A Learner's Bill of Rights

Abstract

In looking back at the progressive movement, Mr. Rathbone identifies the rights of the learner that all educators should embrace and protect. CELEBRATING its 35th year, the Fayerweather Street School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the few extant schools associated with the open education movement of the late Sixties.1 Not only has the school flourished, but it has managed to stick to its original progressive principles. Fayerweather recently hosted a panel discussion on progressive education, which prompted me to write this article. Listening to the panelists discuss progressive -- its politics, its commitment to social responsibility, its emphasis on the individual learner as the maker of meaning -- I found myself formulating a bill of rights, intellectual rights, that I imagine my progressive colleagues, past and present, might endorse. THESE rights of the learner, like their constitutional analogs, are forever balanced in the real world against the greater good of the group. Naturally, there is a tension: just as free speech loses out to safety when an individual wishes to cry Fire! in a crowded theater, so the necessities of teachers to coordinate scheduling with specialists, of schools to maintain enrollments and not appear too wacko, and of publishers to sell their wares to nonprogressive schools all weigh against the undiluted implementation of these and other rights. Each time a compromise is made, however, I would want it to be publicly acknowledged and personally painful. I want teachers to flinch at each violation of a learner's rights. And I want the rest of us -- like some shrill, educational ACLU -- to point our fingers and demand that, if a right be restricted, it be with the least limiting restriction possible. 1. See Charles H. Rathbone and Lydia A. H. Smith, in James W. Guthrie, ed., Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003); and Lydia A. H. Smith, 'Open Education' Revisited: Promise and Problems in American Educational Reform (1967- 1976), Teachers College Record, vol. 99, 1997, pp. 371-415. 2. Roy Illsley, head, Battling Brook Primary School, Leicestershire, in Charles H. Rathbone, Examining the Open Education Classroom, School Review, vol. 80, 1972, p. 535. 3. David Hawkins, Messing About in Science, in Informed Vision: Essays on Learning and Human Nature (New York: Agathon Press, 1974), pp. 63-75. 4. Hawkins, I-Thou-It, in idem, pp. 48-62. 5. Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher (New York: Bantam Books, 1963); and Elwyn S. Richardson, In the Early World (Wellington: New Zealand Council of Educational Research; New York: Pantheon, 1969). 6. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Children and Their Primary Schools (known as the Plowden Report), vol. 1 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966). 7. John Dewey, School and Society, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), p. 34. right to choose. progressive teacher acknowledges each student's right to make important decisions about what is learned, how it is learned, when, and with whom. As a British head (principal) once put it, The basis for learning should be that the child wants to know, not that somebody else knows or that somebody says he ought to know.2 Relevance, in other words, is to be determined by the learner herself. pseudo- progressive teacher, while he may offer time, presents only options chosen by himself and only at limited times. At worst, this teacher uses choice as a reward and withholds it as punishment. right to follow through. An active learner often skips past conventional age- and grade-level expectations, ignoring the traditional boundaries of the disciplines and oblivious to the notion of social appropriateness. This means a progressive teacher cannot be skittish when the student shows an interest in sex, politics, religion, or rap. …