That six year old child is my kiddo, to the extent that any child belongs to their parents (they don’t. We all belong to us all, or maybe we all belong to the planet, but that’s a philosophical discussion for another day). I’m going to talk about children’s education, but my experience is rather limited to this child—Lochlan. So I'm going to approach my research and discussion into the educational state of things through that lens.
Here's my POV:
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| Lochlan on the first day of 1st grade |
Ain't he cute? (I know, I know, all parents...)
Let's go back a little further, to when Lochlan was starting kindergarten in 2023. We were a little discombobulated because we'd just moved from East Hollywood to South LA that summer, then traveled up to WA state to visit friends & family and so that Brendan could work the ren faire.
Actually, allow me to interrupt myself. This blog post isn't just a long overdue life update, it's a school project, and not for Lochlan's school, though I will talk a lot about that. Nope, it's my school project—I'm in grad school! I'm back to school for poetry, but this post is for my Theory, Criticism, and Research class. So if you're reading this, you might be my mom, or you might be one of my classmates or my professor. So for the sake of the latter folks, please know that by "we," I usually mean my husband Brendan and myself.
So, we had checked the school district calendar prior to planning the trip, but at some point after that, LAUSD moved the first day of school to an earlier date. There was no way we could get back in time, so we missed the "preview" day for kindergarteners, and Lochlan missed the first day of school. So when it felt like we were off to a slightly rocky start a little later into the school year, I attributed some of it to that wonky beginning.
I got a couple clues that something was a little off about school early on. The first was that there was homework. In kindergarten. Alfie Kohn, educator and parenting expert, says, "after decades of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school, or, in many cases, before high school" (The Homework Myth, 38). Thankfully, Lochlan's teacher, we'll call her Ms. K (for kindergarten), deemphasized the importance of actually completing the homework right from the start, and said what she really wanted was for parents to sit and read with their kids every day, and the homework was meant to help facilitate that. So, boo homework, yay homework not being a big deal.
Another early hint was when the school held a literacy event after school one afternoon. Parents and kids went to the kid's classrooms and the teachers explained how they were teaching the kids to recognize letters and sounds. Interesting stuff, especially since he's in a dual-language school (English and Spanish) but it was explained in the most boring way—lecture style. And our kids were with us. So, after they had already been in school that day for about six hours, we all had to sit through an hour-long talk. That one just felt like a missed opportunity to me—why not have the kids participate so it could be more like we, the parents, were getting to sit in on an actually classroom experience?
But a little later I realized that the actual classroom experience was kind of like that. By October, Lochlan was having a hard time in school. Well, we think he was having a hard time right from the get-go, but by October, his pent-up feelings were coming out in the form of physical outbursts—throwing things, kicking things, knocking over chairs. Lochlan was struggling and Ms. K did not have the resources she needed to fully support him (like a classroom aide, for example, or perhaps an entirely different model of classroom education). One day, I got a call from the school. Lochlan had gotten upset (it was almost always about something that seemed on the surface minor, like he thought he messed up on an activity) and thrown something and he couldn't go back to classroom unless one of his parents could stay with him the rest of the afternoon. Thankfully, I was free, so I went.
I couldn't believe how boring kindergarten was. And when I say boring, I mean orderly. Here were all these five-year-olds, and the classroom was like something you'd expect of an older grade level, maybe 3rd at least, when children have a greater degree of impulse control and have had time to adjust to the expectations of school. There was no chaotic joy, no free play, just table work and floor-mat sitting and lining up and raising hands. To be fair, it was toward the end of the school day, so I was only in the classroom for about 45 minutes, but that brief glimpse gave me an idea of why my child was struggling. He was used to a lot of freedom and self-directed play. I had been hoping kindergarten would help him learn more about cooperation and compromise in play with his peers, but instead found that it was focused on compliance and consequences.
That's chocolate on his face
(Lochlan's favorite food)
This educational model is what Alfie Kohn refers to as traditional education, or "Old School." He says, "Proponents of traditional education often complain that the model they favor is on the wane. They're apt to describe themselves as a brave minority under siege...such claims are understandable as a political strategy; it's always rhetorically advantageous to position yourself as outside the establishment and to describe whatever you oppose as 'fashionable.' To those of us who spend time in real schools, though, claims about the dominance of progressive teaching represent an inversion of the truth so audacious as to be downright comical" (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 6-7).
Ah, good old rhetoric. Takes me right back...to ancient Greece. We (humans) have been learning about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, since at least the beginning of our Western (read: Eurocentric) written history. And speaking of our Western history, I'm interested in that quote for the reference to political strategy. What's the end game for proponents of traditional education? I'm guessing there's a money trail to follow, because there always is (hello, capitalism), but that will have to wait for my final paper.
Lochlan's outburst behaviors got worse leading up to the winter break. At one point he received a three day "in-school suspension," which meant he wasn't allowed back in his classroom but could be at school in an office (we kept him home instead of that nonsense, which thankfully our work-from-home jobs gave us the flexibility to do). We started to recognize that he was worried about things like hand-washing and the possibility of getting sick to a greater degree than seemed normal, so we sought a psychological assessment through his primary care doctor.
Lochlan received a diagnosis of ADHD and anxiety, and Brendan and I started learning how to respond when he was feeling anxious—we needed to have confidence that he could tolerate these uncomfortable feelings, and express that confidence often. We needed to remain calm and confident ourselves when he was at his most dysregulated. The diagnosis helped us understand why it was extra-difficult for him to adjust to the school environment, and helped us articulate and emphasize to the school that what Lochlan needed was extra support when he was having a hard time, not to be kicked out of his classroom. The school responded fairly well, overall, and assigned a floating classroom aide often to Lochlan's classroom to provide that extra support.
The growing maturity that comes with age and his familiarity with the school meant that Lochlan got off to a good start in first grade. We shared his diagnoses early with his teacher, Ms. F (for first grade), so that she could have some ideas of how best to support him. But Lochlan worries a lot about the bathroom. All of the students in Lochlan's class are supposed to go during recess times or lunchtime. One time Lochlan needed to go during class time, and Ms. F said no. He got so upset that he slammed his water bottle down on a table. I mean, when you gotta go, you gotta go, right?
When she told us about this incident, she also said, "Tomorrow will be a better day, right, Lochlan?" Brendan was the one at pickup that day and he responded, "Did something else happen?" thinking something else must have happened for her to be framing it as a day that needed to be better. She said no, and Brendan said, "Okay, so it wasn't a bad day." It was a moment. An understandably upsetting one, from Lochlan's perspective.
What we learned most recently regarding bathroom usage is that if anyone in Lochlan's class needs to use the bathroom outside the prescribed times, the student that needs to go is required to give one of their bucket tickets to the student that accompanies them, thereby turning a reward system into a punishment one. The rewards system itself is a whole 'nother thing that we've only just begun to tread into with the school. Students receive bucket tickets when they are displaying desired behaviors, such as walking and talking quietly in the hallways, or following the playground rules, and we're they're "caught" doing acts of kindness (like helping a peer). On Fridays, they can exchange bucket tickets for small prizes.
Lochlan gets so worried about having his bucket tickets taken away that we've sometimes been late for school because he is trying to pee one more time before we leave, even if he just peed twenty minutes before—he doesn't want to have to go during class. We've talked about this with Ms. F and she has made a special accommodation for Lochlan to use the bathroom when he needs to with an adult accompanying him (because he tends to take a long time) without the repercussion of losing a bucket ticket. We brought up how the anxiety around gaining or losing bucket tickets is harmful to all the kids, but as far as we know she is still employing that tactic with other students.
I don't mean to disparage Lochlan's school or his teachers. I do believe they are doing their best with the resources they have and within the educational model that has been prevalent for at least the last hundred years (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 6), and that it's the whole model that needs to change, and society-wide priorities that need to shift (and I think are shifting).
Right now, we've got a model heavily influenced by men like B.F. Skinner. Harvard University's Department of Psychology profile on Skinner says, "Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s philosophy of psychology called behaviorism, which rejected not just the introspective method and the elaborate psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, but any psychological explanation based on mental states or internal representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans."
For every theory out there, a new one develops to build on or dismantle an old one (Derrida, anyone?). Skinner believed everything we do is in response to stimuli. He was an empiricist and empiricist ideas were nothing new to public education in the United States when Skinner came on the scene in the mid-20th century. Aristotle's influence had been touching American public education since the Puritans (Reynolds and Kendi, 16-17).
In Schools for Growth, developmental psychologist Lois Holzman takes the build on or dismantle idea further: "Like other societal institutions in Western culture, schools are committed to the philosophical position that human life and growth require some way of knowing the world. This belief, thousands of years old, has rarely been challenged; indeed, it is taken to be as 'natural' as our upright stance...in my opinion, we need to question whether knowing itself—not merely the kind of ideologically biased knowing that schools perpetuate—is the source of our problems. Might it be that centuries-old philosophical biases about what it means to understand, to mean, to learn—to be human—have as much to do with how schools run as do politics, economics, and pedagogy?" (Holzman, 5-6).
Reading and copying that over just now kind of blew my mind. It reminds me of the interview we read for this class with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, in which he said, "We often hear it said that we have to give meaning to this or that, to one’s own thoughts, aspirations, sex, life. But we know absolutely nothing about life. Experts run out of breath trying to explain it to us."
To me, this comes back to Plato and the idea that we should all be aspiring toward some perfect Form—the idea that we must constantly be trying to be something more that what we are, when what we are is already so beautiful.
Later in the same book, Holzman talks about Jean Piaget, a Swiss biologist, philosopher, and psychologist (often cited in Kohn's work) who studied the psychology of children. "Piaget's child is active. She or he does not adapt through responding to stimuli but assimilates and accommodates, constantly and actively adjusting the relationship between her or himself and the things, people, and events in the environment."
This reminds me of something I came across while researching Donna Haraway, the trailer for the documentary about her, "Storytelling for Earthly Survival":
Thinking about all these things, these many theories and ideas we've been reading about this whole semester, and what I'm researching now regarding education, I keep coming back to Jacques Derrida's monstrosity. In his essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," he said, "...the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."
I feel like I can't quite wrap my mind around it. Reading Holzman's work is having a similar effect on me. Are we at a point in human development where we can create new worlds that are not based on old systems? What's coming? As we become more and more aware of how harmful so many of our systems are, as we recognize more and more our interconnectedness, how will the old fall away and what will we build in its place? "Are we more inclined to want schools to turn out kids who accept or who question, who conserve traditions or who create new ones?" (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 116).
For now, Brendan and I are trying to get our kiddo's school to implement Dr. Ross Greene's "Collaborative and Proactive Solutions" method. It's an entirely approachable system of problem-solving with children and adolescents when they display what we consider to be challenging behaviors. It's all about building relationships and trust between children and caretakers and involving children in the problem-solving process. As we continue to advocate for Lochlan at school, we're also trying to move the dial on the overall school culture so that it treats children as whole people, worthy of trust and respect.
Here's a parting image from one my favorite Facebook parenting groups, Visible Child (also an excellent and resource rich website):
Works cited
Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf, 1970.
Haraway, Donna. Trailer for Storytelling for Earthly Survival. YouTube, uploaded by Queer Lisboa and Queer Porto, 20 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xNPSoc6Mq8&t=1s.
Harvard University Department of Psychology. "B. F. Skinner." https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/b-f-skinner
Holzman, Lois. Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.
Kohn, Alfie. The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. Da Capo Press, 2006.
Kohn, Alfie. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards." Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. "'There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis' Jacques Lacan interviewed in 1974." Verso, a blog post by Jordan Skinner, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan-interviewed-in-1974, 22 July 2014.
