February 12, 2004
Romances with schools: Goodlad writes about his lifelong love affair with education
Maybe it was inevitable that when John Goodlad decided to write a memoir, it wouldn’t turn out to be a memoir of his life. Instead it’s a memoir of schooling, called Romances with Schools, and it’s one of four books that Goodlad, professor emeritus of education and co-founder of the Center for Educational Renewal, has had published during the last two weeks.
Of course, one of those books is a reissue and two are co-authored, but still, for a man who’s already retired twice, it’s strong evidence that his work is too compelling to set aside. And that work has been all about schools. From his first job as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse through stints as a school administrator, a teacher of teachers, a researcher and dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education, Goodlad has remained fascinated with the places we create to educate young people.
“Various people have been asking me for a while to write a memoir,” Goodlad says. “It’s been suggested that I knew all the greats in education — James B. Conant, Clark Kerr, Bob Hutchins and so on — and I should write about my encounters with them. I’ve also been asked to write about my life. But I decided I’d rather write about schooling.”
Goodlad describes Romances with Schools, which is being sold as a trade book rather than an academic book, as the “I Am a Camera” approach — he’s the camera pointed at schools but he’s in every scene at the same time, beginning all the way back to when he started school at age 6.
“One theme that runs all through the book is what I call the ‘deep structure’ of schooling,” Goodlad says. “It was just beginning to harden when I started school and it tells both teachers and students what they’re supposed to do.”
The deep structure, Goodlad says, became firmly entrenched during the Great Depression. Before the Depression, kids typically finished elementary school and went to work. But when the Depression struck, they became a threat to adults in the job market. That’s when states began passing laws requiring them to stay in school longer.
Which is why one characteristic of the deep structure is that it’s custodial; kids are required to be there and put in a certain amount of time. Another is that students will be grouped by age and grade, and if a student doesn’t fit into his or her group, that student is an educational problem. In a similarly rigid way, schools are structured so that there are set times of day for various classes and recess, with little chance to vary that according to such things as student energy. And that rigid structure is extended out so that students are required to learn certain types of material at certain times in their school career.
Goodlad has had a ringside seat to observe and analyze this structure through the years, and he’s able to recount the successive reform movements, none of which has changed the deep structure very much.
“Every decade or so we have a new reform but it isn’t really new,” Goodlad says. “Sometimes it’s new bottles but it’s the same old wine.”
Worse, Goodlad believes, the reform movements tend to kill real innovation. And his own ideas about schooling are radically different from the current deep structure, from kindergarten on up. He would, he says, start kids at age 4 rather than 5, and they’d enter school in the month of their birthday.
“That would give teachers time to create an orderly environment because only a few new children are coming into it at the same time,” Goodlad says. “Look at what we have now — near chaos because there are all these kids making this enormous transition from home to school at the same time.”
Once in school, students would be in multi-age groups spanning three, four-year periods. Individual students would move forward at whatever speed they were capable of. A head teacher with a team would teach each group, and these teachers would have a lot of autonomy in planning.
But the biggest change Goodlad favors is to end high school at age 16.
“We’re making 17- and 18-year-olds into role models for younger kids at the very time they’re trying to identify with adults,” he says. “They’re exhibiting adult behavior — with sexuality and drugs, for example. And many are tired of school anyway, or drop out because of repeated failure.”
What Goodlad would offer instead is “incredibly sophisticated skill training” in internships, a system already in place in some European countries. After these internships, or civic-oriented and other kinds of internships, the students who wanted to could still go on to higher education.
Goodlad recognizes there would be tremendous resistance to changing to this kind of system, but he believes if it were tried in a few school districts, it would spread. “We’d keep the old system in place as an alternative until there was no demand for it anymore,” he says. These and other ideas for change are fleshed out in Romances with Schools.
And he’s optimistic enough to believe there would be little or no demand for the old system in time, which is a lot to say, given his long history in the field. Twenty years ago Goodlad wrote a book, A Place Called School, that became a classic in the field. Today that book, based on a cross-sectional study, is being reissued with a new afterword by the author and a new foreword by fellow researcher Ted Sizer, who maintains that it remains contemporary.
“I re-read the chapters that form the body of the book and I didn’t change a thing, because I think they’re all still relevant today,” Goodlad says.
And he goes on doing new work. The other two books he has coming out are Education for Everyone: Agenda for Education in a Democracy, co-authored with Corrinne Mantle-Bromley and Stephen Goodlad, and The Teaching Career, co-edited with Timothy McMannon and including essays by multiple contributors.
“What I’ve tried to do in all the books really is to show how engaging learning can be and how wonderful it can be, and also how it gets loused up,” Goodlad says. “When it comes right down to it, I’m writing about all the things I’ve come to believe in after studying schooling and participating in schools for many decades.”
