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Greatness In The Classroom

Last edited May, 2005, Last reviewed September 2007

Albert Cullum was an elementary classroom teacher in Rye, NY during the late fifties and early sixties. Things were different back then from our time now. Things were also exactly the same. In an era marked by the educational philosophy of “Dick and Jane” this teacher had a different sort of approach. Rather than “See Dick run. Run, Dick, Run.”, Albert immersed his students in Shakespeare’s plays and other masterworks. Albert reasoned that:

“Children who get early exposure to great art, great music, great literature, don’t run away from it ever in their lifetimes…it’s like a friend.”

As a fan of drama, Albert’s fifth grade classroom was frequently loud, raucous and free-wheeling. This did not endear him to some of his colleagues, but others saw him as a wonderful influence and vital resource. His students fell into the latter category as well.

A month into his first teaching job, Albert realized that he was not having fun. He reasoned that if he was not having fun, then no one else in the classroom was having fun either. He had noted a constant disciplinary problem, too, which he blamed on himself. Quickly he came to understand that, as Dewey had hypothesized so many years earlier, children learn by doing and by playful learning. Much later, after years of successful teaching, Albert affirmed;

“You must remember how children learn, rather than how we teach…learning is not painful, learning should be joyful.”

A former student, remembering back to his time with Albert, said:

“How many 10 year olds were dying to go to school each day, and if they had a sick day, screamed and threw tantrums, saying: I’m not that sick, I need to go to school!”

Another of his former students, now a fifty-something year old adult, put a finer point on it:

“Students are turned on by greatness and bored by mediocrity.”

Albert struggled against a different and perhaps less organized form of mediocrity than our teachers today. Yet, the principle is the same. Today in many schools we promote a scripted kind of learning. Teachers are given a screenplay to follow, backed by district standards “aligned” to state standards. The screenplay is made up of minimum benchmarks, paint-by-numbers curriculum, allergy-free vanilla content, and multiple-choice assessments designed to rank students, rather than to rate them. Parents buy tickets to this awful play on the theory that their children must post the right numbers in order to get into a good college. We are so caught up in the horse race of scores that we lose sight completely of what is actually possible.

For the part of students, they become successful according to their ability to think superficially and to respond to extrinsic rewards. “Success”, after all, is defined by the results of standardized testing and the so-called “objective” numbers. When classroom boredom inevitably sets in for many students, it encourages teachers—who may be otherwise constrained by artificial barriers—to create token economies such as stickers, or plastic doo-dads, or similar extrinsic means in order to motivate students to do their “work”. As time progresses, students who cannot seem to navigate their way toward the middle of the classroom are tracked toward a “gifted and talented” program or a program for “classified” children. This homogenization of the classroom brings about exactly the kind of painful learning and entrenched mediocrity mentioned above.

Albert Cullum put it this way. In his classroom, they are all in the same wagon. There are thoroughbreds that will inexorably move to the front of the wagon and do the most pulling. Yet, the whole wagon—the whole classroom—is moving toward the same destination. They are all on-board together.

Is that a just a quaint sentiment of bygone years? It is only for the adults of today who fear hard work or who have not taken the opportunity to poke their head up over the crowd and have a look around. Teachers today given the chance to call upon their own passions, given the tools to construct a classroom of authentic learning, and given the mandate to bring all the kids on their wagon to the same destination will rediscover the joy of learning and the joy of teaching. It is more work for teachers, but it is also more rewarding work. It isn’t that today’s teachers must duplicate the efforts of Albert Cullum either. It is only that they need the freedom and encouragement to apply their own enthusiasm and their own judgment in their own classroom.

Students of today have exactly the same intrinsic motivation to learn as those of any other era. Authentic learning is fun, it is rewarding and it creates a perpetual motion machine of lifelong education. If our students of today are asking “do we have to know this?” instead of “can we do this again?”, then where lays the blame? If our students of today are doing the minimum to get by, if they are trudging along to school instead of skipping, or if they talk at the dinner table about winning a plastic reward rather than the engaging story they can’t wait to finish writing tomorrow—then where lays the blame? Every minute of every day in the classroom cannot be wondrous, but when students are permitted to exercise their natural abilities the necessary dull moments go by quickly on the way to another adventure. Authentic learning happens when children don’t realize they are learning.

We, the adults, can flush out the poison of scripted learning quite easily. We can stop the “classified” and “enrichment” games that encourage teachers to teach to the middle and send the others onto another track or into another classroom. Good teachers are perfectly capable of creating differentiated instruction within a single classroom. We can put an end to the standardized testing that reinforces the already strong emphasis on superficial learning over authentic learning. We can shine a spotlight on the examples of unique, passionate, idiosyncratic, individualized, fun, and exceptional teaching already going on in our schools and count those examples as standard rather than exceptional.

If we want children to become adults who can raise original questions and seek to answer them, if we want children to find the capacity to think deeply and critically about subjects that they find engaging, if we want children to turn to art and literature as an old friend, if we want children to become worthy citizens of the greatest political experiment in human history, if we want children to find within themselves the power and the passion to construct their own fate, is our answer to the challenge: more bubble tests, more homogenized classrooms, and less individualized, engaging teaching?

Things were different back in Albert Cullum’s time, and they were exactly the same. In his school district, some students had the benefit of an inspired teacher and some did not. It is his students, though, who got together again some forty years after their time in his classroom to celebrate a part of their lives that remains special to them. This gathering was captured in a documentary titled “A Touch of Greatness” and available as a DVD. We have the benefit of looking back at such history and using it to examine our present. There is no reason, save our own reluctance to take on the task, that we should not find the means to create a touch of greatness in every one of our classrooms today. Our children are not the obstruction, we are.

To cite this article:

Painter, John. Greatness In The Classroom. (May 2005). Retrieved month x, 2xxx, from

<http://rationalamerican.com/education>