by Richard Fransham
Table of Contents
- The Formally Scheduled School Day
- School Closures Are Casualties of Timetabling
- Course Selection Injustices
- Devaluing the Human Being and Snuffing Out the Joy of Learning
- Time Is More Than Money
- Discrimination Against Minority Interests
- Other Injustices
- What Is the Alternative?
- Footnotes
The Formally Scheduled School Day
Have you ever considered how the traditional school schedule works against equity and inclusion, and how it impedes student learning and alienates them from their humanity? We have become so accustomed to age-segregated classes of students being marched to the bells that we tend to give it no second thought. More and more, however, in large part due to the growing visibility of Self-Directed Education (SDE) and the accessibility of video statements like those by Ken Robinson, Prince Ea and Suli Breaks, people are realizing that schools can and must become different.
Larry Rosenstock, a founder of the High Tech High network of charter schools, identifies the practice of timetabling school days as the single greatest impediment to educational innovation.[1] When we hear this, we are apt to think that it is all about student learning, but it is about much more. Timetabling violates students’ rights. It amounts to systemic discrimination making it virtually impossible to achieve equity and inclusion in our schools, and it reaches beyond race, religion, and gender. It demeans and discounts any students who do not fit the mold or do not perform as expected. Even the view that the system works for some students cannot be taken at face value. How is it working for them; what is their sense of wellbeing; whom are they trying to please, and to what system is it being compared? From the following, one can conclude that even the students who are perceived to be excelling in a timetabled system are victims of it.
School Closures Are Casualties of Timetabling
A starting point for a study of the injustices of the traditional school schedule is the closure of high schools that have low enrolments. In 1981 the former Ottawa Board of Education developed what it called a “foundation programme.” It defined 122 course options as the minimum that a high school should offer its students.[2] Without special funding it becomes impossible for schools to offer this number of options if their enrolments drop much below 800 students. In 1985, for example, Rideau High School had only 655 students and it provided only 114 course options.[3] Enrolment at Rideau was down to 418 students in 2015 with projections that it would remain around the 400 mark until at least 2020.[4] Due to the economics of timetabling, Rideau High School was closed in 2017. Its students lost their community hub and started having to ride buses to school. Some people say the students are better off because they have more course options, but they aren’t taking into account the humanitarian loss, the lost sense of community and the hampering of people promoting healthy living through groups like active and safe routes to school, and those fighting climate change by putting more buses on the roads. There clearly needs to be greater effort to come up with a better solution.
The end of the one-room schoolhouse is lamented for the loss of the sense of community it created. Smaller schools of up to 250 students are often appreciated for that same quality that develops when groups are small enough for people to get to know each other. The number 250 has been suggested as the maximum enrolment number for learning communities that are free of the bells and age-segregation, and where everyone is a learner and a teacher. It is a number based on a balance between diversity and anonymity. Diversity is celebrated in a climate where all students are viewed as having their own unique gifts that can enrich the lives of others. The more students there are in a school, the greater its diversity and the more there is for students to learn from one another. It is thought however, that if the number of students grows beyond 250, anonymity begins to creep into the learning environment. If students start to feel anonymous, which translates to feelings of being unappreciated, we need to see it as infringing on their right to belong. Feelings of anonymity also result in students establishing subgroups, cliques and gangs that often discriminate against others. In a private conversation, Daniel Greenberg, a founder of the Sudbury Valley School, said that where students enrol at a young age and there is little attrition, a school might be able to operate with as many as 450 students before anonymity becomes a problem. It is interesting that this number of around 400 results in timetabled schools being closed while it is the high-end number for schools designed for humanity.
A study of school closures also reveals that calculated injustices stem from the systemic ones of timetabling. Adjustments to school boundaries and special programs that attract students from outside those boundaries can be used to keep numbers up in a school to avoid it being closed. Affluent communities with influential people and the resources to fight school closures in their neighbourhoods tend to encourage these tactics to save their schools. Schools are more likely to be closed where people are less empowered to fight for them. The solution to this injustice is not to seek a more just balance. By ending the practice of timetabling there would be little need to close schools because of low enrolments.
Course Selection Injustices
The systemic injustices of timetabling run much deeper than school closures, however. They touch every student personally and contribute to the kind of cultural genocide depicted in the documentary film Schooling the World. An inspection of the typical high school course selection process reveals the deficiencies.
Before a school year is even half over, planning for the following year begins. Enrolment numbers are projected and the course options to be offered to students are determined, sometimes in consultation with students, sometimes by just staff. To provide students with a range of choices, the list of options is greater than the number of courses the school can run. It is usually in February that students fill out their option sheets where they indicate the courses they want to take the following year. If a sufficient number of students select a particular interest course it will run, otherwise it will be cancelled.
This practice for deciding which courses a school will run in any particular year is a disservice to students at the outset with its presumption that the best way for them to obtain a good education is to sit them through days and years of teacher led classes, but beneath the surface there are numerous other injustices.
Devaluing the Human Being and Snuffing Out the Joy of Learning
Compulsory course requirements eat up so many of the options offered to students that the non-compulsory electives are small in number. The amount of real choice they offer does not begin to address the broad range of students’ interests. The larger the school, the more options it can offer, which has led to the creation of big comprehensive high schools. Timetabling has produced these factory schools that put students on polluting fleets of school buses, sometimes for hours a day, but even the biggest of them fall well short of providing for the interests of all students. No matter what size the school, students are having to endure classes that to them lack relevance, and they cope by tuning out in class, studying just enough to pass a test, and forgetting what they learned soon after. The problem is so widespread that it is difficult to find anyone who has not suffered through courses they did not want to take, and the problem is actually worse.
A typical high school course credit is based on 110 hours of class time. It results in even students who are in courses they choose to take, complaining that they could accomplish the required learning objectives in far fewer hours. The boredom that can set in may be enough to cure a student of ever again wanting to pursue a topic that was once of interest. It creates a narrowing of students’ views of what the world has to offer, which is obviously not in their best interests and therefore needs to be understood as an injustice.
A look at how math is taught leads to a better understanding of how scheduling works against the interests of students. It is considered to be a rigorous subject, but when you examine what really happens during a typical math class of 70 minutes, you are likely to find that the new material can be learned by motivated students in 10 minutes or less. A blog post found on the Uniting for Children and Youth website titled A Lesson About Math paints a picture of a math class where a concept is taught and retaught and retaught again. To fill the time, students are then assigned exercises to do that often amount to busy work with little learning value. It is a routine that makes it inappropriate to apply the concentration a person brings to bear with a deep learning experience. It discourages students from getting into the highly focused productive state that Mihály Csikszentmihhályi calls flow, a state that can leave a person feeling energized and refreshed. If the learning exercise is dragged out there is no incentive to apply the high level effort to learn it efficiently. Brain research is in its infancy when it comes to the psychological and attitudinal effects of having students spend endless hours half engaged or less in regular classes, so we need to be careful when drawing conclusions. One controversial study receiving attention found that brain activity during lectures is lower than during sleep. There is not enough evidence to declare it as true, but it seems reasonable.
A regular class can have the effect of alienating students from what interests them, of numbing them and killing their joy of learning. These classes can condition students to mark time as a habit and they give rise to the accusation that schools are dehumanizing, of which there can be no greater violation of human rights. With so little opportunity to freely explore the full range of topics the world has to offer, students are graduating from high school not knowing what to do with their lives. Their creativity is diminished; their critical thinking skills are under developed, and employers complain that graduates stand around with little initiative waiting to be told what to do. Award winning teacher John Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, has claimed for years that schools are designed to keep people infantile, as opposed to providing for them to be active players in life striving to reach their full potential. The devalued state of a human being produced by formal scheduling is something that we must not keep perpetuating.
Time Is More Than Money
The waste of student time resulting from taking courses that are of no interest to them, or requiring them to spend hours learning things they already know or could learn in minutes, may not be officially defined as a human rights violation, but it does amount to personal disrespect which when institutionalized is a systemic injustice.
We say time is money, but that is not true. It is far more than money. It is the currency of life. It is all that we really have and to waste someone else’s time is to be abusive. We have made it taboo to steal people’s money, but we haven’t exercised the sophistication to make squandering a person’s time unacceptable.
Discrimination Against Minority Interests
Traditional schools have been described as obedience schools designed to produce uniformity and conformity, the goal being to turn out manageable factory workers who can tolerate boring days. That alone is bad for humanity, but it also runs counter to creating schools that are equitable and inclusive, schools where the celebration of diversity is genuine and natural.
The formally scheduled school day is one of the constructs that produces the uniformity and conformity that results in bullying those who don’t conform and which ultimately contributes to cultural genocide. The course selection process discriminates against minority interests. A foreign language course or a history course given from the perspective of another culture or race may never run because there are never enough students who opt for it. It is a fault of the design that the courses delivered tend to be the ones preferred by students of the dominant culture. Courses preferred by minorities are more likely to be cancelled, if they are even offered. When they are cancelled the students who opted for them are then slotted into second or third choices, or courses of no interest, which are most likely to be those preferred by students of the dominant culture.
This aspect of course options is not only bad for cultural or religious minorities. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth,” and for the white student whose truth is that his or her interests do not fall within the course options, his or her lived experience at school will have some similarities to what other minorities are suffering. Anybody, whatever his or her origins, who in some way does not fit the mold will experience what it is like to be discriminated against for being different.
Other Injustices
The above introduces how formal scheduling is inextricably bound up with social injustice, but it only begins to define the problem. An effect of the age-segregation created by it has students positioned as human beings in waiting, not invited to make their natural contributions to others, particularly the young. Pages could be written about adverse effects on young people’s brains when they are confined to seats in classrooms for endless hours and days. The impact on teachers and students by routinely assigning teachers to teach courses they know little about produces serious injustices. The possibilities for employers to provide quality co-op opportunities for students are a mere fraction of what they could provide if they were not so constrained by school schedules. Even the possibilities of something as simple as a field trip are minimal because of the concern that students can’t miss other teachers’ classes. With the changing world and employers calling on schools to do a better job at cultivating the 4Cs, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication, which cannot be properly addressed by a lockstep school model, and the growing awareness of children’s rights, schools really have no choice but to change.
What Is the Alternative?
The Self-Directed Education (SDE) model is gaining visibility. Boston College professor Peter Gray has defined it as Mother Nature’s Pedagogy and an organization he cofounded, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE), is spearheading the popularization of it. In his book Free to Learn, he argues that children are biologically wired to learn of their own volition everything they need to know to survive in the culture into which they are born.
The ideas he is bringing to our attention have been around for years, but they have largely been kept out of sight by proponents of the dominant school model or refuted by them with little second thought. His views reflect those of John Dewey who wrote about experiential learning and they appear influenced by the work of A.S. Neil who founded Summerhill. They radiate the compassion and sensitivity towards children that are trademarks of John Holt who is consider by many to be the father of homeschooling, and they reinforce the views of Jerry Mintz who founded the Alternative Education Resource Organization – AERO. Peter Gray’s son attended the non-coercive Sudbury Valley School. Its co-founder, Daniel Greenberg, says the school’s greatest gift to its students is to let them be, and Peter’s firsthand experience with Sudbury Valley has most clearly affected his thinking. There are many others who could be mentioned here and the words Patrick Farenga and Carlo Ricci used to describe John Holt, “A man who genuinely understood, trusted, and respected children,” apply to them all.
In an article titled Differences Between Self-Directed and Progressive Education, Peter Gray argues that Self-Directed Education is the wave of the future. It is a view held also by Daniel Pink, author of the best selling book Drive in which he says about the times we are in, “This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” He also says that you cannot take people who have been controlled all their lives and plop them into environments of undiluted autonomy. He says they need some kind of scaffolding to help them make the transition.
Progressive education can be looked at as scaffolding for the transition from traditional education to self-directed education. Experiential learning and deep learning, which are being explored by local school boards, are found in Self-Directed Education. When teachers retain some control over how these approaches to learning are implemented they fall within the category of progressive education. This control can serve as scaffolding to be slowly dismantled as students regain their innate sense of what it takes to be a self-directed learner. The use of the word “regain” in the foregoing sentence is to encourage people to do more than laugh at the saying, “I was such a great learner and then I went to school.”
The elimination of formal timetabling and age-segregation has the potential to expand the possibilities for immersing students in experiential and deep learning while creating a community of learners characterized by equity and inclusion.
Footnotes
[1] Vicki Abeles in her book (p, 56) and documentary film, both titled Beyond Measure, presents Larry Rosenstock’s view of the traditional school schedule.
[2] Ottawa Board of Education, Report no SU81-01 from the Superintendent of Schools Department to the Ottawa Board of Education: Report on Declining Enrolment in Ottawa Secondary Schools (Ottawa: OBE, 1981), 12-14.
[3] OBE, Report SAA-85-04, 4.
[4] Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, Eastern Secondary Area Accommodation Review: Final Report (Ottawa: OCDSB, 2017), Appendix B.