What Is A School?

Everybody, I hope, would agree that a school is a place where teaching and learning go on, steadily and systematically. That is its function. Its purpose is something else: to remove ignorance. A school can do several other good things at the same time, but it has one purpose only: to remove ignorance. This distinction is important because these definitions serve as a standard by which to judge what is done and what is proposed in the name of schooling. A half-century’s agitation for reform has thrown into currency so many notions and slogans and started so many trial programs that in the best minds and most earnest hearts, confusion reigns. If it is to be dispelled, much demands our attention.

Removing ignorance is more complicated than removing tonsils, and it is sometimes as painful to the child. The teacher uses no anesthetic—and should not be one. Hence the first of our concerns is, How does a teacher teach? Next, How does the learner do his part? Followed by, What should be taught? Then, How to test the knowledge acquired? Next, Who should run the school? Followed by, What role for the parents? And lastly, What should go into teacher training?

What Teaching Is

One of the complaints today is that, alongside teachers who are willing and able, schools have many who are willing but unable. Worse, there is a teacher shortage—forty thousand are wanted in Texas alone—and everywhere good ones leave for other work. Teaching is becoming a lost craft. To understand and appreciate the act of teaching, imagine yourself in the following predicament. You are visiting a town for the first time and you want to find a post office. You accost a pleasant-looking person and ask the way. He smiles, waves an arm vaguely, and says, “You go down to Maple and then you walk three blocks, maybe four—no I guess it’s only three—to Jackson, and then you turn . . . turn left toward the square. The post office is across the way—you’ll see the flag in front.”

All of this has been rattled off at speed, and you are no wiser. You thank him but must ask again. You approach a middle-aged woman with a bright countenance. “The post office?” she says. “Yes. You keep on as you were going, toward Maple Avenue. You can see it from here; it’s the wide street where all the traffic is. You cross to the far side and, going right as you face that side, you walk two-and-a-half blocks to the narrow cross-street, called Jackson. There is no street sign, but facing you as you come to it is the name “Jackson” on the big general store. You turn left on Jackson. It soon takes you to a plaza with a fountain in the middle. There is a diagonal path, which you take all the way across, and straight ahead of you is a small office building. The post office is on the ground floor. Remember: down to and across Maple, then right two-and-a-half blocks to Jackson, the narrow street, left on it, and across the plaza.”

What makes this woman’s directions a model of what teaching is? To teach means first to put oneself in the mental state of the learner, aware of his ignorance and his capacity for confusion. The helpful woman removed both by breaking up the route into a series of things to be noted as they appeared. She took care to direct you to the far side of the avenue, pointed out that Jackson was a narrow street and had no sign. In describing, she repeated names and facts even before her final summing up.

That bespoke her talent. Now for her qualifications: she knew her subject in full detail, as the first informant did not. She spoke without backtracking and, unlike him, with pauses and not too fast. The poor man probably suspected his incompetence, because he ended in a way I did not mention. He said: “You can’t miss it.” That is a sure sign of poor directions.

A teacher, then, is a person who, by squaring his or her mind with that of the class, collectively or singly, removes ignorance on a subject fully mastered. This definition tells us not only what teaching is like, but what teacher training calls for. The unhappy truth is that there are few born teachers, fewer perhaps than born poets. Schools must make do with people who are neither, but who can be trained for their task. More on that later.

What Learning Is

Now turn to the learner, the child in school. The difference between the pupil and the adult who wants directions is that the child has no question in his mind. To get him to learn, to remove the ignorance he is not aware of, the teacher must create some equivalent to a question—in other words, stir up interest and hold attention. Long before school years, the infant learns at a great rate because it wants to walk, talk, and do all sorts of things with its muscular energy. Next, the child asks questions: What is that for? What does this mean? It is then that parents’ care matters enormously. In one of his short stories, Ring Lardner has a boy ask his father a question, after which comes, “Shut up, he explained.”

But although all can learn school subjects—no social class, ethnic background, or skin color creates exceptions—most children are not exactly eager for school. As Bil Keane points out in one of his Family Circus cartoons, “Billy’s mind is amazing. It starts working when he wakes up and never stops till he gets to school.” It is the school’s duty to establish conditions that reinforce the teacher’s effort to keep the child’s mental engine in gear. An early start in a preschool program, where learning is close to playing, accustoms the child to going daily to work with others, doing what he is told by a grown-up.

Learning is an invisible operation, so it cannot be shown by example; but obviously a learner is one who makes a mental effort under guidance and correction. Knowledge cannot be poured into a child like liquid into a bottle. The pupil has a responsibility: if pupil is to turn into student, he must make a mental effort and follow instructions.

Learning is done in three distinct ways: listening to the teacher explain; drilling to memorize rudiments; and taking part in discussion. Drill is done by coaching and recitation in class and also on one’s own in study hall and at home. Homework, which is practice in re-learning, enables the teacher to see what each pupil has or has not understood. These benefits disappear when the parents do more than encourage or explain the question and actually write the paper or solve the problems.

Memorizing has a bad name, but it is essential. The multiplication table, the verb forms of a foreign language, and all techniques such as using logarithms, cannot be mastered in any other way. Drill also teaches the lesson that in life one must often go through drudgery in order to achieve something one wants to know or do.

The third mode of learning, by group discussion, is appropriate in middle or high school when the teacher thinks the class mature enough to carry on this seminar-like exercise. The topic is an idea or situation that has been duly studied and offers room for opinion. When ably led, discussion teaches the young person how to think straight, which no course called “Thinking” will succeed in doing. In discussion, the teacher sees to it that each student speaks clearly, has listened accurately to the previous speaker, and meets the point just made, using facts and reasoning and keeping the temper cool. A session of this sort engages the whole class, unlike what is often done—a pseudo debate between students who impersonate a pair of historical figures and argue their views. Reading an assignment in a textbook, by the way, is not a fourth way of learning. Although it is reading practice, it is only another form of listening to a teacher expound.

What Curriculum Is

All that I have described so far—school, teacher, and learner—imply some definite content: What is to be taught and learned? Any proposed subject must meet two demands: does it remove a patch of harmful ignorance? And is it be teachable? Before any answer, one fact stands out: reading is central. Every act of learning, through school and later life, depends on the ability to read; and the way to learn is through the drill called phonics—recognizing and sounding the letters and combining the sounds to form words.

It is sheer lunacy to try to teach the young to recognize a full word as a picture using the “look-and-say” method, assisted by flash cards and the Dick and Jane books. That adult readers grasp the whole word in one glance is a result of much reading, not a shortcut for beginners. Adults do arithmetic in their heads, but it would be madness to begin teaching the subject that way. To bypass phonics, as is done in the majority of schools today, suggests that the ancients who invented the alphabet to replace Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform syllabics wasted their time. Look-and-say visits on the American child the plight of his Chinese counterpart, who must learn five thousand pictograms in order to become literate. This grievous blunder is preposterism—putting the cart before the horse—and it is preposterous also in the common meaning of absurd.

There is more to reading than making out words. The reading child must understand all that words mean and imply when put together in sentences. Next comes handwriting, which also depends on letters and sounds in spelling, and which requires the full attention it has lost of late years. Many business people are so fussy that they want employees who can write legibly. Some companies indeed have set up the equivalent of in-house elementary schools.

All school subjects face the challenge: is it teachable? Today, school programs are loaded with subjects that are unteachable—for example, Family Living, Shopping and Community Resources, Good Citizenship, Self Esteem, and Thinking. They sound interesting and desirable but they are in fact a waste of time and effort. A former U.S. Commissioner of Education estimated in 1987 that on the average, only 18 percent of school time is devoted to “academic subjects,” meaning established and organized studies. The typical unteachable subject is Social Studies, which has largely replaced History. Why unteachable? Because it is formless. A classroom subject is one in which each phase grows out of the one before and builds up from simple to complex, until the student commands a body of organized knowledge. Grammar, arithmetic, plane geometry, algebra, history, geography, physics, chemistry, biology, and foreign languages—these are teachable. They are naturally unified by system or by cause and effect. As for reading, writing, composition, and literature, which are less systematized, they rely on techniques that are learned by practice.

What is wrong with Social Studies and other formless subjects is that they are an indefinite mix of facts and ideas gathered from here and there among advanced subjects that are teachable: sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, demography, law, public health, government, and what not else. The result of trying to teach a hodge-podge is that it leaves in the mind neither organized information nor clear principles—and it favors sloppy work.

As for the arts, the most lasting and useful instruction aims at mastery of fundamentals: drawing with pencil or charcoal and studying color and composition; for music, learning how to read notes, which leads to sight-singing and the recognition of simple musical forms. Some children will add playing an instrument, and some will join the band. The graphic rudiments equip students for future careers in architecture and the fine arts, commercial art, and industrial design. The music program gives a grounding for domestic enjoyment and professional work—all together preparing a child for what the public calls “the real world.”

What Preparation for Life Is

Apropos of the real world, some parents—and still more students—complain that history, literature, foreign languages, advanced mathematics, and science will not equip them for the real world’s work, for being—say—a firefighter or a restaurateur. Teachers must explain to parents and pupils that the effort of learning difficult subjects develops the talent of learning as such, including learning the job on the job, where promotion goes to the one with a quick grasp of unfamiliar facts and ideas. Besides, the school has a duty not only to the individual but to society, which is to hand down the treasury of knowledge. Without schools to perform this task, a civilized nation would turn into a mass of illiterate barbarians in thirty years.

But something more needs saying on this topic. It is a fact of nature that not everybody feels at home with words and ideas. Many instead are deft with their hands; they have a sense of space and size, an affinity with the make-up and workings of machinery. Still others, who are good at figures and systems, enjoy the ways of trade and finance, of clerical and managerial tasks. These talents deserve not just shop or keyboard work a few hours a week but a comprehensive technical and commercial curriculum (drop the misleading term vocational) taught by seasoned practitioners. These options should be open for the last two years of high school, when adolescents become impatient. Those well trained in these capacities are in great demand too.

Likewise geared to “the real world” is the much-debated “sex education.” Its proper name is Human Sexuality; it should loom large in a thorough course in Hygiene. With Reproduction must go also the elements of nutrition, sanitation, and personal and public health. These topics need no moral preaching added, if the facts are made so vivid through description and pictures as to constitute strong warnings of natural consequences.

One more type of instruction should be expected of every teacher in every course: correcting mistakes in English, poor pronunciation, and jumbled thoughts in speech, while also demanding legible handwriting. To overlook these from laziness or fear of hurt feelings is the greatest disservice that can be done to the young. The correcting should be done firmly; not incessant nagging but timely and kindly severity. The power of self-expression satisfies an emotional need in the child and makes for self-esteem. And articulateness has a cash value in “the real world.”

The curriculum sketched here is by and large that of the American public school of the 1920s. Indeed, in a good many high schools it was even richer. A senior had had courses in physics and chemistry and was taking spherical trigonometry besides. In English class, he might be reading the shorter poems of John Milton under a teacher who knew how to make them interesting, and having taken three years of Latin he would be reading Virgil without strain. At the Oak Park, Illinois, high school that Ernest Hemingway attended, a room was reserved for the Latin Club, where students talked to one another in something like that language.

Even without these particular requirements, the typical American high school of that era graduated young people who deserved to be called educated. The only defect—and it was a disgraceful one—is that access to this schooling was largely denied to the black population.

What Testing Is

After teaching and learning comes examining. This is a touchy subject. Pupils are nervous, teachers tyrannized, parents bewildered, politicians arrogant. Fairness demands that examinations fit what has been taught. They no longer do. Today, if children should join in a class-action lawsuit against present-day standardized testing, an upright judge would award them damages. To begin with, they are cheated of proper teaching time when the class hour is devoted to special coaching designed to outwit a prefabricated test made up by remote merchandisers.

Instead of check-marks in a box, students’ responses to essay questions show the teacher what each has learned and the student what he has forgotten. The multiple-choice test does neither. Instead, what it does is positive harm, because the so-called objective question does not call for knowledge: it calls for single-fact recognition. Just return to that town where you were a stranger seeking a post office. Time has passed and you wonder whether you could find your way again. What was the name of that wide avenue? Chestnut? No. You keep walking and there it is: Maple, of course! And soon comes the big shop—Jackson’s, sure enough. Those names seem familiar; you have recognized them but you could not summon them up. You did not know them. Knowing means the power to recall without any hints.

Now let us consider a multiple-choice question that taps only our spacious ignorance. The statement reads: “The first man who drew down lightning from the clouds and showed it to be electricity was: (a) Patrick Henry; (b) Thomas A. Edison; (c) Benjamin Franklin; (d) Button Gwinnett.” We have no idea—but we quickly reject Patrick Henry because we remember that all he ever did was to say “Give me liberty or give me death.” Edison sounds plausible. Electrical power today often comes from an Edison company—but no, Edison is the light-bulb man, and that’s not as far back as when electricity was first fiddled with. Edison is out. As for Button Gwinnett, who has ever heard of him? He doesn’t sound real—nobody was ever named Button. So it’s Franklin: the right answer, but by default, not knowledge.

The student who has wormed his way to Franklin in this fashion is clever, no doubt. But the test is not meant to reward cleverness; it is to find out who knows what. So his right answer should really be counted wrong. Nor is this all. Multiple-choice tests give the student a false idea of what knowledge is. They reduce it to bits of scattered information. Genuine knowledge consists of clusters of facts, their relations and their significance. It is this patterning that the mind needs to retain the whole; it is the answer to the question the astute Bil Keane puts into a child’s mouth: “How can I remember everything I know?”

It should be added that the bits of information offered by the standardized test sometimes mislead the able student. Consider the question noted earlier: the student who does know about electricity knows that the unit of inductance is called a henry, after the nineteenth-century physicist Joseph Henry. The presence of Patrick as an option is thus an unfair distraction.

Knowledge is properly tested through carefully framed questions which, by referring to a statement of fact in a sentence or two, direct the student’s thought to the further facts that he is to provide. Of course, for a short quiz to see whether an assignment has been read, six or eight true-false or multiple-choice questions are convenient and harmless. As for grading, it is best done on the scale of A to F or of 1 to 5. These marks are clear to students, teachers, and parents, whereas the verbal accounts favored in some schools are vague compounds of disparate judgments and amateur psychology. No comparisons across time are possible or between reports by the several teachers of a given child. Nor do the figures compiled from multiple-choice scores yield sound results: they are, as we saw, based on coaching and unrelated to genuine knowledge. Numbers can be precise without being accurate, and the national scores that go up or down a few points every few months are only make-believe.

What, then, is to be done? Some measure of performance is needed that will permit comparisons over time and space. The answer is suggested by the word performance: the student must perform an act of sustained thinking, which rules out the check-mark system of tapping a layer of scattered items. The best subjects for a reliable test of the kind wanted are English and mathematics. For the first, a given passage from a real book is to be read and questions on it answered in full sentences; this is to be followed by a brief essay on a related topic assigned. For the second, a series of problems, coupled with definitions to be supplied.

But are these objective tests? Answers of this kind can only be graded by a person—another mind—hence different persons in groups of various sizes, a great many all over the country, will each read a number of papers. Again, is this objective? As shown earlier by the example of manipulation in making multiple choices, no test can be simultaneously valid and objective in the sense of being judged mechanically. But persons can be trained to be careful and quite uniform graders. This was proved by the College Entrance Examination Board when it was first established to conduct examinations in a dozen or more high school subjects, all written work. In a full-day session, teachers, active or retired, and sometimes graduate students, were given rules and examples to follow, plus a list of points to look for and values to assign for each particular examination.

A notable advantage of this system is that the quality of the student’s work receives attention and credit, instead of the quantity of indifferent, fungible data. For example, the student who clearly knows all the steps for solving a problem but has made a mistake in the last line when copying a number does not get a zero for “wrong answer” but partial credit for what he does know. Similarly, evidence of understanding the English passage, the organization of the ideas in the essay, and the level of the vocabulary used—these signs of lessons well learned and well taught are taken into account and reflected in the grade. It is closer to its object, more “objective” than a bare number.

What Administration Is

Perhaps the character of a school has begun to emerge from this inventory of essential parts, and offhand one might think that the only remaining topic to take up is the preparation of good teachers. But there is one other matter to settle first: Who runs the school?

“Run” must be taken in a loose sense. Teachers are not employees in a business; they are professionals, and like the doctor, lawyer, or engineer, they must be largely self-directing. The school administrator, similarly, is neither a corporate executive nor the head of a government bureau. The leadership style that goes with these two types of management—rigid rules, much paperwork, frequent staff meetings, and a fear of initiative—will not run a school; it will ruin it. Strictly speaking, those who administer schooling to the young are the teachers. To do so at their best, they must feel and be free. The person to lead them is the principal. He should choose his teachers (and a librarian), know them as individuals so as to guide them well, retrain them if necessary, and praise them in no routine way. He should encourage the teachers to know one another, to exchange information about pupils, and to discuss ideas arising from their subjects. Such is the professional at work. In that capacity, principal and teachers together should choose the textbooks, with particular care for those in science, history, and grammar.

The principal must also see to it that the school building is kept in proper condition. Neat and clean is a lesson too. The library must be well supplied with books, the classrooms with writing materials, and the science labs with their due requisites. There should also be a “language lab,” where the learners of a foreign language match their pronunciation with the correct one on a recorded tape. Years spent in foreign-language classes that leave the students unable to read, write, or speak what they have “learned” is a common American experience.

The children should also feel that the school is a common enterprise of which they are the reason for existence. For the sake of atmosphere, a neighborhood school is best. To the small child, its being nearby makes it an extension of home. At no time should there be, as at present, twenty-four million pupil-commuters. This vehicular attendance is due to the elimination since 1930 of some 150,000 schools; or to put it in official words, “consolidation” has reduced the number of “attendance areas” by not quite half.

To be sure, many of those lost units were rural, one-room, one-teacher schools. They were classed as inefficient. But in many of the new “mega-schools,” inefficiency has been replaced by ineffectiveness. Huge buildings where hordes of students jostle one another at class-changing time, where discipline hardly exists and teachers fear physical attack, where truancy is rife and dropouts may be thought fortunate—these are no improvements on the schools deemed too small to keep alive.

From the natural conditions of the truly local and modest-sized school, teaching and learning benefit. This is not a guess. In the several surveys of inner-city schools, going as far back as the pioneer study by the Council for Basic Education in 1970, the conclusion is that success depends on capable teachers with good morale and a principal who leads with authority. He was a teacher to begin with, not simply an educator; his title is a shortening of the earlier name: “principal teacher.” The word authority makes some people nervous. What is it, actually? Authority is a claim to obedience and deference. It is based on the right to direct according to accepted norms. Authority anywhere is the only alternative to force. In a school ruled by authority, you do not need armed guards roaming the halls and metal detectors at the doors. In class, the authority of the teacher maintains discipline without violent words or violent punishment.

The atmosphere of a school should be studious calm. The visitor should experience hospital quiet. And physical calm should be matched by mental. It is a bad habit of academic people to say that their work is exciting. When it goes well it is absorbing; excitement would spoil it. True, school children are human dynamos, and when their interest is aroused, it leads to wild waving of arms and cries of “Teacher, Teacher!” But the excited boy or girl is likely to tumble out words incoherently. The teacher is there to bring order out of eagerness, to encourage the timid and calm down the ebullient.

There are, of course, proper occasions for excitement. Athletic events come to mind first, but others such as the school play, the band concert, the debate team, among other extracurricular activities, foster learning and companionship and give the school community the feeling of a full life. Outdoors, the principal is responsible for decent behavior on the playground. To tolerate bullying to the point where the state legislature considers passing a law is a disgrace. Will state troopers enforce it?

And to do the opposite under the slogan of “Zero Tolerance” is no solution. It leads to harshly punishing very small children for small mischief and alleged “sexual harassment”; it amounts to a policy of “No matter what happens, we won’t have to think.” The sports coaches and teachers of physical education are there to patrol the playground. As to punishments for the bullies and other miscreants, what better than extra hours of supervised work? Suspending the offender for a few days only extends his freedom to rampage and remain ignorant.

To the law-abiding, the conduct of the school teaches morals by example all day and every day. But where “social promotion”—which lets those who fail and those who do well both go on to the next grade—is the rule, the opposite is taught: it does injustice to the rest of the class and to the teacher of that next grade. The same holds for the Certificate of Achievement given to those who have not graduated from high school but have “done time” there. And, worst of all, when teachers are ordered to inflate grades so that the principal can falsify the school’s test scores and receive more state or federal money, the school becomes a showcase for dishonesty.

If an able principal exerts his due influence, what role is left for the superintendent? He is what is called abroad a School Inspector. He stands toward the principals as these do to the teachers. A second duty is to lead the school board to enact his proposals for what is to be taught in each grade, class size, special provisions for gifted students, length of the school year, and the like. A school year of eight months is enough, preferably divided in half. A longer stretch of bad schooling is not improvement. And children need time of their own, in summer especially. The legislature is ill-equipped to settle these matters. Different regions have different needs, for example as to foreign languages. The superintendent’s third task is to oversee the material base of the system—buildings and supplies, clerical force, and budget. He defeats himself if he does not insist on high salaries for his teachers. Most often, the money is available, but is spent on non-teachers.

What Teacher Training Is

By and large, two motives lead men and women to teaching: one is idealism—a desire to serve, often impelled by love of a subject and a fondness for children. The other motive is lack of any marked taste or talent. Thus the top and the bottom of the aptitude scale preside over the classroom. When loaded with non-teaching duties and held to low salaries, good teachers resign soon or retire early; the others stay.

To make teachers out of those who are not born to the craft, it is not necessary that they should love children or burn with zeal to serve humanity. But it is necessary that they possess a certain temperament, that they master a subject, and that they acquire by practice some special habits. Teachers are public speakers who must know how to arouse and hold the interest of their audience and see to it that its members, young and restless, retain the message. Would-be teachers must therefore learn to speak well; they must exercise their imaginations so that “squaring of the mind” is effortless; and they must be so at home in their subject that they convey it clearly, in small doses, with striking details that the textbook rarely supplies and that show the links to other subjects and to the “real world.”

For example, the teacher can explain how the subject came to be—geometry out of surveying land, algebra out of weighing bales of goods and marking them plus or minus a standard weight. History and English offer endless opportunities to arouse curiosity about the past and the effects of change and permanence in culture, to say nothing about lessons in morality and its opposite. Teacher training need not make scholars, but it must make practitioners who are fond of their work and still learning about it. Students say about a good teacher that he or she “made the subject come alive.” What they mean is that the teacher did not kill it, by dull delivery and feeble interest in it, which reduce knowledge to a pointless string of facts.

Teachers must know how to maintain ordinary discipline—their words are wasted when their charges distract one another by talking or passing notes or acting rowdy, while at home the parents wonder at their offspring’s hatred of school. The reason behind both of these is that some class hours are so endlessly boring that an adult would rush out and hang himself; some truants and dropouts are simply showing good judgment. Sustained interest takes care of discipline and hatred of school in one operation.

The teacher should correct mistakes without harsh words, sarcasm, or shows of temper, but will punish disturbance, taking care in so doing not to confuse the children’s sense of fairness. Clearly, the requisites of the capable teacher go with a type of character: strong, definite, impressive—an impress is what is wanted in teaching. There is, properly speaking, no list of methods, no system of teaching. There is only Difficulty, recurring and permanent. Teachers-in-training should therefore practice teaching early in the course, not in front of an actual class but before a group of their own teachers, who can give pointers and warnings about both the contents of the lesson and the manner of it.

Teaching calls for such quick responses to what happens from moment to moment that the current demand for a “lesson plan” to be filed with some official two days ahead is sheer oppression. If the plan is rigidly adhered to, it makes for bad teaching; if not, it is pointless. The best guaranty of a good lesson remains mastery of the subject coupled with easy handling of any unexpected difficulty.

As for the devices called teaching aids, they are of dubious use. Too often, films, projections, discs, and field trips are an excuse for evading work. Teaching is a person-to-person encounter; it is a form of conversation, even though at times silent on one side. Classroom technology consists of a piece of chalk and a blackboard eraser.

It may be asked, what of child psychology? Should teachers learn it? Well, so far as it is science, it states only general truths. For example, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget tells us that the young child is self-centered and does not think in causal terms, that is, does not understand that if you do that, this will follow. A parent or teacher comes to know this without reading a book. William James, the master psychologist, said long ago that the science had nothing to offer pedagogy. The fruits of his experience as a teacher he set down in a small book, Talks to Teachers, which is still in print and worth reading.

What is useful for the teacher to study while training is the history of the main educational reformers since the Roman Quintilian. It shows how again and again schools turn bad as practices get ossified. The proposed remedies repeat: use imagination to see and guide the pupil’s thought; drill early in the main subjects without requiring mindless memorizing; emphasize things, not abstract words; relate subjects to each other and to life. Today, one must add: pursue no other goal than to remove ignorance—no preposterism such as Dick-and-Jane and the new math, no attempt at reforming society. It was an evil day when the phrase “public instruction” was replaced by “public education.” Education cannot be given; it is something indefinable made by oneself out of experience and reflection.

To bring out in each potential teacher the talents surveyed here obviously requires a teachers’ college faculty itself made up of experienced teachers. Some will be theorists besides, but all must be able to say, “Watch how I do it.” This is the rule in all professional schools. Teacher-training is a clinical profession.

What a School Is

Such are the elements that, properly combined and kept in order, make up a school. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a good school, any more than there is good government—good in the sense that everything works right, as in a machine. No school or government can entirely fulfill its promise to its constituents, but some perform far better than others. Why is complete goodness beyond reach? In a school, the reason is that its operation is in the hands of a large number of grown-ups and of children, who are, all of them, less than perfect. Mistaken decisions, accidental neglect, fatigue, laziness, and other failings are bound to occasion flaws in spite of earnest effort and sensible arrangements.

It is therefore wise for teachers, parents, and administrators to make firm demands but entertain reasonable expectations; to refrain from routine pieties and enthusiasms, from promises and slogans of the kind we hear from advertisers and candidates for office, such as “The Right to Read,” “Teach for America,” and “Goals 2000.” Educators and parents should seek satisfaction in each day’s conscientious work, rather than chase after empty abstractions such as Excellence and Innovation. The day’s work is manageable, and its results are cumulative. In schooling, it must be repeated, there are no organic problems to solve, no breakthroughs to look for that will revolutionize teaching and learning. There is only a steady, unchanging set of difficulties to meet head-on and overcome so as to remove ignorance. When that is done with fair success, then teacher and student deserve reward and respect: the schoolis A SCHOOL.