Schools of Thought

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
My Sixty Years in Education
A Constructivist Manifesto

1.

My earliest school memory is also my favorite memory. I was at nursery school, 5 years old – the kindergarten concept hadn’t reached rural Wisconsin yet. It was only October, the air was crisp like fresh apples, but somehow I had convinced my mother to let me wear these really neat black leather ski boots with stubby toes that had been my older sister’s. Just at the end of outside time, I was the last one outside behind the fire station that housed the nursery school, standing by a mound of dirt. I climbed that mountain. I crossed my arms and surveyed the whole yard, my domain.
“I’m going to be a robber!” I thought.

At 5 years old, I was so powerful – and knew it – that I could imagine doing anything. I never shook that outlaw self. It was a defining moment as well of my stormy relationship to schools over the next 60 years, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an educational change activist. I loved nursery school – fingerpainting, playdough, blocks, what’s not to love. But apparently I wasn’t buying the indoctrination to be “good.”

That was the last time I loved school. I liked school okay for the first few years. My first grade teacher, Ms. Gunderson, was beautiful – tall, slender, with flouncy brunette curls – and I adored her.

Miss Miles in 3rd grade taught me about “constructivism” by allowing me to do a “project” about the addition they were building to the Stone Bank School, which had been a two room school when my sister started there 3 years before me. But parts of rural Milwaukee, like parts of rural USA, were quickly exurbanizing, and the school was adding six rooms. I talked to the architect, who was a family friend. He showed me the plans. I learned how to make concrete. I wrote about the names of all the machines and drew pictures of them for my report: the front loader, the back hoe, the cement mixer, the pile driver, the bull dozer.

Constructivism is another term for “hands-on” learning. The idea, which derives from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and Soviet educator Lev Vygotsky, is that children construct their own knowledge out of their experience. The philosophy is widely practiced in nursery schools, day-care centers, child development centers, Head Start programs and many kindergartens. It stands in contrast to the behaviorism of extrinsic rewards (and punishments) which dominates instruction in grades 1-12, and beyond.

Both a premise and a conclusion of this memoir is this simple proposition: in the US at least, after preschool, all schools suck, big time. Public, private, urban, suburban, no Marker what their reputation or Academic Performance Index rating. They suck because they were designed to serve an economic system based on competition. Competition is destructive to human beings, creating far more losers that winners, and even the winners lose in their isolation.

I sub-sub-titled this memoir a Constructivist Manifesto because what I am hoping to do is describe the experiences in my life that taught me what I know about schools and society, and thereby suggest ways we might go forward to develop schools and a society that transcend competition, that honor the fact that human beings have far more in common that they have differences, and that if we work together, we may really be able to arrest our seemingly inexorable slide toward self-destruction and the destruction of our beautiful planet.

After nursery school, grade school was generally boring, though I don’t recall minding so much. I enjoyed learning to read. I especially remember a story in my Dick and Jane Reader where baby sister Sally was setting the table and ended up one setting short because she forgot to count herself. That was the kind of mistake I could relate to.

Because the academics came relatively easy to me as a Doctor’s son in this amalgam of farm kids, children of grocers and workers at Waukesha Motors or Hartland Plastics, the local factories, competition didn’t affect me much at first. My father probably justified sending me there because he hoped the farm families would impart pastoral values to me, though the real reason was that he wanted to live in the country. He wasn’t a people person, to say the least. Gruff is the word that describes both his bedside manner as a physician and his parenting style. A well-regarded eye surgeon with snow white hair by the time he was 30, he also lacked eye-hand coordination – a trait I inherited – so that his entire being as an adult was channeled into keeping his hands steady as he maneuvered the scalpel near the optic nerve. There wasn’t much of him left over.

Competition began on the playground with the archetypal children’s game, “Nigger Pile.” The only version I remember was the one in which someone in a gang of kids raging through the playground yelled “Nigger pile on Henry!” and five or seven or some number of kids would swarm after me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy and traumatizing me into a mild case of claustrophobia. I don’t remember yelling “Nigger pile on” whoever, nor do I recall being near the top of a pile on someone else, though most likely I participated in those versions as well.
Baseball killed me. We had three sport seasons at Stone Bank, baseball, baseball, and baseball. It was really softball, but since the ball wasn’t soft, it was the same difference to me. Thanks to the bad coordination I got from my father, I couldn’t play baseball for shit. I couldn’t throw (“You throw like a girl,” was a frequent taunt from my schoolmates), couldn’t catch, and couldn’t hit. I could run okay, but that was about it.

Still because I was seen as smart, and because at a working class school, competition wasn’t central, I was part of a gang of friends. My 4th and 5th grade teacher, Mr. Babinek, was a genius in that when he organized an interscholastic softball team to play North Lake and Merton, he made me the batboy, so I went to the games and wore the uniform and was an integral part of the team without having to embarrass myself (or the team) by actually playing. Even so, it was baseball that first made me suspicious of competition.

While I couldn’t have articulated this, the class differences in attitude to competition became evident to me early on. The house I grew up on was on Pine Lake, at the time a favorite summering place for the industrial, brewing, tanning, and banking titans of Milwaukee. My great grandfather, Frederick C. Winters, a corporate lawyer for Allis Challmers and the Milwaukee Road, and a General in the Civil War, acquired the 7 acre property on the lake in the 1880s, as a summer place. In the late 1920s, my grandfather and namesake, Henry B. Hitz, an eye-ear-nose-and throat doctor, built a largish house on the property overlooking the lake. Large by most people’s standards, only medium sized by Pine Lake standards.

To give you an idea, the area around Pine Lake was organized into the Village of Chenequa, which in my youth from 1950-70, had 400 residents, but a full time police and fire department, giving it possibly the highest ratio of police to residents of any community in the country.

It was a beautiful lake, not large, perhaps 3 miles by 2 miles, with deep blue water and not a single commercial establishment, all kinds of trees – pine, oak, maple, birch – vast well-manicured lawns, lush gardens, and homes, most of them grand.
Beginning with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1944, we were among the first families to spend winters as well as summers on the lake, and remained one of the few at least until the expressways were built in the 60s. So winter nights could be eerily quiet.

I still don’t know how our branch of the Winters family won the competition to get the best piece of the property, and it was never discussed, but because of this “victory”, our family had a little more money than our cousins who ended up with the smaller cottages next door. I know that some resentment simmers subterraineanly to this day. So it goes with competition.

In the fall, winter, and spring, despite the baseball challenges, I played exuberantly with my working class friends from Stone Bank. We rode our bikes to Oconomowoc 7 miles away, seeing how high we could get our speedometers to go as we raced down the one serious hill; we played “Civil War” with real antique guns given me by a family friend (my idea, they wanted to play cowboys); we had a club called the “Moon or Bust Club” with a clubhouse above our garage where we painted a skull and crossbones on the door in radium glow-in-the-dark paint; we developed naked pictures of my sister in my dark room, frustrated by a black streak covered the most interesting parts; we played with my electric trains, a double-transformer layout with a Union Pacific passenger train and a freight train with a log car that automatically dumped its logs; we hunted frogs and turtles in the swamps of Moose Lake, a neighboring lake where the working classes were welcome to live. My friend Jeffery’s mother was den mother to our Cub Scout troop, and we made lanyards and picture frames around the kitchen table in their Moose Lake bungalow.

The summers were different. I didn’t see my Stone Bank friends. The Milwaukee owning class swept over the lake and I learned to claw my way into the various cliques that arose among this privileged population.

Just as baseball was the only game in town in Stone Bank, sail boat racing was what we did in the summer. It was in sailing school that I first became acquainted with the art of hazing. My cousin, Billy Winters, a pudgy boy with a prominent cow-lick above his forehead, lived next door to us, in the Red Cottage my father had sold his father (and about which deal there was some trace of bad blood). They later built their own house, which we snobbishly belittled.

The earliest I remember Billy being scapegoated was at day camp, a precursor to sailing school, led by a teenager named Dick Gallun. My mother was picking me up at the end of the session. She asked Dick conversationally, “So, what’s the dope?”
“Oh, Billy’s the dope, everybody knows that,” Dick riposted, and my mother chuckled. The adults blatantly colluded with our hazing.

There were times I remember enjoying hanging out with Billy when it was just him and me playing laboratory or some such in the basement. We would make thermite, a mixture of ferrous oxide and aluminum powder that once lit, made a blinding flash and left behind a little hunk of iron. Or we would explore one of the many I had hide-outs all over the property. There was a boat house, an ice house, a cottage where my grandmother stayed in the summer, an outhouse, a toolshed, a barn converted into a garage with an upstairs, where we would look for pictures of naked natives in the old National Geographics.

But if anyone else was around, the game quickly degenerated into “picking on Billy.” We would taunt him with cruel rhymes:

Wee Willy Winters sat on a sprinkler and he began to cry,
Oh ma, oh ma, oh what a stinker am I.

We would shun him or ditch him, push him in the lake, splash him with water until he cried, belittle his inferior boats (he had a 7 ½ horsepower to our 15).
I understood full well, and felt only slightly guilty, that hazing Billy was my ticket to the inside of the prestigious clique. The incident that best illustrates this dynamic happened quite late, when I was 16 to Billy’s 15, after I had achieved a modicum of popularity. I was having a party for the 4th of July. It was the party of the season. My parents understood my need for popularity enough to sanction my purchase of 4 cases of beer at the Beer Depot in Nashotah, another nearby town. At least 50 people came from all over the lake and from Milwaukee. Of course I hadn’t invited Billy. But Billy came over anyway. I greeted him at the door. “Hi, Billy! How you doing, man?” I gushed with enthusiasm as I shook his hand. Then with an evil grin, I pressed my lit cigarette into the back of his hand and held it there. Once again, for the jillianth and perhaps last time, Billy ran home squealing, and my status was secure.