admit it or not, schools were founded upon the basis of oppression. At the very minimum, traditional schools engage in an ongoing practice of demeaning and marginalizing students based on their age. Even if oppression was not built into the structure of schooling, which it is, it would be a natural outcropping to the assumption schools hold that young people are ignorant and incompetent, and therefore need to have their lives dictated to them by adults. But the oppression in schools extends beyond just ageism. It expands to ableism based on physical disability, and spreads beyond ableism and picks on young people based on their mental health, emotional state, and learning differences.
But going back to the history of schooling, there was a very clear objective by the architects of our modern day schooling system to tear down select communities and cultures (e.g, immigrants, indigenous people) for the purpose of assimilating young people into the dominant social order.[2] And this coercive effort to undermine communities and personal identity is not an archaic form of oppression, it continues to this day, although it is now wrapped in much more altruistic language. While oppression is part and parcel of schooling, it is amplified most aggressively against students of color, immigrants, and students of low socioeconomic status.[3] From a social justice perspective, we should demand that the institution of schooling acknowledges and addresses the ongoing oppression of young people. But even if one were uninterested about the broader social justice concerns of schooling, it should be apparent that oppressed students (even if it is only a small minority of students) are going to internalize the belief that power justifies bullying.
The second ingredient of an educational philosophy that schools must adopt in order to promote respect for the learner is to allow young people to take full control of their learning. We spoke at length in the prior essay in this series about learner agency, and how it is good for education and necessary to combat bullying.[4] Simply giving young people a few options in what, when, where, and how they learn is not the same as allowing them to have agency over their learning. Agency requires stepping back and allowing the learner to make all of the decisions related to their education, while recognizing that caring adults can certainly assist on the journey, when invited. It is also worth pointing out that giving respect to young people also requires allowing them to be full and equal partners in the community. It is not sufficient to simply give them a space to learn without giving them the opportunity to shape that space in accordance with their needs and resources, while balancing that with the needs of the other members of the space.
An educational philosophy that prioritizes learner control directly impacts and improves the self-confidence and self-awareness of students.[5] It allows them to experience at a young age the dignity that is often only afforded to well-educated, professionally successful, financially well-off members of society. Self-confidence and self-respect help undercut the drivers of bullying. Further, when learners are able to take their education in any direction they want, they find themselves avoiding the competition that often pits students against other students. When young people are able to learn for the sake of learning, their standing relative to their peers becomes a non-issue, and that also helps undermine bullying.[6]
The third condition that must be incorporated into an educational philosophy is the elimination of punishments and rewards. While some may consider this an extension of learner agency, it warrants additional attention as busybodies are so often eager to try to nudge students down preferred pathways, or to turn self-directed education into “learning opportunities.”
The most obvious form of punishments and rewards in schools are grades, which we have previously addressed in this series on bullying. But punishments and rewards also include compliments, verbal rebukes, praise, detention, honors status, and even criminal charges.[7][8] The author Alfie Kohn has written extensively about the effect of punishments and rewards on children.[9] In his writings he leans heavily on the work of Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan (who we talked about in the prior essay) to highlight how punishments and rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. He also references dozens of studies that reaffirm Deci and Ryan’s claims that manipulative efforts to get students to engage in certain types of learning experiences are counterproductive, and that those efforts ultimately decrease interest and performance in the work that adults are most focused on.
If education was the goal, schools would immediately cease their use of punishments and rewards. Likewise, if reducing bullying was the goal, they would also cease the use of punishments and rewards. As Kohn points out, punishments and rewards can elicit temporary compliance, but that those efforts will ultimately “generate anger, defiance, and a desire for revenge.”[10] Since the revenge will rarely be directed directly at the adults who are manipulating the students, it will most likely be redirected toward other students. Kohn also points out that the focus on punishments and rewards illustrates for young people how one can bypass reason and rely on power to get one’s way. School teachers and administrators may not realize it, but they are providing the blueprint for schoolhouse bullying through their practices.
Bullying can be stopped in an environment with a great culture. A commitment to anti-oppression, a willingness to trust young people enough to give them agency over their learning, and a refusal to try to manipulate them through punishments and rewards are essential to building that culture.
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“I believe that our experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child.”
(1) A learning environment with a great educational philosophy but a bad culture is a miserable place to be. Countless democratic schools and self-directed learning environments, for example, have failed and shut down because of poor messaging, or conflict and miscommunication among families, guides, and learners. And while a good culture can help mitigate or hide some of the harm to children created by a poor philosophy, it cannot undo the harm.
(2) To begin your investigation into the history of schooling I recommend the documentary Schooling the World, and the book The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto.
(3) A commitment to anti-oppression would also address cultural background, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, nationality, language, race, religion, physical appearance, self-expression, sexual orientation, parental education, and other factors. It would also recognize hierarchy within the learning environment and would work to deconstruct it. The list provided herein is not comprehensive, and organizations committed to anti-oppression would consider ongoing evaluation of their practices as necessary to minimize and prevent marginalization.
(4) http://www.abrome.com/blog/2016/11/25/five-steps-to-end-school-bullying-agency-essay-3-of-6
(5) Abrome’s educational philosophy is one that we would like to see other learning organizations replicate.
(6) http://www.abrome.com/blog/end-bullying-collaboration-not-competition
(7) Shockingly, schools are even punishing the victims of bullying. Their reasoning is that the victims are partially to blame for being a party to incidents in which they were bullied!
(8) The criminalization of schooling has only recently become a hot topic in the media, but it has already spurred a good amount of legislation to reduce the use of criminal charges to induce desired behavior in students. However, schools across the nation, particularly in the south, continue to station police officers on school grounds, and they continue to dole out criminal charges for classroom disruptions, truancy, and fighting.
(9) Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards is a must read for parents and educators.
Five Steps to End School Bullying: Agency (Essay 3 of 6)
While this essay series focuses on the problem of bullying, I would like to take a step back for a moment and address self-motivation, which is critical to academic and life success. Self-motivation is what makes or breaks many people once they come out the other end of the schooling apparatus, whether it be high school, college, or graduate school. There are many people who do well academically in school, only to fall on their faces in the “real world” because they never learned how to take control of their lives and drive toward a self-defined goal.[1] Following a syllabus and neurotically studying to perfectly answer every question that will be on the test might give one a perfect GPA, but it leaves little to no time for young people to author their own lives.
Self-determination theory (SDT), made famous by Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan, states that there are three needs that are essential for the psychological health and well-being of an individual: competence, autonomy, and psychological relatedness. When these three needs are not met over a sustained period of time, there are significant and substantial risks that an individual will suffer mentally, physically, socially, and emotionally. And in traditional schools, autonomy is virtually absent. That lack of autonomy undermines self-motivation which does not bode well for the future happiness and success of students. It is also a major driver of bullying in schools, which destroys psychological relatedness and further undermines the well-being of students.
A decade old research study conducted at W. F. Boardman Elementary School in Oceanside, New York, focused on SDT to identify the causes of bullying in the school.[2] What they found, similar to most traditional schools, is that there were very few instances in which their students could act autonomously in their learning, even though teachers thought they were providing their students with ample choices and opportunities for self-expression. Most remarkably, this study focused on the bullied, and not the bullies, and lack of autonomy, real or perceived, was a common factor for those who were most bullied. A lack of autonomy in education can easily be extrapolated to a lack of autonomy over one’s life, and those who feel they have the least control over their lives seemingly become easily identifiable targets for bullies.
In addition to grooming the bullied, the lack of autonomy in school grooms the bullies as well. First, we know that those who have been bullied are much more likely to become bullies themselves.[3] Hurt people hurt people is a cliché that bears true in bully-infested schooling environments. Second, there is ample research that shows that a lack of autonomy over one’s life promotes dysfunctional behaviors, many of which manifest themselves as bullying. While education researchers have touched upon this dynamic, prison researchers have done a much better job addressing the matter. The only American institutions that provide people with less autonomy than schools are prisons, jails, and parts of the military (e.g., basic training), each of which are also plagued with bullying.
Research by Anthony Bottoms highlights that while dysfunctional behaviors were common in prisons, the more prisoners were prevented autonomy in their daily lives, the more likely they were to engage in dysfunctional behavior, including violence toward other inmates.[4] Further, Bottoms highlighted the success of the Barlinnie Special Unit in Scotland for violent offenders. Breaking with convention, this unit provided greater than usual prisoner autonomy in spite of their more complicated prison population, and significantly brought down dysfunctional and violent behaviors, including bullying.[5]
Student autonomy means handing the reins of education over to the learner. It does not mean there is no role for adults, but it requires that adults abdicate their role as authoritarians who dictate where, when, what, and how students learn. Student autonomy allows learners to make the decisions that are relevant to their education, and gives them the belief that their approach to learning will have a significant impact on the outcomes of their learning.
While lots of schools may give lip service to the idea of autonomy, very few have offered even a small sampling of it to their students. They may allow students to choose a topic to research, who they can work with on a project, or the format of the end product that they will be graded on, but such narrow options do not equate to student autonomy. One place schools can look to within their system for proof that greater autonomy is possible in learning are individualized education plans (IEPs). IEPs have traditionally been reserved for students that have been labeled as learning disabled, but schools should expand them to all students. IEPs are an attempt to personalize learning, and the most effective IEPs allow the student to have greater ownership over their education by given them an opportunity to provide input into how they will learn, what they will learn, and how that learning will be assessed. Unfortunately, the structures and practices of schooling prevent even the most forward thinking traditional schools from taking increased autonomy as a tool to promote learning to its logical conclusion.
Because the schooling system treats children as though they are incompetent and ignorant people who are incapable of taking control of their education, they promote a sense of learned helplessness. This behavior or belief that develops in young people, in addition to handicapping their ability to learn, leaves them vulnerable to being bullied by others, or to developing into a bully as a means of externalizing control on others since they have no control over their own lives.
Giving students full autonomy in education can help undo the harm to the bullies and the bullied, and it can prevent future bullying. This is a step that all schools should eagerly embrace. However, doing so would require them to let go of the structures and practices they were all trained to employ, and that they are evaluated on.
(1) Our measure of “doing well” academically differs from that of most educators and parents. Their measure of doing well means getting the highest grades and ranking the highest among one’s peers. Our measure of “doing well” entails deep, meaningful, and enduring learning experiences that allow young people to lead remarkable lives. However, it should be noted that far more young people in the traditional schooling system are not doing well relative to the tiny few who are doing well.
(2) “Interrupting the Cycle of Bullying and Victimization in the Elementary Classroom”, Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 86, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 288-291. http://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/successful-anti-bullying-program-focuses-on-victims/
(3) There is a chicken and an egg aspect to bullying. Bullying requires the bullied and the bullies. However, once the cycle starts, there are ample numbers of people who were bullied waiting in the wings to become bullies.
(4) Bottoms, Anthony E., William Hay, and J. Richard Sparks (1995). “Situational and Social Approaches to the Prevention of Disorder in Long-Term Prisons.” Long-Term Imprisonment: Policy, Science, and Correctional Practice. editor. Timothy J. Flanagan. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.
(5) Some may take issue with our use of prisons as a way to highlight the point about the lack of autonomy in schools. While we do not intend to minimize the inhumane treatment of inmates in prison, it should be noted that there are many parallels between schools and prisons. Both are hierarchical institutions where the students/inmates have no choice but to follow the directives of the staff. There are punishments for non-conformity (e.g., dress codes) and there are rules that cannot be questioned. Additionally, there are legal consequences for those who flee schools (truancy) and prisons.