Educational Complex

This might sound shocking coming from a blog about education, but I have been wondering whether compulsory education and traditional schools are leading us astray and even worse, harming our students’ well-being. I am not talking about an end to the practice of education, but rather musing over whether a pedagogical shift and dissolution of traditional teacher-student hierarchies could be more empowering for both educators and learners and whether these models could successfully be implemented in a society that is as diverse and inequitable as ours in the United States.

The debate for and against traditional pedagogical models and educational environments is not new, but it has expanded over the course of time. Criticisms of schooling become even more emboldened with mounting instances of school violence, censorship within the curricula and studies that show how students are graduating with minimal preparation for social and intellectual scenarios outside of the classroom (see: Greene, 2014).

Making it compulsory for students to sit in classrooms during the majority of their day while taking instruction from adults who are pressured to teach and govern via a structured and predetermined learning system, misses out on key experiential learning possibilities and inhibits a child, adolescent or young adult’s natural inquisitiveness. A compelling argument against compulsory education is that it limits students’ agency and seeks to control their physical, emotional and social behavior. Furthermore, current curricula requirements may end up blurring the line between being a measurement of learning and a form of detrimental assimilation.

As I wrote in an earlier post titled Character Education, “The overarching influence of bureaucratic commonization and standardization of curricula has stifled the creativity, criticality and morality of educators, students and school administrators.” There are notable instances where schools and schooling attempts and unfortunately even succeeds in the erasure of students’ identities, such as refusal to use a student’s preferred pronouns or acknowledge their gender or overcorrecting a student’s usage of culturally established sociolects (i.e. Black American English; see: Artfully Speaking). Stripping students of their cultural and social identities is incredibly shattering to their growth and inimical to their overall wellness. Ideally, schools would uplift and support the expression and communication of students’ identities, however as educator John Holt and others who were/are influential in the Youth Rights movement have espoused, the current system of education and the institutionalized structure of the school building hinders freedom of thought and the ability to act critically and assert and strengthen one’s identity.

One of the foundational texts which inspired movements and theories like Youth Rights and Unschooling, is Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written in 1969 by Queens College professors of education, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. In the book, which has literary similarities to John Dewey’s Education and Experience (1938) and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), the two professors question the formal methods of schooling. They suggest that traditional models are a form of indoctrination and submissiveness and are actually more indicative of uneducation because in schools, students are predominantly: “required to believe authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true….It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used.”

David Hill (2000) expounds upon Postman and Weingartner’s theory, which summarizes many contemporary discussions about school reform: “Schools, they urge, must teach young people to think critically about society, politics, and culture. To that end, they propose doing away with grades, tests, textbooks, courses, and full-time administrators. Teachers must abandon their traditional roles as authority figures and become more like consultants or coaches. No more ‘content.’ No more ‘subjects.’ No more ‘irrelevant’ classes.”

While some people enjoy and flourish in the preexisting school system, other people’s experiences within traditional schools and academic systems can be traumatic and detrimental to their growth. Schools are sites of unbalanced or biased disciplinary measures from administration, intense bullying and most ominously, violence.

An apt monument for the unschooling movement might be the late conceptual artist Mike Kelley’s 1995 sculpture, Educational Complex. The title is a triple entendre signifying the aforementioned complexities of education and educating students, an architectural compound and the psychoanalytic definition of, “a related group of emotionally significant ideas that are completely or partly repressed and that cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behavior.”

Kelley’s Educational Complex is a tabletop architectural model that reflects his biographical history through the lens of his identity shaped by intrinsic and developmental experiences. The artwork involves a re-envisioned landscape full of sculptural renderings depicting every school he ever attended, as well as his childhood home. There are also vacant spaces within the landscape, representing his repressed or forgotten memories associated with certain environments and structures. As art historian and artist John Miller describes in his book dedicated to a deep understanding of Educational Complex, the work of art is symbolic of trauma associated with educational experiences, as well as his perception of compulsory education and the democratic arguments that are employed to support it.

On an overarching scale, Educational Complex could be representative of the American cultural landscape from the early 1990s through today. It was conceived at a time when more than ninety school shootings and high profile child-abuse cases occurred. Violence and abuse within schools has gotten even worse since then. But instead of learning from past traumatic events, our collective response has been to largely repress the underlying factors responsible for these recurring tragedies. If we are going to keep forcing children to attend school within brick-and-mortar spaces for the bulk of their day, then we (at the very least) need to ensure they are physically and emotionally safe when inside these settings.

While the issue of school violence includes a plethora of policies that stretch out into the culture at large including gun control and banning assault weapons; there are other issues to consider such as curricula reform and de-standardization. In his books, How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967), John Holt explains that centering students’ identities and teaching in a manner that assumes their humanity and agency, will benefit their engagement and enable them to learn even more about a particular subject than what is possible within the conventional educational framework. On the other hand, adopting a rigorous, didactic and methodical approach to teaching will have significantly poor consequences on both their academic achievement and overall wellness. Holt (1967) wrote, “the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.”

There is not one mold that will form the “ideal student,” because each student already starts their educational journey with a strong sense of identity and prior knowledge from social, cultural and familial experiences. Educating these diverse and multifaceted students should be a tangible process, providing them with ample agency to creatively interpret and re-present information from the curriculum that is in accordance with relevant experiences to their daily lives, culture and myriad identities.

One way of achieving this is to set up situations where students can partake in real world problem solving with their peers and strengthen their self-directed learning skills. The teacher’s role is as a facilitator. They construct situations for students to explore and express interests and issues, develop a thirst for acquiring knowledge and partake in transformative actions.

While the implementation of choice-based, inquiry-based and student-centered learning should be reflected throughout school-wide learning, art education is one of the subjects where this is already happening. In the 1970s, a pedagogical methodology called Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) began in Massachusetts, as a result of elementary school art educators Katherine Douglas, John Crowe, Diane Jaquith and Pauline Joseph looking for a way to support student-initiated and inquiry-based learning in a traditional classroom and school setting. The TAB concept took inspiration from the Open Schools Movement that was emerging in United States schools at the time. 

The concepts behind the Open Schools Movement and Teaching for Artistic Behavior are that students are more engaged and focused on learning when they are given permission to move around the classroom and have the agency to learn traditional subject matter based on their own self-directed inquiries and curiosities. TAB is in opposition to the pedantic exchange of information between teachers and students. Instead, educators set up their classrooms for independent and collaborative learning and students have choices in how they can approach a particular subject or project.

TAB considers that students are already artists or have the natural inclination to think and act creatively. Therefore, instead of traditional rote learning or mimicry of prior artistic modes and styles, their artistic education is more in line with how professional artists develop work guided by their personal artistic interests, inquiries and explorations. This pedagogical movement where children are considered artists and given the environment and resources to independently make art, is a beneficiary of the historical Child Art movement (see: A Brief History of Children’s Art Exhibitions). 

In a TAB curriculum, students are generally left to their own devices, but that does not mean they are not fully supported. Educators supplement independent learning by periodically introducing new skills and techniques that might be helpful for students to employ in the studio and provide additional scaffolding if students need support or guidance. However, the goal is for the student to steer their way through explorative and creative processes. It may be a messy and noisy alternative to traditional schooling methodologies, but it is more indicative of real-life scenarios and an apt reflection and acknowledgement of students’ individual humanity and differences.

The unfortunate reality is that arts education is being cut in many public schools across the nation (and internationally too). A common mantra that I say and write frequently when referencing our current educational system is, “The way we evaluate the impact of education and educational settings within our collective culture informs us of our overall values as a society.” If we are truly a society that values freedom of expression and individual rights then our educational goals need to be significantly adjusted.

---

References, Notes, Suggested Reading:

Greene, David. “The Long Death of Creative Teaching.” U.S. News, 17 March 2014. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/17/how-common-core-standards-kill-creative-teaching

Hill, David. “Teaching As A Subversive Activity,” EducationWeek, 1 April 2000. https://www.edweek.org/education/teaching-as-a-subversive-activity/2000/04

Holt, John (1964), How Children Fail, Pitman Publishing Company.

Holt, John (1967), How Children Learn, Pitman Publishing Company.

Miller, John. Mike Kelley: Educational Complex (2015), London, Afterall Books.

Postman, Neil, and Weingartner, Charles (1969), Teaching as a Subversive Activity, New York: Dell.