“In Order to Give Their Children A Right to Study Painting, Poetry, Music…”
My mom shared a video with me yesterday about The Independent Project. It’s a wonderful sounding program that was piloted at the public high school of Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, MA. This student-driven school-within-a-school was comprised of eight students and lasted one semester. It was comparable to a democratic school; it had more structure than the average Sudbury-model school, but that structure was determined by the participating students.
The Independent Project
The intent of the program, as conceived by the founding student, Sam Levin, is described here:
His intent was to design a school in which students would be fully engaged in and passionate about what they were learning, would have the experience of truly mastering something, or developing expertise in something, and would be learning how to learn. He felt that the most important ingredient to a school like that would be that it was student-driven.
The semester was divided into four parts, described as: Orientation, The Sciences, The Arts, and The Collective Endeavor. There’s a PDF outlining the full project in detail on their website.
Of course, the idea of a student-driven structure is familiar to all unschoolers and life learners. But it’s still exciting to look at a program that has implemented this paradigm within a public institution, where kids with all kinds of parents might have a chance to experience agency in learning.
Honestly, if I had had the choice between a high school program of this model, or the path I took – unschooling on my own until age 16, when I sought more community through junior college classes (but where I was the youngest student) – I would have chosen this program, hands down.
BUT when I watched the video there was something that gave me pause. As each participating student is introduced in the video, a label is flashed on the screen to tell us the long-term independent project that kid chose and accomplished during the program. There’s a trend:
Three students wrote novels, one wrote a play, and another made a compilation of short stories; one student made a short film, one studied culinary arts, and the eighth student studied women’s trauma and recovery. I would say that at least seven out of eight of the “individual endeavors” the students chose for themselves over the course of the program were very personal, artistic, and creative. And, not one science, engineering, or math-oriented “individual endeavor.”
What’s up with that? Is that a reflection of the arts-starved public school situation we can imagine they came from, having experienced the status quo up to this pilot program? Were they just soaking up the one opportunity for creativity they were going to get?
Had math and science been dulled-down for them by the way they had been taught? Or is it just natural for people to pursue the arts when given a chance to do an “individual” endeavor, as opposed to a collective one?
The student who created the short film said that, outside of The Independent Project, he had been presented with this choice:
“I have on one side of my table a stack of trigonometry homework. And on the other side of my table, some tapes, like this, that I want to upload and make a movie out of… I’m stuck with a decision, where I either push aside my creativity to struggle on something I simply don’t care about, or I go with my creativity, and I do awful in school.”
I get that issue, and I would have been struggling with that if I had been in regular school at that age, for sure. But, strangely, when he said that, it kind of bummed me out…
I wrote two novels before I was sixteen years old. I never studied trig. And to this day, I don’t see myself ever studying higher math. I went to art school and studied painting in college. But I’m uncomfortable with the idea that, given freedom, only one out of eight kids would choose to study something that is not in the arts. That ratio just feels off…
It made me think about this John Adams quote I heard years ago; it’s always stuck with me:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
As Americans, have we reached the generations that need not worry about politics and war? Do we have the luxury of everyone studying painting and poetry and music and…porcelain? (Not so much that last one, probably…or tapestry. Substitute writing novels and making films for those.)
In the Independent Project video, a history teacher at the high school says:
“It’s not as if there’s some sinister group of education leaders who are intent on making American education intellectually and existentially numbing. It’s just the nature of large bureaucracies and large institutions.”
But one concern informing education policy in our country is the desire for more students to pursue math and science, and for more of our students to go into the tech careers that will “push the breakthroughs” that will drive the new and future economy. I would say, if those eight kids who chose pursuits for that one semester represent some big-picture snapshot of what comes with agency – well, it would freak out policy makers.
Again, I went to art school; I’m totally down with kids pursuing the arts. But as a working artist, I recognize the scope and limitations to the kinds of social impact my work will have, and more importantly the tremendous saturation of artists to art markets and professional opportunities. And there have been times, as an adult, that I have questioned not bringing my passions and engagement into a field that more readily serves my community, or at least provides myself with greater financial stability and salability.
I guess what I’m saying is, the thing that has always bothered me about that John Adams quote is the picture of linear-progress. We will never arrive at a point where we don’t have to study all the aspects of living, and the human condition, and problem solving. We need all of it in every generation. And we always will.
So, the question I want to pose – the question that I think relates deeply to education politics and policy and reform in this country – is this: Why don’t more of us want to become engineers and doctors and chemists?
My mom and dad are both science buffs, but they unschooled three kids and yielded an art-history major, a painter, and a dancer. Is that ok? Or are we missing something?
Fantastic, Lindsey! I was reading a piece in Harper’s that I’ll link to below arguing the opposite point (more or less) that higher math should be an elective in public schools. It was good to see the same idea (allowing curriculum to be shaped by student’s interests) treated a little more critically. When I was in school I always wished the expectations for math and science were higher, not because I was more interested in them but because I thought that I wouldn’t learn them otherwise. Since going to art school I have wondered a lot about what I missed getting a more rounded college education, so I guess my bias is to be a little conservative when it comes to imagining the ideal curriculum I would prescribe to someone else, or to myself as a kid. Anyway, great writing! Thanks for sharing.
Here is the article:
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/wrong-answer/
I was discussing this with my daughter, one of the few unschooled kids who is pursuing a STEM subject. She says that people have an inherent desire to produce something original. Of course, you’ll be a better artist with years of practice, but you can make *something* the first time you pick up a brush. Most people can’t produce anything original in math or science until they’ve had many years of study. This makes it much less appealing.
I was thinking about that John Adams quote, pondering the probability that Adams thought more along “class” lines than most modern Americans do. In the early history of science and mathematics, I believe, many of the intellectuals were upper class, gentlemen scientists–those who had enough leisure to ponder, experiment, make contributions. (Of course many were instead religious clerics or rabbis.) To some extent, it seemed that you had to be one of the “haves” to work in scientific fields.
Some Facebook contacts of mine opined that real, true, exciting science and engineering tend to be more inaccessible to kids than art and music, movies and plays, dance and literature. And they went on to say that labs and lab equipment and the other materials of modern science are more expensive than the materials needed to create art or perform art…
Definitely food for thought!
My 13 year old unschooled daughter loves physics. She has been pursuing it avidly for many years; at this point, she is exploring quantum physics, reading herself to sleep at night with Alice in Quantumland.
Our family has always been long on ingenuity, short on cash, so we have kept our feelers out for learning opportunities over the years. And while we have not yet been able to give her hands-on experience with say, a particle accelerator, we have been able to find numerous websites that explain how the equipment works. And we have found many mentor-like adults who are willing to talk to her about physics and related science stuff.
I asked her why she thinks more kids aren’t interested in science. After letting the question roll around in her brain for a few days, she told me that she thinks that most people, not just kids, think that if you don’t get the outcome you are looking for in a project you have failed. “But negative results are still results,” she pointed out with a smile.
My eldest is fascinated by quantum physics and quantum mechanics. When he was 3 we got “The Elegant Universe” DVD set (i think it came free with a membership of some sort). He watched it – beginning to end – almost daily for a year. Then at least several times a year thereafter. I will look up “Alice in Quantumland” – can you recommend anything else specifically for those with little to no funds?
I don’t know for sure what will be covered in the new version of “Cosmos” (“A Space-time Odyssey) with Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it will be airing this Sunday on Fox and Monday on National Geographic channel. Since it’s an update of Carl Sagan’s wonderful series, probably the current series will at least touch on quantum physics.
What a great discussion. I have pondered this question, too. Looking at the early years of Edison, Einstein, Feynman…to name a few whose stories I’m a bit familiar with, I have been struck with how unschooly they were, and continued to be as adults.
I know very few STEM adults who were unschooled, and I agree, we need there to be more of them. My 23yo daughter, who recently graduated from a liberal arts college with a literature major, is immersed in writing her novel…was very interested in physics when she was younger, and still is in a layperson’s fashion. However, the arithmetic/math skills needed to actually *work* in that field of study were so impossible-it seemed-for her to grasp, that I “allowed” her to skip most of it. In her college years she took a year of Euclid’s Geometry (her only required math). Got an A, yeah. Thanks to her awesome memorization ability, she says.