Journal #3 Assignment

‘l’lris str’:rtcgy l()r'(‘llilngc is, trl corrrsc, ll()t l)ew. lt stcrrrs lll l)lllt l[()nr
Dcwcy’s lrragnratic c()llccption rlf constantly reassessing goals and results
in the light of expcriencc. Movements to improve learning have often
been based on shared general principles and flexible implementation. But
it would be unwise to underestimate the force of the “pedagogical past”
and the difficulty of changing basic institutional forms, the grammar that
organizes the central work of the school: instruction.

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4

Why the Gramm ar of

Schooling Persists

The basic grammar of schooling, like the shape of classrooms, has
remained remarkably stable over the decades. Litde has changed in the
ways that schools divide time and space, classify students and allocate
them to classrooms, splinter knowledge into “subjects,” and award
grades and “credits” as evidence of learning. In 1902 John Dewey warned
against dismissing the way schools are organized “as something compara-

tively extemal and indifferent to educational purposes and ideals.” In
fact, he declared, “the manner in which the machinery of insuuction
bears upon the child , . . really controls the whole system.”l

Continuity in the grammar of instruction has puzzled and frusrated
generations of reformers who have sought to change these standardized
organizational forms. In this chapter we ask how this grammaf came
about, why it was so tenacious, and why even vigorous and imaginative
challenges to it tended to fade, leaving behind a few new practices here
and there but not fundamentally altering the way schools are organized
for insffuction.

Practices such as age-graded classrooms structure schools in a manner
analogous to the way grammar organizes meaning in verbal communica-
tion. Neither the grammar of schooling nor the grammar of speech needs

to be consciously understood to operate smoothly. Indeed, much of the
grammar of schooling has become taken for granted as just the way
schools are. It is the departure from customary school practice that
attracts attention (as when schools decide not to issue student report
cards).2

People are accustomed to elementary schools that are divided into
self-contained classrooms called “grades.” In these rooms individual

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Iligh st’lrtxrls :lt'(.()t.lliutizctl qrritc tlillcrcntly. l,.r,cl.y lrt,rl., strrik.rrts shilt
f.rorn onc subicct to anotlrcr, onc tcachcr to anr>thcr..lcac]rcls bclong to
specialized deparrmenrs and instruct about one hundred and fifty prpil,
a day-in five classes of perhaps thirty each-in their particular fields,
X/hen students complete these courses, they are re-arded with Carnegie
units. In secondary schools, but generally not in elementary .lusr!r,
students have some degree of choice of what to study.

Under these institutional arrangements, teachers have been expected
to monitor and control students, assign tasks to them, and ensure that
they have accomplished the work. Over the past century there has been
a good deal of conrinuiry in how reachers taught. i7e attend here,
however, not so much to what happens in classro*, *, to the organiza_
tional framework that shapes how teachers do their work.l

The grammar of schooling is a product of history nor some primordial
creation. It results from the efforts of groups that mobiliz. to *in supporr
for their definitions of problems and theiiproposed solutions. The more
pow.erfrrl and prestigious the groups, the moie likely it is rhat they will
be able to buffress their reforms nith laws, regulations, and accreditation
requiremenrs. The timing of innovations also has much to do with their
implementation. Reforms rhar enrer on rhe ground floor of major insti_
tutional changes, such as the rapid expansion of elementary education in
the ninereehth century or the differenliation of secondary schools in the
twentieth, have a good chance of becoming part of the siandard insritu-
tional template.a

Once established, the grammar of schooling persisted in part because
it enabled reachers to discharge their duties in a predictable fashion and
to cope with the everyday tasks that school boards, principals, and
parents expected them to perform: controliing student behavior, instruct-
ing heterogeneous pupils, and sorting people for future roles in school
and later life. Habitual institutional patterns can be labor-saving devices,
ways to organize complex duties. Teachers and students socialized to
such rourines often find it difficult to adapt ro different srructures and
nrles. Established institutional forms come to be understood by educa-
tors, students, and the public as necessary features of a ,,real school.,,
They become fixed in place by everyday cusrom in schools and by outside
forces, both legal mandares and cultural beliefs, until they are barely
noticed. They become just the way schools are.5

Periodically, innovators have challenged the structures and rules that
constiture the grammar of schooling, perceiving them not as the reforms
they once were but as sraitjackets preventing the schools from providing

86

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Itrtvc oltt’rr I lrt’, 1

to create ungraclccl, r-rot graded, schools;

to use time, space, and numbers of students as flexible resources
and to diversify uniform class periods, same-sized rooms, and
standard class sizes;

to merge specialized subjects into core courses in junior and senior
high schools oq alternatively, to introduce departmental speciali-
z^tiorr into the elementary school;

and to encourage teachers to work in teams rather than to function
as isolated individuals in separate classrooms.6

In the 1960s, for example, reforms in the grammar of schooling sprang
up nationwide. Inspired by a vision of high schools of the future, reform-
ers experimented with flexible scheduling and class sizes, variable-space
classrooms, team teaching, independent study, and core courses. In ear-
lier times, as well, innovators assaulted standard organizational arrange-
ments, as in the Dalton Plan of individualized instruction or the
progressive experiments of the Eight-Year Study. These reforms swept
through educators’journals and conferences, seizing the attention of
superintendents, teachers, school boards, parents, and professors.

Reformers who opposed the familiar gtrmmar of schooling insisted
that it was irrational, narrow in aim, antiquated in design, and harsh in
effect. They found allies in foundations, associations of progressive edu-
cators, and cadres of enthusiastic teachers and principals. Various inno-
vators blamed different groups for the persistence of the raditional
grammar: adminisrators with perverse notions of efficiency, college
officials who tried to dictate practice to high schools, or mossbacked
teachers unwilling to try the new. Vhatever the character of the “estab-
lishment” that supposedly inhibited changes in the grammar, confident
reformers asserted that the logic and persuasiveness of their attack would
undermine the foundations of the old order and provide the blueprint
for a new order in the schools.T

But this did not happen. The standard grammar of schooling has
proven remarkably durable. When new departures survived more or less
intact, they typically took hold on the periphery of the system in special-
ized niches: industrial education, continuation schools, or special educa-
tion for gifted or handicapped students-groups of pupils who did not

u7

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scleclivcly inct’rr.lrorirrctl sonre refbrnr practices in regular classrooms,
hybridizing rlre new with the old.

.
lVe start our explorarion of the stability of the grammar of schooling

by examining how rwo pracices, the graded schiol and the Carnegie
unit, became insdtution ahzed. We then ask how the grammar s.rruiued
three vigorous challenges: the Dalton plan, the Eight_yiar iruay, una ,fr.
new-model flexible high school of the late 1960s and 1970s. Ar,.l i., or.
reflecdons on these case studies, we suggest that the “establishment,, thar
has held the grammar in place is not so much a conscious .orrr.*rtir*
as it is unexamined institutional habits and widespread cultural beliefs
about what consdtutes a “real school.”

The Creation of Enduring Institutional Forms
The graded elementary school-in which the curricuium is divided into
yearJong batches, students are sorted according to academic profi.i..r”y
and age, and individual teachers instruct them in ,.lf_.o.rtrin.d class-
rooms-is now so {amilar that it is hard to imagine a dme when it did
not exist or to conceive of alternatives. But once it was a deliberate
invention that spread rapidly across the urban landscape and that prom-
ised to make schools efficient, equitable, and easily replicable.

—

Efficiency and standardizationwere also goals olan academic accounr-
ing sysrem called the Carnegie unit. The reform had unlikely and now
largely forg-otten origins, but it rapidly became an established pu.t of the
grammar of schooling, influencing three fundamental resour.., i, ,..orr-
dary education: instructional time, specialized subjecs, and academic
credits.

The Graded School

The one-room country school was nongraded, a place where students of
different ages learned together and often taught each other. k, ,lh.d,rl.
was flexible and adapred to individual differences among pupils, parents
and school rrustees often came to the classroom to see what the children
had learned, and they frequently rook an acive parr in making decisions
about education.

-Td”y many people regard such practices as desirable, but during most
of the rwenrierh cenrury reformers in universities and ,irr. J.fr*-“r,,
of education have done their best to eliminate the one-room school. They
wanted to replace it by a larger, multigrade school because they regarded

88

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