One of the important transformations in the world of work over the part several years has been the involvement of workers in decisions about the production process. When workers were isolated on an assembly line, they just followed orders. Nobody considered asking them about the best way to do their jobs. Now, people are finding that following workers' suggestions about how to make a product can lead to big improvements in the quality of the product.
Unfortunately, the people in public education haven't yet learned to listen to the workers in our schools. It's true that teachers have gotten a chance to express their views through surveys and polls. As a result, the public now knows what they think about their work, why they remain in or quit teaching and what they think might make the schools better -- even if these views haven't yet made much difference in the way schools are run. But another group of workers in our schools are ignored -- just like the assembly-line workers in a factory used to be. I'm talking about the students.
We often act as though students are the products of school, when, in fact, kids must be the workers in order to learn. They must want to come to school, and they must be willing to work, even when no one is hanging over them. If we can't achieve this, no kind of school reform, however ambitious, will improve student learning and public education. So it's hard to explain why we don't routinely ask kids - especially kids in trouble - about how to improve schools.
We now have some answers in When I Was Young I Loved School: Dropping Out and Hanging In, a collection of 23 interviews with teenage students and former students presented by Children's Express, a new service staffed by kids. No adults were present when the teenage editors of the Children's Express conducted their interviews. So we get the authentic voices of kids talking to kids about their lives, in school and out, instead of the stuff kids think adults would like to hear.
The voices are many and varied, and some of the stories are painful. But these kids aren't whiners. The ones who dropped out don't try to shift the responsibility for their actions on to the schools and their teachers - though a number do talk about the important positive difference teachers can make in keeping would-be dropouts in school. They are also frank about the things that made school hard for them to take. And much of what they say confirms what we already know about problems in the way our schools are organized.
Some talk about getting lost in schools that are large and impersonal. One girl, who dropped out and then dropped back in , describes how hard it was for her to make the transition from junior high school to high school: " ... I don't think I was ready for high school. It was really crowded and I was nervous, too." And big classes can add to the impersonality by ruling out any close contact with teachers. As another girl says, "It's not the teachers' attitude .... I mean, with thirty-five students in a class, how is a teacher going to notice whether a couple of the students are in all of their classes." In this setup, teachers, too, are the victims.
Many of the interviews complain about being turned off by what goes on in the classroom - boring is the way they usually describe it. One boy who dropped out when he was a senior in high school explains that though he reads books at home, "I didn't like doing school work .... School was boring. And the school work I was learning was boring. Boring, boring, boring." Another boy, who has plenty of spirit and ingenuity, talks about getting his intellectual challenge from breaking school rules: "School was boring because you had so many classes to go to. The fun part was skipping or always doing something wrong. You always have to have some kinds of adventure in your life .... "
A bright girl who dropped out - and who is more analytical about the way learning is organized in school - contrasts the kind of learning she enjoys with the arbitrariness and rigidity of what goes on in the classroom: "I don't really mind learning, if I'm talking with somebody and they're telling me something interesting. It's different. But ... sitting in a classroom with this person teaching you, pointing to the blackboard, and all these people sitting behind their desks. I don't know. If there was a different way to learn or a funnier way, I'd do it in a minute."
A different way to learn is what these kids are calling for -- even one of the least gifted, a youngster for whom sitting still is difficult and who confesses that what he didn't like about school was the "classes were too long .... " All of them are talking about how our one-size-fits-all delivery system - which mandates that everyone learn the same thing at the same time, no matter what their individual needs -- has failed them.
When I Was Young I Loved School is not a scientific sampling of student opinion, but the interviews speak powerfully of what it's like to feel lost and unconnected to the school culture and unconnected to what's going on in the classroom. And as we look around for ways to make schools decent workplaces for the students we'd be foolish to ignore this kind of testimony. If fact, we should hope for more.