Ernest L. Boyer, who died in December 1995 after a lifetime of outstanding service to the field of education, was President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, New Jersey. This article is condensed from his address to the Grosse Point Academy, Grosse Point Farms, Michigan on April 26, 1995, as reprinted in The Education Digest, September, 1996. It captures well the strengths and core values of Applewild. Our new faculty each year read this as part of their orientation. One suggested that I share it with our parents, which I am delighted to do.
Chris Williamson, Head of School
Five Priorities for Quality Schools
By Ernest L. Boyer
As we visited schools, both public and private from coast to coast, for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching study that generated The Basic School: A Community for Learning, we became convinced that educators already know what works. We spent hundreds of hours in schools across the country, and interviewed teachers, principals, and headmasters. We surveyed parents, teachers, and 10-year olds in 12 countries around the world. Ultimately, we arrived at five basic components of a quality education.
The first priority of an effective school is to build a sense of community within that institution. A school is an idea people share, a vision, a spirited feeling that generates strong bonds. No matter how the building looks on the outside, at the heart of every effective school is a sense of community built around a shared vision. Yet, we went into schools and found that teachers rarely could describe the vision of the institution overall.
Building community is not only the school’s task; it’s a task for the neighborhood, the nation, and the family. How we can create a shared vision and how we can wrap our minds and hearts around common goals are questions having to do with what makes a community work. Building community in the school creates a spirit of connectedness that can spread into the neighborhood beyond.
What have we found in effective schools – schools that are true communities for learning? Everything I describe in The Basic School is going on somewhere in the nation today.
To be a community, a school should be small enough for everyone to be known by name. Maybe that’s three, four, or five hundred. Larger schools can be internally restricted into smaller units. Community does correlate with size.
In a school of 5- or 6,000, it’s usually the very good or very bad students who are known by name. In between is a large gray mass of unknown students moving from class to class, hardly known by any adults. Many students drop out because no one notices they dropped in.
Revitalizing our schools must include reorganizing these institutions into smaller units. Students need to come together in a school community in which they are known by name, have a sense of purpose, and have good communication, a sense of justice, of discipline and of caring, and occasionally find moments of celebration.
Teachers are the key. Every successful school community I’ve observed has teachers working together – not just in their own classrooms, but across classrooms, too. An effective learning community requires organizing schools so that teachers, at least once a week, have time to work together to talk about shared goals, curriculum, assessment strategies, and problems of discipline. Community and communication are inextricably interlocked.
No School is an Island
Next, enlarge the circle, engage the parents. You cannot have an island of academic excellence in a sea of community indifference. In our study, teachers often lamented a sense of disconnection between family and school. Parents often said they weren’t sure how to get more involved in the school. We must create stronger connections between school and parents.
The first day of school is critical in building a bridge between school and family. Most of the time, children are simply dropped off at school, and parents remain at a distance. Instead of having parents hurry off, bring them in. Why don’t we make the first day of school a national celebration? We could create all-day celebrations to forge a stronger bond between home and school.
Grandparents also need to be more engaged in children’s education. We need to build, in many areas of society, intergenerational connections, and the school is an excellent place to bring together the young and the old, with grandteachers in the schools as volunteers.
We’re building a society with each age group living in isolation. We have infants in nurseries and toddlers in day care and children go off to school and are organized by age. Then they spend four years on the college campus, still mostly with peers. Adults are in the workplace. Older people are isolated in retirement villages or nursing homes. I don’t think this is healthy for our society. It is certainly not healthy for children to be so separated for so much time from the other generations. Children need grandparents.
My own mother and father lived in a retirement village where the average age was 80, but the village had a day-care center. Every morning, about 50 three- and four-year olds came in, and every child had an adopted grandparent. My father wouldn’t talk about his aches and pains, he talked about his little friend, who he was sure was going to be governor or president someday. When I watched that relationship, I saw the poignancy of it, the inspiration children can bring to older people, and the insights children can gain from spending a little time with the aged.
The second priority of an effective school is the centrality of language. I believe the main priority of an effective school is the study and use of symbols.
The human capacity to use language and to reach out and connect with one another is a great gift. We have this exquisite, mystical, wonderful capacity to communicate with one another, using the most intricate systems of symbols. One of the most critical responsibilities of the elementary school is to help children lay the best possible foundation for a deeper understanding of the symbols of words and numbers and the arts that together make up language. By the time children come to school, they’ve mastered at least 3,000 words. In a way, we don’t so much teach them language as build on a symbol system already well established.
Mathematics is a symbol system, too, a universal system of communication about quantities, space, time, and energy. As with words, children learn the language of mathematics very early. They show great curiosity about shape, sizes, and how things fit together, and preschoolers begin to count things, to add and subtract. Illiteracy in math should be no more acceptable than illiteracy in the language of words. We need to teach children that we use words as one system of symbols to express feelings and ideas, and numbers as another system of symbols. Mathematics is a vital human language.
Language study includes the universal symbol system we call art. We communicate our most evocative feelings and ideas through the arts. Children are natural artists. Even before they start to speak, they respond to rhythm and color, to form and texture. They have a joyful response to the language of the arts that begins very early. Schools should not consider the arts a frill, but rather one of our most essential ways to communicate with one another.
The third priority of an effective school is a curriculum with coherence. Every child in the school must develop a core of essential knowledge. Our children need to know about the world around them, to know science and history and the literature of their country, to build a foundation of solid knowledge by which they can negotiate the world. Our children should be literate enough to read a newspaper, understand the language, and know the cultural references needed to get at the deeper meaning. That’s to me a given.
But children also need to see connections across disciplines. We make a grave mistake to give them a slice of science, a slice of history, a slice of literature, while failing to help them understand that they are connected.
Perhaps children naturally know more about connections than our curriculum reveals. They keep asking “why” precisely because they are looking for relationships and patterns. They don’t like fragments. Kindergarten children come to school asking “Why?” But around fourth grade, they stop and begin to ask, “Will we have this on the test?” This tells us more about the effect schooling can have than anything else I know. “Why” is a curiosity question. “Will we have this on the test?” is a conformity question. If I were to define only two goals for a quality elementary school, I would say, teach children language and help them see connections.
The fourth priority of an effective elementary school is to create a climate for creative learning, a place for active, not passive, learning, a place where people learn to be creative, not just conforming, where they learn to cooperate, as well as compete. At the center of such a school you find inspired teachers who know how to help students themselves become teachers, and who, occasionally, put themselves in the role of student, letting students teach them.
I remember Mr. Wittlinger, my high school history teacher. He stopped me after class one day and said, “Ernest, you’re doing pretty well in history. You keep this up and you might just be a student.” Me? A student? Three seconds of interaction, and he caused me to redefine my vision of myself. The influence of great teachers lives forever.
We had better affirm the essential act of teaching, and do so in the early years when it matters most. If we gave as much status to first-grade teachers as we give to full professors, that one act alone could revitalize the nation’s schools.
I think, also, if we’re serious about improving schools, we need small classes in early grades. I would like to see no K-3 class with more than 15 students. Anyone who says class size doesn’t matter hasn’t spent a day, or even an hour, with five- and six-year olds. Small classes are most essential in the early years.
This brings me to the fifth priority: a climate that affirms the building of character for every student. In teaching young children, we are helping them develop body, mind, and spirit. If we do not understand the wholeness of the child, if we do not have a whole vision, we will neglect important aspects of learning and deny children perhaps the most important knowledge, the deeper understanding of the sacredness of life and their responsibility to themselves and others.
Uncommon Mann
In 1837, Horace Mann, called the father of the common school, said the public school should help students develop both reason and conscience. The highest and noblest goal of education, Mann said, pertains to our moral character. And schools, he said, should teach virtue before knowledge.
In our school surveys, we talked to hundreds of educators, and we found general agreement that this commitment to teaching virtue has dramatically declined. In fact, people even feel uncomfortable talking about values today. It’s all right to talk about academic standards, but not about ethical and moral standards. I am convinced that knowledge unguided by an ethical and moral compass is more dangerous than ignorance itself.
I think we all must acknowledge that our children are growing up today in a world of glorified violence, a world that celebrates sexual degradation. Children are bombarded endlessly with evil actions. I consider it a national scandal that, on the children’s programs on Saturday morning television, there are 26 acts of violence every hour. Then we wonder why so many young people are prone to violence and incapable of respect for other people. That’s what our culture is teaching them, what life is all about, unmodified by moral judgments.
What children urgently need today is not just to cram for CATs or SATs but to be inspired by a larger purpose. We must teach them that the tragedy is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined, convictions undeclared, and service unfulfilled.
The fifth priority of a quality school, then, is to affirm core virtues to guide the lives of children, to guide teachers and the school itself, and to guide the community beyond the school. In The Basic School, we define seven virtues to guide educators as they work with young children: honesty, respect, responsibility, compassion, self-discipline, perseverance, and giving.
The last virtue – giving – directs students away from selfishness toward service to others. Martin Luther King, Jr., said everybody can be great because everybody can serve. Even young children can understand that if they have been taught something important, they have a responsibility to pass that learning on to others.
I was greatly impressed as I walked into elementary schools which had developed a “buddy system,” with fifth-graders linked up with first graders, to help orient them and even tutor them at times. And I was in a school in a barrio in San Antonio where every child in that elementary school had a responsibility to be a buddy, a partner, to someone younger. When the first-grader would get off the bus, the fifth grader would be there and take her by the hand and lead her to the school and then lead her back to the bus in the afternoon. We should teach children a sense of commitment, so they know that life is not to be lived selfishly, but at least part of the time should be lived reaching out to help others.
Meaning Beyond Absurdity
Shortly before his death, Jewish leader Abraham Joshua Heschel was asked what message he had for young people. He replied, “let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can – every one – do our share to redeem the world in spite of all the absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art.”
There is meaning beyond absurdity. Every deed must count. Every one, every word, has power. We all can, every one, do our share to redeem the world.