Small Schools Speak

In yesterday's paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education's efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: "Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom."  Yes, students who have more personal attention from adults seem more likely to achieve their goals.  I get that.  But what interests me more is how this notion became newsworthy; how we got to this point in education.  

I'm hesitant to write too sweepingly about education in general.  But I can offer some ideas regarding the history of English class in terms of reading and writing.  

Some scholars have argued, in fact, that it is precisely reading and writing that has led to the current asocial, impersonal, and classroom-packed situation we find ourselves in.  Let me explain: when someone reads or writes, they isolate themselves from live, active, social engagement with others.  That is to say, when one writes one sits in silence and composes soundless symbols on a page.  When one reads, more often than not (and certainly in schools) one reads in one's own head.  The effect of literacy, you could argue, has been only the slow march to schools of de-socialization.  Imagine what these look like: massive buildings with thousands and thousands of students, classrooms jammed with forty students whose identities have already been distorted by the massiveness of the physical space, activities in those rooms that seek to silence students (by reading and writing, for example), and, finally, by requiring assessments that value asocial silence rather than social dialogue.  

This is precisely what the Chancellor is being lauded for--the re-socialization of schools.  

There was some point in the past--scholars say around the late 19th century, early 20th century especially--where the industrial trend of the country said that bigger was better.  The idea of packing a building with as many students as possible who were assigned to study specific disciplines at specific times seemed like a good idea.  Whether or not it ever worked is for someone else to decide.  Few would argue that it does work today.  The Chancellor's plan seems to suggest that it did not in fact work.  I imagine the students at Law and Justice would agree.  

I'm left wondering whether or not we in education are doing a disservice by emphasizing literacy when orality is something many students already show fluency in.  Orality, by which I mean spoken language, seems to me to mean more in many ways than written language.  Spoken words are intimately connected to the speaker.  They convey presence in a way that writing cannot: a writer of a text could well be dead for centuries; a speaker, by the nature of the word, must be present. 

Are we trying to teach students to be present or absent in this world? 

My hope is that we learn from the way these small schools speak.  They speak of the import of presence: presence of teachers, presence of administration, presence of words.  If what we want for our students is their genuine presence, then we  must begin with our own.  And nothing conveys one's presence as the timbre of the spoken word addressed to a single person.  Perhaps if we closed the books, just for a moment, and spoke to each other like learners we'd hear the sounds of learning.