Detailed Background and Educational Philosophy

Summary | Educational Experience | Educational Philosophy

1. My Educational Experience

I have experienced a variety of educational models both as a student and staff. From this I derive a preference for democratic education and treating students as intelligent, dignified, and true persons, deserving their freedom and their chance to be responsible for themselves. After day one of kindergarten, I pleaded with my parents never to send me to this stultifying place again, and thus I bought myself a few more years of childhood, of roaming free and learning about nature, of play and growing up on my own terms. Nevertheless, I tested so well on an aptitude test that I was eventually sent to primary school a year early. The pendulum now swung to the other side.

My primary and secondary schools in Germany followed the traditional coercive school model which has governed public and most private schools ever since schools were first conceived. For being coercive schools (with a top-down curriculum and teachers in a dictatorial role), I found they provided me nevertheless with a fairly good education, chiefly for two reasons: (1) I was motivated because I came from an intellectual and artistic household and decided early in life that I wanted to go on to higher education in pursuit of my naturalist interests; and (2) the way tracking was done allowed for a good degree of differentiation (matching students much better with subject matter and teachers than is usually the case in American public schools nowadays). Nevertheless, I detested the coercion which often hemmed me in more than it provided me with resources. Many of my fellow students, who were less motivated than I, did less well in school and hated it more. My own dissatisfaction with the traditional model made A.S. Neill a veritable saint in my adolescent years and his book "Summerhill. A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" my personal bible.

After high school, university was a true liberation. Back then (before Bologna), German universities retained much of the original approach to higher education, one where the student drove his own studies and eventually asked to show his stuff to the professors (defend a thesis) and, when successful, be accepted into their ranks of titled scholars. As the only student of my "class", I managed to finish the equivalent of senior college in a mere 4 semesters instead of the usual 5 or 6 (and with a very good grade at that) while somehow also finding time to write a children's book.

This was all thanks to my high level of intrinsic motivation and the liberties afforded in this original university model: attendance at lectures was voluntary; to prepare for your comprehensive exams, you had the option of studying a recommended textbook or two instead of attending lectures (or you could do both); and the required practical courses, labs, and excursions were sufficiently interesting, relevant, profound, and light on busywork as not to be a burden. To date, this is the best school model which I have experienced in the role of a student. The grade on my bachelor equivalent came entirely from the four final oral examinations (similar to a thesis defense), so this grade actually reflected my state of learning at the time of graduation instead of points earned on long forgotten content in long forgotten exams — the way it unfortunately is with most schools (even universities) nowadays.

After this positive experience, I came to the US to attend graduate school. It was a big step backward since, once again, I was forced to take often meaningless (to me) courses peppered with strings of exams which were given primarily for the purpose of accumulating credits. It was all about credits and more credits. Who needs actual learning, right? The exams were all multiple choice and shallow but demanding in terms of the sheer volume of trivia which they required you to memorize. Any American student in one of today's public high schools will be familiar with the concept. At the same time, I was also appalled by what little my fellow students had previously learned, understood, or retained from their prior schooling. In contrast to my classes, however, my major advisor gave me free reign on my research, and so I developed a brand new investigative technology ("Freeze Filtration") during my time as graduate student.

In the topsy-turvy world we inhabit, this original research played a big part in me leaving with only a master's degree rather than a Ph.D. (Other factors involved being in the line of fire when faculty members were gunning for my major advisor, coming across massive academic dishonesty, and re-examining the direction my life was taking.) Doing a tried and true, completely unoriginal study would have been much safer. Go figure! Nevertheless, this experience once again showed me how much more can be achieved when a learner has freedom than when he is confined in scripted classes in a coercive setting. During this period, I also picked up my computer skills and joined my first Andean band. Both self-taught skill sets would serve me in later careers. My cartoon series also began to take shape around this time. Two decades after this period, I went back to school for my teacher certification only to encounter the coercive, scripted system of busy work and credit gathering again, except with a heavy dose of grade inflation added. Like all my fellow graduates I regard most of our time there as having been wasted. Now I have been working in conventional public schools (and one private school) for the last few years, and – again – found myself immersed in a culture of coercion and wasted potential. I am sad for our students. We could do so much better by them, and I had thought I might be able to make a difference. Sadly, I soon found out that when you are teaching in conventional schools your hands are very much tied, especially as a new teacher still on probation and when you don't have administrative permission to do something different. I do as much as possible in those settings to allow for genuine learning and growth, but standards based education (especially "No Child Left Behind") with its high stakes testing, mandatory curriculum, and lesson scripting has poisoned the system over the years; and so I am now interested in either finding or founding me a school of the Summerhill or Sudbury Valley (SVS) model to work in, or something sufficiently similar, or at least get enough of a free hand to let my students benefit from the lessons taught by those educational models.

2. My Educational Philosophy

I believe that children are natural learners and that their primary task is to discover who they are and develop along their natural inclinations and strengths. Left free, they typically do this with great skill, drive, and aplomb. (As one example, just remember how you cracked the code of your native language when you were little!) Children will go through their growing years learning about the world and themselves and others on their own steam if only we let them. As their elders, we can provide valuable assistance, especially in broadening horizons, providing alternative viewpoints and an elder's perspective, by modeling how we do things, and by providing resources, but we should never warp their path by imposing ourselves. For most of our children, their childhood and full potential end the day they first hear the words: "Sit and listen! Today's lesson is..." The 'one size fits all' drill which follows for the rest of their school years flies in the face of human diversity. It can only produce life hating robots. In the early industrial age, when society needed armies of machine operators for its factories, this may have served a purpose. In today's world in which life is much more complicated and flexibility is a must, the world needs thinking, creative, astute, dynamic, and decent people.

Forcing our young to prepare for a barrage of mostly meaningless tests in (to them) irrelevant subjects at whatever time the system deems to be the right time only creates resistance, apathy, and a revulsion against all learning (most especially against books at a time when literacy is on the decline!). It stifles curiosity and self-motivation and retards maturity. It also prevents the development of the skills needed in citizens of a democracy, as this educational approach churns out obedient automatons instead of critical thinkers prepared to challenge authority and engage in debate based on facts and reason. Can we be surprised that many of the products of this coercive and nonsensical schooling retreat from sense-making and an enlightened civilization into cults of unreason? Even the purely academic aspect, the acquisition of academic "content" and skills, suffers greatly under standards based education (AKA test-driven pedagogy) because of the meaningless nature of the mandated standard tests and the teaching to the test which teachers are now forced to do if they wish to keep their jobs. This shallow teaching and leaning leads to students who can regurgitate question-answer pairs at test time but who have no idea of their significance or meaning. These abused students often no longer even grasp the idea that their should be a meaning. Our young are hardly being taught anymore but rather drilled for meaningless tests and with ever sinking standards in mind. The very fact that one size simply does not fit all but all students must be counted as successes on the standardized tests in order for schools and teachers to avoid draconian punitive measures causes our vaunted educational standards to be lowered year after year in order to pass as many students as possible. Demoralized as students and teachers are in this derailed race to the bottom, too many students keep failing even the lowered standards. So, next time there is an adjustment, the standards get lowered even more. First we dumb down the mandated curriculum. Then we dumb down our children to match it. Then we dumb down the curriculum some more, and so the downward spiral continues. Facing budget cuts, harsh and abstruse performance evaluations and unrealistic expectations, regulations upon regulations, censorship, lack of materials (which teachers then have to make to fill the gap), oversized classes, endless grading, mounds of ancillary (and mostly pointless) paperwork, ever more elimination of positions, and a public drum roll blaming them for all the worlds' ills, teachers are or feel powerless to speak up against the nonsense, not to mention too overworked to even find any time to do so. For example, I worked 120 weekly hours in my first year whereas workers in the industrial revolution when exploitation ran rampant only averaged 84!. All this not only hurts students and society as a whole right now, but I believe that conditions have become so bad I fully expect a massive teacher shortage from attrition which will shock the nation's school systems a few years from now.

I summarized my core educational philosophy at the beginning of this section. Here it is again in a nutshell: People who want to learn will. Those who don't won't. It's that simple. Coercion breeds aversion, meaning that coerced students don't wish to learn. The first step in any enlightened approach to education must therefore be to remove coercion. The second step is to provide excellent resources and a vibrant setting for learning, ideally including age mixing, peer teaching, and mentoring. The fourth step is to constantly reexamine the evolving model checked against the questions of: (A) what is useful to learn, and (B) can the current efforts be improved upon?. In all this, it is vital to understand that each person is unique in interests, abilities, learning styles, and the path in life which suits them. Thus one size never fits all. This is yet another argument for putting learners firmly into the driver's seat of their own education. Last, not least, democracy, as well as maturity, require practice. If we want to live in a world where our choices and voices matter, our children cannot start practicing democracy early enough. This combines perfectly with the already mentioned need for student choice and agency as a much more motivating stimulant for learning than external coercion could ever be. Also, as living democracy is often not perfectly possible at home, and as children are often reluctant to take steps towards independence in the presence of their parents, schools are the perfect place to provide this opportunity. Thus I conclude not only by faulting our public schools for the wrong turn they have taken as a result of test-driven school reform but I also voice my support for democratic school models like England's Summerhill and America's Sudbury Valley School.

3. A Brief History of Schools

Our conventional schools were originally based on the imperial Prussian model of schools designed to turn out docile, easy to govern, and efficient subjects and workers for absolutist monarchs and industrial oligarchs. The main focus was on discipline, obedience, tolerance for mind numbing repetitive tasks, and the ability to read, write, and follow simple instructions and perform calculations by hand in an age before pocket calculators and computers. Having watched entire nations obediently march into the horrendous carnage of World War I, AS Neill of Summerhill, England, in the 1920's lit the path toward Democratic Education; and in the 1960's Sudbury Valley School added further dimensions of freedom and democratic structure with equal courage and an American touch. For a while, Democratic Education schools sprang up in many places, but on the whole these brave advances were largely ignored by mainstream schools. When Standards Based Education eventually swept through them like a black plague, things took a turn from bad to worse.

Our conventional schools have not only stuck with the traditional wrongheaded educational philosophy with which many of us grew up (so that we are accustomed to it and confuse it with learning), but - for many decades now - they have gone down a path of self destruction: the standards based, test driven pedagogy I described, and which many educators deplore. These reforms have taken a flawed system and made it a lot worse by simply adding more of the same old mess and turning up the heat. I don't believe that more of the same makes any sense when it only perpetuates and exacerbates old mistakes. Therefore, instead of merely asking that we return to the less eroded schooling in which my generation grew up, I favor a fundamental shift of focus towards student-directed learning for individual growth and true understanding (rather than for the memorizing of meaningless fluff, the avoidance of demoralizing value labels, and the amassing of highly questionable credits) and education for democracy and critical thinking (instead of submission and gullibility). This shift would bring much better result, and is simply the right thing to do. In fact, when you add up what I am arguing for (human dignity, self determination, fairness to all, the freedom to live your own life and become the best you that you can be and do what makes sense); we are simply looking at the ideals of the enlightenment on which this country and other modern nations were founded and which we often take for granted as our - adult - human and civil rights. Why should our children, even as they inch ever closer to adulthood, have none of this? We tend to think that these principles are absolutely necessary for running a democratic society and for realizing ourselves as individuals. Why should it be any different for our sons and daughters? I therefore sometimes call this kind of education enlightened education.

4. Future Outlook

I will keep promoting education based on student choice. This approach may seem like a fad from the sixties to the misinformed, but the reality is that the drive for standards, statistics, and credits of the last three or so decades has prevented true reform at great cost to us all, a fact of which more and more people are becoming painfully aware. Also, student directed learning merges perfectly with the new electronic and Internet based educational technologies which hold tremendous potential. Thus it is the road to the future.

Things I can do in a conventional school: Options are very limited in conventional schools. To their classes, I bring a high subject knowledge, a genuine respect for my students, and a healthy dose of humor. In this setting, I have found that classes of high achieving students often have a blast with me in a rich collegial atmosphere. When I am tasked to play a mix between prison warden and drill sergeant for low achieving students, however, things admittedly can go less well since those students are rebelling against a system I myself find flawed, and I am simply not the dictatorial type. My best subject to teach in conventional settings is beyond doubt German, because I can bring in my entire personality, humor, and enthusiasm to fire up my captive audience of students. The brain research of recent years confirms what many visionaries told us all along: that we learn a great deal better and solve problems much more creatively when we are enthusiastic and having fun. In a class like this, even the conventional school model becomes bearable, reducing "classroom management" issues to a minimum.

Reflections on things I (and you) could do in a free school environment (a democratic school): Much depends on the amount of freedom and the range of required tasks. I like the Sudbury approach the best. Obviously, keeping such a school running operationally, and modeling or explaining the Sudbury philosophy of freedom coupled with responsibility comes first. Staff often has to do things like office work and attend the School Meeting or Judicial Committee even if not all students do. So, I would probably find myself doing a lot of that much like other staff. As I am handy with computers, office work might be a common use of me. I may also be able to contribute in a mentoring function to students who wish to draw on my life experience in many careers and on three continents. In a more free-flow private school I once worked, many students regularly sought me out to get feedback on their music, IT, or science quests, for example, or to mediate conflicts. My prior experience and current skill set might let me be useful to the school's publications and information technology. As for teaching in schools where elective courses are offered, I could see myself going as far as setting up a research lab where students who profess an interest could join in doing actual scientific research discovering scientific methodology for themselves by doing science, rather than merely learn (and then forget) about the so-called "scientific method" through hasty cookbook labs, abstract doctrines, and anemic worksheets, the way things go in conventional schools. Potentially, the work could reach publication worthiness and actually be published to the science community with students listed as authors. I could see myself running miscellaneous seminars about life science and science ethics and an intense biology course for any students who want a thorough overview of this academic subject and a college-like experience. This course would resemble a college study group or a graduate school seminar more than a high school course as it would be based on self study mixed with group level brainstorming and discussion as well as use of multimedia, hands-on, and Internet technology. Students who actually want courses (or have a need to take them) would be very well served, and passing state biology tests after this would be a snap. Those who then wanted to take and pass the College Board's AP Biology test, I could confidently coach for that, too. For the more casually interested, I could arrange for joint viewings of science documentaries, TED Talks and the like to be watched and discussed together. As a native speaker of German and someone fairly fluent in Spanish, I could assist anyone interested with the learning of those languages. In fact, at the moment I would suggest self study with the excellent and free service duolingo.com especially for the basics, possibly followed later by reading captivating reads to reach high mastery — all along supported by me as desired by students, an approach I have already tried and which in my opinion works much, much better than traditional foreign language classes (it's a lot more fun and learning goes a lot faster, too). Additionally, I might be able to help in other things like learning programming and software design, vivaria, professional translation, writing, cartooning, and music. More possibilities would surely come up in an environment of spontaneous and elective rather than curriculum-mandated learning.

In conclusion, what I find has been lacking in my public school jobs, to date, is much of the freedom needed to be the useful resource I can be for young people after having lived in many careers, avocations, and countries which taught me a great deal beyond the lessons from many years of schooling. Students with a variety of interests can lean on those who walked a similar path before them to plot their very own unique path, but rigid curricula and absurd testing schemes prevent this in most schools, much as their authoritarian governance stunts much human growth. I can only hope that the failed school reforms of the past become supplanted by a much needed, fundamental change in approach, and that in the meantime courageous administrators and truly alternative schools dare to let enlightened teachers try the road less traveled. Pioneers in democratic education like Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, and to some extent holistic schools like Waldorf and Montessori and uncommonly student friendly public school systems like that in Finland, point into a better direction than No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and similar approaches which focus on the wrong parameters so that, in spite of their promising names and purported goals, they actually leave most children behind: behind and broken, resigned or rebellious, and drained of their internal motivation. If you are a parent, you should check out the alternatives. By doing so, you may find a great independent school or even a revolutionary public school program near you. If not, you might start one yourself or join a startup initiative. At the very least, from such research, your relationship with your children and their teachers could become more supportive. I myself, for now, continue to do the best I can for my students in either public or private schools.

~ Dirk Bayer