The Ultimate Child-Centered School

February 12, 2004

Regular readers of ReformK12 know that we spare no effort in criticizing Progressive educators and the whole child-centered mindset. A few months ago we posted a comparison of what would happen if you took the Progressive model and the Traditional model to their respective extremes. At the time, we felt that Summerhill exemplified the Progressive approach.

Today we learn that Summerhill's been trumped.

By way of Joanne Jacobs we find a story both shocking and sobering, of one truly child-centered school. Published at Strike The Root, a market anarchist site, Bernard Chapin writes of his life at a school run by a marvelous caricature called Princess Sparkle.

It is my role to academically assess, on an annual basis, all of the children at our alternative school.  This is due to our kids being exempted from district wide testing based on what I call “The Spicoli Effect.”  This refers to their habit of drawing rocket ships on evaluation protocols if left unsupervised in auditoriums.

Rocket ships? Where's a psychometrician when you need one? Oh, and The Spicoli Effect is named for Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who talks like this.

One day Mr. Chapin was administering a timed math test to a student when there was an announcement for everyone to go to the gym for a tug-of-war. Mid-problem the kid stops, because naturally the event is more important.

What occasion were we celebrating on that day in October? The fall harvest?  No, it was yet another in a long line of contrived events, and this one happened to be titled “Wacky Wednesdays.”  Bizarre holidays from curriculum have become the rule rather than the exception since our school hired a new principal in 2001.

That would be Princess Sparkle.

It is a most appropriate nickname for our leader as it surgically captures her vapidity, lust for attention, lack of seriousness, and ever-present sense of entitlement.

The child's abandonment of his math assessment was the straw that broke Mr. Chapin's back, and he requested a meeting with the principal and her supervisor.

I began slowly and pointed out that our students are schooled only from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day, and that those six hours already included breaks, lunch, gym, and movies on Friday afternoons [in fact, one teacher I know refers to another’s classroom as “the Cineplex” because his VHS player is rarely off].

This sounds familiar.

I stressed that there was altogether too much “play” and not enough “work” at our facility.  I reasoned that these children had more play in their lives than any of those present had ever experienced (other than Sparkle) over the course of the last 30 years.

Progressive educators criticize Traditionalists for "taking the joy out of childhood" (as if school were the only place for joy), and this school takes that message to heart (and to foot, and hand, and earlobe . . . ).

Mr. Chapin criticizes the permissive nature of the students' homelives, concluding:

Home is one big MTV video.  Their schooling should not be a continuation of the party.  That is why I concluded my argumentation with the statement, “School should be a sober place, but ours is not.”

So, how did Princess Sparkle's supervisor react to these charges?

Every point I made he responded to with complete denial.  He even informed me that Sparkle was doing an excellent job following his “community model” and that our children needed positive interactions more than they needed books or lectures.

That's the Progressive vision in a nutshell. All children need are positive interactions and all will be well in the world.    The supervisor then said, in effect that "our students never tested well and that assessing their education was useless because they never improved." (Emphasis ours.)

When children are being sold up the river, they call that slavery. When children's futures are being sold down the river, we call that Progressive Education.

We challenge anyone to explain to us how this isn't a racist or classist way of running a school.

If we abandoned the pretense of imparting knowledge, then there would be no way to evaluate the entire venture (analyzing future incarceration rates would not help our cause).  Accountability was no longer possible, which may have been their goal in the first place.

So here we have a school, which for some reason has a special exemption from standardized testing, and accountability seems to be the scarlet letter A, which no one wants to wear.

What will follow will be more of the same, as the public invests millions in a school that has been deliberately engineered to fail.

"No, he gets it all wrong," Progressives protest, "that school was deliberately engineered to be child-centered." Enough said.