When the occupying troops left Reggio Emilia, Italy, after World War II, the citizens of the city considered what to do with the proceeds from the sale of the few tanks and horses the Germans left behind. The men wanted to build a movie theater. The women, a school. The women prevailed. Thus began an educational project to ensure that never again would the people fall under fascist rule, a project to foster intellect, self-determination, and democracy. Starting with a preschool, the project grew to include infants and toddlers and, more recently, primary and elementary education. In this way, the municipal schools of Reggio Emilia became a political entity as well as an educational one. In this time of rising autocracy, oligarchy, exclusion, and cruelty in the United States, we might consider the origin of the Reggio schools a beacon of hope. Has our education system unintentionally contributed to what seems be the rise of fascism in the U.S? Might our education paradigm be at a tipping point?
When I was a young and green Kindergarten teacher with a bit of a restless mind, an experienced colleague told me that teachers couldn’t know what children should learn (and therefore how to teach without following a recipe) and that if I wanted to innovate, I shouldn’t tell anyone what I was doing. Though we taught in an independent school, free of some of the restrictions of public schools at the time, my colleague was still a victim of an education system that placed children and teachers in metaphorical containers, a system that privileged simplicity (though people and learning are complex) and governed by the fallacy that learning is linear and unidirectional. She believed that what she taught was what children learned (there is no such direct pathway), and to accomplish quality teaching and learning, she deferred to experts at companies publishing teachers’ manuals. I, too, was given these manuals, and some at the school expected me to follow them word for word. When I did, children complied if they could, but there was nothing generative about how I was expected to teach and no scope for my own imagination or creativity in a manual-centric pedagogy. The children’s responses told me daily that this was not a natural way of learning, nor did it light them up. Fortunately, my boss, unlike my colleague, approved of innovation and had no prejudice against teachers who think or innovate. Thus began my sometimes-lonely career of questioning and innovation, in which I got to keep my intellect and sense of agency intact. I resisted, though I hardly knew what the consequences could have been.
You could see it coming if you were an educator 30 years ago. I remember feeling dismay when the No Child Left Behind Act, instead of inspiring excellence via innovation in how children experienced school, led to high-stakes testing and a concomitant cinching of the curriculum. There arose discourse about “basics” and the discarding of play and, when money was tight, the arts. Compliance, for children and teachers, became a sometimes overt and sometimes tacit priority. When schools had to change during the COVID pandemic, I thought, “Education has to change. Here is an opportunity for the field to reflect on the why’s of school and make meaningful changes that were long overdue.” Of course, that did not happen. I understand now that people were, naturally, in a reactive state of mind that could not have considered major paradigm shifts. So, changes made to pedagogy were contained within the paradigm: There is a direct path from telling to learning. Assessments continued to drive the curriculum. But they fell far from ascertaining what children really learned. School has become a pressure machine: the district imposes the standards on principals, with success-linked consequences. The principals impose them on the teachers, again with the threat of consequences. And the teachers impose them (and the flow of fear that affects each level in the pressure machine) on the children. The system’s image of the teacher was diminished, which was passed back up the chain, all the way to the publishers of curricula that the schools adopted. We’d better make this curriculum teacher-proof, was the sentiment, thus relegating the teacher’s role to something akin to a factory foreman. The years following NCLB were the beginning of the steal…squandering teachers’ intelligence, lowering expectations (“All you have to do read the teachers’ manual out loud to the children and manage their behavior”), and discouraging teachers’ sense of agency and autonomy in the classroom. Concomitantly, the public’s image of learning was circumscribed. Curricula became narrow and reductive. Creativity, innovation, thinking out of the box, and critical thinking gave way to learning in the least natural way: rote memorization and conformity, contained by what was on state standards tests that didn’t even measure what was learned.
This all has led to a swath of the populace (now well into middle age) who were robbed of their natural curiosity in school. They never developed cognitive flexibility and many lost the creativity that was their birthright. Many never discovered the deep pleasure in learning that creates the lifelong learner. Children learned to comply (or not, at the expense of their self-images as students) and to work in school for approval rather than for learning’s intrinsic value. They were not given opportunities to think critically, so that muscle either never developed or atrophied over time. Thinking critically for those folks, now adults who vote, is uncomfortable. It would involve questioning biases, considering perspectives different from their own, and acting on curiosity, and it seems that many just don’t have it in them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) called this unwillingness to think critically “stupidity.” The word has a connotation that diminishes, and I don’t much like it. But his theory is apt. Bonhoeffer considered stupidity more dangerous than evil. He said that evil has intent and knows what it’s doing. But stupidity, he said, can be manipulated, weaponized, and used by evil without the subject realizing it. He called stupidity evil’s unsuspecting sidekick, with those affected blindly holding the detonator that can destroy their own lives. (Bonhoeffer, 1951)
This is where we are, with a whole swath of Americans unable to think critically. They are loathe to take the risk that considering perspectives that do not fit their cemented-in world views entails. They are manipulable. They hold values that are entirely antithetical to the manipulator’s goals, but believe the manipulator when he claims to share their values. So, they are blind to the actions the manipulator takes that, if they could muscle their way out of perspective-in-concrete, they would recognize as against their values and their interest. Thomas Jefferson said it often: In order for a society to be self-governed, it has to be educated and free-thinking. That is, we must educate better in order to keep our democracy. Apparently, we have not done so.
Here, then, is the mandate: in order to reclaim education and reclaim democracy, we need a different paradigm for our schools. We need to reclaim independent thought for our children to inoculate them against propaganda, groupthink, and blind allegiance to authority. We need to safeguard the curiosity children are born with. We need to foster and grow children’s flexibility of thinking. We need to sustain creative thought. We need to teach children the value of dialogue and support them to consider the perspectives of others while they learn to articulate their points of view. We need to teach them in a way that preserves and develops the inclination to explore, investigate, and innovate that they have before they ever go to school. We need to provide conditions that encourage students to play with ideas and engage in dialogue, from toddlerhood through graduate school.
We have models for such a transformation. In fact, in order to inoculate its citizenry against ever experiencing what they did in World War II, the families of Reggio Emilia created preschools that privilege critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and community. The school-as-machine views children as machines (think classrooms full of same-age children, with one-size-fits all curricula, where the image of learning is simpler and more outcome-oriented than it can, in truth, be). It is outdated, ineffective, and, in my opinion, at least partially responsible for the mess we’re in in this country. It pretends that learning has a straight-forward trajectory. It loves simplicity, when learners and teachers are anything but. And, in many cases, it kills the natural processes to seek learning that we are born with. How many kids hate school? How many hate it enough to eschew anything intellectual or scholarly for the rest of their lives? Too many kids come out of traditional schools without having discovered an academic passion. Too many products of such schooling allow themselves to be led down a path of lies toward a world that, if the clouds were lifted from their eyes, they would perceive with horror. Let’s re-imagine our idea of what education is and should be. Let’s listen to the smart people who have been making strides to create a new paradigm for education. I don’t believe we can leave what’s there and apply new ideas on top of it. I believe the entire idea of school must be reworked, starting with questions like, “What do we want for our children?” and “What is necessary for a populace that can sustain democracy?” If it’s not too late.
Reference
Bonhoeffer, D. 1951, 1997. “After Ten Years” in Letters and Papers from Prison. Touchstone