Imagine that you are absolutely unique. There is no one like you today anyplace in the world. There never has been anyone like you before, nor will there be after your eventual demise. Of course, take a look around, and the statement I just made about you? That applies to every single person you perceive. Now, that might be a good thing, because we sure as heck don’t need another George Walker Bush, or Karl Rove, or Abu Gonzales.
But seriously - do you want to be treated as just a number, or one of a broad category - blondes, soccer players, musicians, tall), skinny, stocky, old, young, clumsy, graceful - or any combination of non-contradictory characteristics such as those just listed? Do you want someone to say "oh that’s just because you’re a xxxxx"(substitute category of choice?
If you think there should be a different way, that you want the uniqueness of the first paragraph and not the inpersonal nature of the second, shouldn’t we be helping you explore that uniqueness? And shouldn’t that be part of what happens in our public schools?
I can remember reading a mandatory essay in 9th grade English, with Mrs. Hance, about the well-rounded person, and having a viscerally negative reaction. My argument was that the well-rounded person could be pushed in any direction you chose, he would simply roll, whereas the oddball, the imbalanced one, well that would be a different story.
American public education is moving in the direction of destroying our uniqueness. Increasingly our approach to instruction and assessment remind me of the famous song by Malvina Reynolds, wherein she mocked the cookie-cutter suburbs and the mindset they represented:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same,
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
I was fortunate to grow up in a neighborhood where the houses were not all built at the same time by the same company. There were small pockets of similar (not identical) houses, so our neighborhood had variety. When I first encountered a Levittown I was shocked at the blandness, the "sameness." Even in summer camp the cabins were somewhat different. The idea that everyone could live in identical buildings seemed somehow restricting to me, limiting the possibilities, possibilities of being challenged and provoked by differences.
A commonality of physical structure may provide comfort for some - you will know how to find the lightswitch in the dark, or under which counter is the garbage can. And yet - even in cookie-cutter suburbs there is a strong human tendency to personalize. I have seen this in office cubicles, in military barracks, even in monastic cells. In some small (or not so small) way we seek to indicate that we are absolutely unique, that we are not bound by the seeming commonality of the physical space.
In school too often the students have assigned seats. That’s bad enough - spend several months always sitting next to the same people looking at things from the same angle and your perceptions become narrowed - you cheat yourself of possibility.
And for all the predictablity of regular classroom routine, and our concern for supportive structures, sometimes there is far more exhiliration in experiencing something different. Today instead of left rear, why not try right front, or center center? Instead of beginning with a warm-up the teacher willn present the summary. Oh, and instead of scantron on which you will indicate which of four preselected answers is the "correct" response to the question, you will have a list of 15 answers for which you can make up any 10 questions and the parallel 3 wrong answers for the "correct" ones, what we call the "distractors."
Too little of our educational processes K-12 requires metacognition, learning how to learn. Or rather, learning that there is more than one way of learning, and then deciding which method is appropriate for you, in this particular endeavor. Because, after all, if you are absolutely unique, that may mean how you learn is not how I learn, so why should I insist that you learn as I do?
Commonality is often justified on the grounds of efficiency. After all, mass-production heavily depends upon standardization, and it is quicker, and cheaper, to build out of interchangeable parts. And if things are ‘standardized" there is less chance of error in construction, in fact, we may even be able to have a machine build parts to a tolerance far more exacting than that of which a human is capable. And perhaps we need to have a machine do such repetitive tasks, because we have a wealth of evidence that humans do not thrive in an environment where their activities are rigidly structured - they become bored, or distracted, or even worse.
Even in the environment where we most want things to be uniform, the military, often the most effective leaders and units are those that are least conventional, breaking out of the standardized ways of thinking. Robert E. Lee divided his forces in the face of an enemy of overwhelming superiority, and thereby succeeded on occasions where using traditional methods he might well have been overrun. We have moved increasingly in the direction of unconventional forces and tactics, of being less predictable so that an opponent cannot plot out our patterns and then use them to attack us.
There are some people who do want everything in its right place, with no variance. And there are disciplines in which regularity has its place - accounting, or piloting a plane through busy air corridors to and fro even busier airports. And yet - I know of one occasion where a probable crash was avoided because the pilot intuitively did exactly the wrong thing because the right thing was not working. And absent the ability to examine things in a different fashion, how could there be science, or any advancement in human understanding?
So why are our schools still largely designed and run as factories? We have efficiency, certainly. It is efficiency in sorting people into winners and losers. It is efficiency of managing large groups of students with insufficient numbers of adults, in a fashion far too often reminiscent of places of incarceration. But by forcing students to learn in one way, by assessing them with only one set of measures, we are often forcing those students to use their minds in ways that are not efficient for them, and thus in the long-term robbing our larger society of the gifts they could be sharing with us, the most important of which is their absolute uniqueness.
I don’t propose to design a new model of school tonight. As I write I listen to the music of a very unique man, Anton Bruckner. When I was younger I used to joke that Bruckner thought anything worth saying musically was worth saying four times. If you know his 4th symphony, the bon mot will make sense. I have the 8th on now, and last night Iistened to the unfinished 9th. They are each unique, different from one another, as Bruckner is from any other composer. Why cannot we have both Bruckner and Brahms? 1685 saw the births of Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Friederich Handel. Would we insist that all composers write like Bach? Would not that rob us of their uniqueness, and thereby impoverish our listening experience?
My biggest failure as a teacher is that I am unable to provide a school experience which properly allows each student to explore and value her own uniqueness. And I should know better. Even as I knew growing up that I was very different, that I would not, could not, be "well-rounded," nevertheless I tried to be like others. I fell into the trap so aptly described in Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet:
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least
Perhaps the reason I fight so hard against NCLB is because I see it as a denial of the uniqueness of each of the students entrusted to my care. I don’t wish to see them sorted into winners and losers based on a set of scores on mass-produced tests at the end of the course. I don’t want their education reduced to preparing them to do well on such a test.
Perhaps someday we can, in our approach to education remember a key part of the founding of this nation, that we stop interpreting that all men were created equal to mean that we are all supposed to be measured, evaluated, in the same way, and grasp the intent of the words that follow, that we are endowed with inalienable rights, that among this rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Society has no right to insist on a narrow definition of what that happiness is, nor should schools be used to enforce such a narrow vision.
Just remember. A rose is not a banana, a dog is not a television, and no one has the right to tell you who you must be. You are absolutely unique. And it is about time that our schools began to recognize it.