Valuing What Our Students Know

Valuing What Our Students Know

by Judith Kaufman

Join the Conversation—What Is Human Nature?

Questions to Consider:

1. What is your view on the need to control human, especially adolescent, “passions”?
2. Judy Kaufman has ideas about teenagers and education that may be considered controversial by some. Which of her ideas do you agree with? Which do you disagree with? Why?

Who we are as individuals is a product of the social context of our lives. We become who we become because of the experiences we have as members of families, communities, ethnic and religious groups, social classes and societies, and the way we are perceived and treated because of our race, class, and gender. This perspective on human development is called social constructivism. Of course, there are biological aspects of being human, but we cannot isolate those aspects from who we are as social and cultural beings. All human potential is expressed through a particular culture. I think that we are born with almost infinite potential, but once we become a part of a cultural environment, we are fundamentally altered and shaped by that environment. Our neural structure is shaped by each encounter in the world; connections are established and severed and potential ways of being are both nourished and starved. This process continues throughout our lives. As we experience new things, we continually grow and change.

As a social constructivist, I believe that to be effective, teachers need to understand that both they and their students shape and are shaped by the communities in which they live. To understand that who I am has been shaped by my community helps me to appreciate and understand the differences that can accrue when individuals from different communities come together. This is a perspective that is essential to effective teaching. I want to start off discussing who I am, how my social context shaped my childhood, and then discuss my views on what it means to be a teenager in this society and the implications this has for the way we prepare teachers.

I teach human development in a teacher education program and I am a former elementary school teacher. I was born in 1955 and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. The neighborhood I grew up in was a post–World War II suburban community built up with help from federally subsidized mortgages and the GI Bill. It was an all-White neighborhood with Jewish and Irish Catholic two-parent families. The children in our neighborhood grew up together and went to the same public schools.

The Jewish community in Worcester was, it seemed to me, a middle-class and wealthy community and I thought my parents were the only working-class Jews. My classmates all appeared to be from wealthier families and I felt marginalized. Their fathers were large business owners while my father was always struggling to earn a living in a succession of small businesses. I internalized the anti-Semitic stereotype that all Jews were successful and moneyed, and I wondered why my family did not look like everybody else’s. Looking back as an adult, I recognize that the community was quite diverse, wealthy and poor, secular, ultrareligious, and everything in between.

As a young child, I recognized that there were very different expectations for my brother and myself and this made me angry. I was a tomboy because I wanted what boys had; they had more choices and power, and they clearly had more fun. I played sports. I played on the street with the boys. I loved tree houses and snow forts. I preferred erector sets to dolls. Acting like a tomboy gave me some male privilege, but never enough. My brother could go with my father on truck driving trips, but when I asked to go, I was told it was “no place for a girl.” My father and I were close, but he worried about my “boyness” and tried to encourage me to “act like a girl.” This was especially true when I started to enter adolescence.

An incident from third or fourth grade taught me a great deal about gender role expectations in school. In the wintertime my mother made me wear corduroy pants under my skirt in preparation for the cold walks to school. The skirt looked ridiculous, so I would take it off and stuff it in the milk box beside the back door when I left the house. When I returned home, I retrieved the skirt and put it on again. However, the teachers, and children imitating the teachers, called me a boy and tried to pressure me into wearing a skirt. They wanted me to act like a little girl and punished me for crossing gender boundaries.

One of my most painful school experiences was being held back in first grade. I was a young first-grader (an odd concept that is a consequence of age segregation in school) with a November birthday. Halfway through the school year my teacher called my parents and told them that I could not read and did not know my numbers. She complained that I played all the time, did not listen, and was always making trouble. She told my parents that I was not developmentally ready for the second grade and that I needed to be retained for a year.

Looking back, I am not sure whether I was retained because of my academic performance or because I was gender nonconforming. School is very much about learning to conform and I did not pay enough attention to the teacher’s expectations for female first graders. As a result of being kept back in first grade, my sense of who I was in the world was changed. My classmates were suddenly younger than me and I felt old, big, and dumb. In age-segregated spaces, children always ask each other, “How old are you?” I would have to “come out” about my age and being held back. I was sure they thought I was “dumb.” This insecurity plagued me through school and into college. I was marginalized for being held back because my peers were mostly honors students. However, I am White, I speak standard English, and though my parents are working class, they have middle-class values. After experiencing the humiliation and pain of being retained, I learned to compromise with the system and started to obey its rules. I was given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to succeed. Children who do not have privilege based on their skin color or class membership, or who have experiences that are at variance with the middle-class expectations of public schools, often find school a devastating experience. They are labeled and tracked into the lowest rungs of the school and rarely given the benefit of a doubt or the opportunity to succeed.

In reflecting on this cursory narrative of my life, it is important to understand that this narrative reflects who I am now in my life. Class, race, and gender are important concepts that shape my thinking about human development; hence it is not surprising that I use them to discuss development, adolescence, and schooling. I can admit to some consciousness of class and gender as a child, though certainly not the interaction between class and internalized anti-Semitism. Race and racism were ideas that were rarely spoken about in my home, so the fact that my neighborhood and schools were segregated was invisible to me. I was also unaware of the unearned privileges I accrued owing to my skin color and class values. How did invisibility and unconsciousness in a segregated community shape me as an individual member of that community? If I am oblivious to oppression and inequality, then I contribute to its reproduction in the larger culture and continue to benefit from unearned privilege. My conformity maintains a system that benefits a few at the expense of the many. After college, I was drawn to Berkeley,and the various jobs I had drew me into communities that were very conscious and very political, and so began a long process of becoming much more attentive and conscious in the world.

Ten years ago, when Alan first interviewed, I talked about the essential problems of secondary schooling in terms of power and control. I talked to my students about a vision for schooling where students could empower themselves and take more responsibility for their learning. I discussed findings from a classic study (Davidson, 1996) which showed that, not surprisingly, teenagers thrive when they are given respect, responsibility, and freedom. Davidson described a case study of a teenager from East St. Louis, Illinois, who felt the community did not value him or his school. This young man gave up on any possibility of achieving success through the standard routes. He became a member of a youth gang and was involved with drugs and violence. He joined the gang because membership provided him with both a sense of power and of belonging. The young man’s mother, in an effort to help her son, sent him to live with a brother in Los Angeles, where he entered a high school program with other teenagers who had been involved in gang-related activities. In this program, he was given responsibilities that showed he was respected, he took courses that reflected his history and ethnic roots, and he learned about college opportunities. He went from a school where he was considered a failure and denied the right to participate as a full member of the community to an environment where those in power sent a clear message that they cared about him and his future. In this new setting, instead of being a dropout, he went to school every day and invested in his learning.

In 2002, I thought that understanding this young man’s experience and the experience of similar young men and women could help my students respond to the needs of teenagers and provide effective learning environments. In 2012, public schools attended by the poor and youth of color have become more controlling, less relevant, and defined by models of corporate accountability. In 2002, I wanted preservice teachers to become visionaries. They would learn the nuts and bolts of teaching in their first few years. My job was to help them conceive of and begin to shape a vision of who they wanted to be as a teacher and how to create exciting and effective learning environments for all their students. In the last ten years, with the increasing corporatization of public schooling and the consequent degradation of those learning environments, I have become more pragmatic in my approach to teaching adolescent development. My values have not shifted and my vision remains the same, but I find that I must teach my students very specific strategies for negotiating their future schools and classrooms. Having an evolving vision is not enough. My students need to know how to provide effective learning environments in an era when their jobs will depend on how well their students score on standardized tests that are not valid for evaluating teacher effectiveness. I must help them think about how to engage students that have experienced repeated failure in a system that expects very little. And, I must prepare them to survive in schools where many teachers and administrators have reluctantly relinquished their visions to drill and rote test preparation. In short, I’ve had to revamp the way I teach adolescent development.

I still begin my classes with a modern history of adolescence, because I think it is essential to interrupt the many stereotypes my students hold about adolescents. Relying on Lesko’s (2001) insightful interpretation of this history, we discuss a foundational myth that adolescence is a time of raging hormones and uncontrolled emotions. While it is certainly true that as children get older their lives get more complicated, many of the problems associated with adolescence stem from the way this period of life is framed by the popular culture. Teenagers are trapped in a world where they are no longer allowed to act like children, but are not permitted to be adults. They are denied the rights and responsibilities of adulthood, but they are expected to act like adults. This irony creates many of the conflicts that we attribute to the turbulence of adolescence.

I argue that adolescence is not a natural phenomenon or developmental stage, but rather a modern social construction. The adolescent years are not problematic in cultures where young people are legitimately integrated into their communities and are expected to increasingly contribute as workers and citizens. Adolescence is a phenomenon of the U.S. capitalist economy that began with the Industrial Revolution, and it functioned for much of the twentiethcentury to keep teenagers out of the permanent labor force. Adolescence lowered unemployment rates, provided teenagers with low-wage occupational training, and socialized them into a hierarchical and authoritarian work environment. The history of thinking about adolescence in the United States can be traced to G. Stanley Hall (1904, 1906), who provided the foundation for our current thinking about adolescence and how best to educate adolescents. He formulated his ideas amid a context of social Darwinism and the Great Chain of Being, immense social change, and what Lesko (2001) calls “nervous masculinity” about the future of the nation state contributing to a view of adolescence that was raced, classed, and gendered. The high school would focus its energies on preparing young White men, at the top of the Great Chain of Being, to maintain and defend the interests of the nation. Poor youth, recent immigrants, youth of color, and girls would get a different curriculum commensurate with their expected futures, but control over behaviors and activities would define the lives of all adolescents in school.

Control, differentiated curricula, age segregation, and team sports, used by Hall to encourage socialization by peers who could be controlled as opposed to families not subject to control, along with school hours and building design, continue to define schooling in the twenty-firstcentury. A significant change is the move toward greater and greater accountability increasingly controlled by corporate interests and driven by profit. Indeed, privatization of schools and privatized control over many of the functions of the public schools represents an unprecedented threat to this public good.

Apart from presently being viewed as huge reservoirs of untapped profit, schools and high schools in particular have functioned and continue to function as containment facilities where teenagers are warehoused until some, but not all, find a place in society. We justify this containment by arguing that the economy requires a skilled workforce, but it is not clear that this training must take place in “schoolsasweknowthem” and with teenagers forced into suspended animation. I expose students to alternative models such as Halpern’s (2009) research on apprenticeship, which helps high school students rebuild their capacity for trust and openness to learning, which strengthens their sense that they have something important to say and that their work and their goals matter to the outside world. We also talk about schools around the country such as the Met Schools (discussed in Halpern, 2009) and some of the small schools in NYC (e.g,. the Urban Assembly’s Harbor School on Governors Island), where the curricula are organized around project-based learning. We spend time talking about these models to underscore the importance of relevance in the high school curriculum. I suspect that very few of the students would attempt these models in traditionally organized high schools, but the models provide them with potential tools and ideas for creating a relevant learning environment. The psychological cost of systemic irrelevance is young people disengaged from the adult community, concentrated into large age-segregated cohorts subject to increasing surveillance and loss of privacy, and blamed for many social ills.

During the 1997–98 school year, a string of highly publicized school shootings contributed to growing national concern about teenage violence. While pundits were busy blaming movies and music lyrics for what seemed like an increase in violence, statistics showed there had actually been a slight decrease in school shooting deaths since 1992 (Donohue, Donohue, Schiraldi, & Ziedenberg, 1998). Teenagers were used as political scapegoats and the corporate media demonized young people instead of confronting the problems of overall social violence and widespread gun ownership. It is far easier to blame youth culture than it is to seek solutions through challenging powerful political lobbies protecting the interests of, for example, weapons manufacturers. The consequence is that teenagers are marginalized and further alienated from the adult community.

Sexuality is another area where teenagers are under attack and subject to scapegoating. The problems facing adolescents are not their raging hormones, but the contradictory messages and the limited information they receive about appropriate sexual behavior. At the same time that teenagers are told to put off sex until marriage, they are immersed in advertising thatexploits sexuality to sell all kinds of products and maintain consumer demand. Additionally, this culture drastically limits the information that youth need in order to sexually responsible. It is difficult to get good information in schools about birth control and abortion, and condoms are not freely available in schools. In fact, during the most recent Bush presidency, federal funding for abstinence-only sex education increased from 60 million in 2000 to 176 million dollars in 2007. School districts, hard-pressed for funding, found it difficult to turn the money down.