Perhaps my favorite moment teaching this year came as my class finished reading Of Mice and Men. In the final moments of the story, one character executes his friend to save him from a far worse fate. It’s sudden and thus shocking. I set them to read this final scene silently. The faster readers finished first. I watched eyes widen and flit faster from word to word. A few let out little gasps. One exclaimed, “F*ck this ending, Mr. Buck. Curley’s wife had it coming.” I stifled a smile and told them to hush up. This encouraged those who hadn’t yet finished to speed up, and those who had unfocused to re-engage. Not all peer pressure is bad.
My students walked out of my room that day still discussing the book. Had the character deserved it? Was it really a mercy killing? What does it mean for one friend to kill another? C.S. Lewis quips that all friendships begin with the simple exclamation “What! You too?” The ritual of reading a great book together had given these students a “you too,” a common piece of culture, that brought them all a little closer together.
Prominent progressive education advocate Alfie Kohn writes that community is a bedrock of progressive education: “Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children—separate selves at separate desks.” And yet throughout my teaching experience, I’ve always found traditional approaches to the classroom to be far more communitarian. What’s more, there’s an inherent tension within the progressive theory of education between its desire for community and its foundation of individualism.
Romantics like Rousseau, and the progressives he influenced, view the child as inherently good. Traditions and institutions are not civilizing, but corrupting. As such, the best education is that which places the fewest constraints upon a child. Do not impose a curriculum or knowledge worth knowing. Rather, let them discover their way into whatever interests them most. Let each child guide their own education. Never mind an expectation that students master Langston Hughes, the Declaration of Independence, or any common body of knowledge to bind us closer together.
This view of the child and education more generally is exceptionally self-centered. One cannot build an education up from this first principle and expect community to result. Instead, we get children off reading their own books, designing their own projects, discovering their own knowledge, and building their own curricula. Never do they discuss together, read out loud together, practice problems together, or sit silently struggling through the same task together.
Consider the workshop model, a progressive alternative to my traditional classroom with classic novels read by the entire class. In a workshop model, students and teachers spend ideally less than ten minutes together on a lesson before spending anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five minutes working independently. A teacher might read a short excerpt from a book, perhaps model “making an inference,” then set students off to read, cloistered in their own corners of the room. According to the Units of Study website, “off you go” are the most important words of the lesson. Notice, they’re not “let’s come together.”
The criticisms of this approach and its justification are legion. I’ve detailed many here and elsewhere. But I want to focus on one right now: It’s just so atomized, individualized, lonely. No child is asked to make a small sacrifice of their own immediate interest for the good of the group. Children no longer commune around books, sharing the sorrows and joys of literature together.
This tension shows up even in behavioral expectations. It is seemingly authoritarian to ask a child to track the speaker. But even if one student is feeling down, that action of picking up one’s head to look at a speaking classmate communicates “what you’re saying matters to me, so much so that I’ll forgo my desire in this moment in order to give you my attention.” That’s a real community. We could even say that’s the basis of the social contract itself: giving up aspects of our freedom for the good of the group.
Yet the obverse shows up in so many of the fads in education right now. Children have their own learning styles, individual needs, zones of proximal development, differentiated material, individualized education plans, and so much more. Despite gestures at community, our schools foster ever less of it.
Our public schools are one of the few unifying institutions that we have left. If we allow progressive educational principles to continue to individualize and atomize the classroom, we shouldn’t be surprised if our culture and political climate follow suit. In a traditional classroom with central texts, common knowledge, and routinized behavioral norms, our children learn to let another finish speaking before interrupting, no matter how much they might disagree. How many complete strangers could spark up a conversation over their shared love—or perhaps disdain—for the Great Gatsby because so many of us have read it in high school?
Traditional literature classrooms in particular seem all the more important as technology advances. When children spend ever more time isolated in their rooms, endlessly scrolling on their phone, depressed and anxious, the act of putting a phone away, reading together, and then making eye contact to discuss the text could be the very “social and emotional” support that they need. When artificial technology can accomplish evermore tasks, enjoying a book with friends is one of the few remaining, distinctly human pleasures.
My favorite activity that I carry on with my class comes at the end of every unit. I spin the chairs into a circle and cover my chalkboard with countless thematic words like “aging” or “isolation,” so long as they relate to whatever book we just finished. As students file in, I give them only a blank piece of paper and a pencil. They choose which topics to talk about, I give them a few minutes to write about how this word showed up in the book, and then we discuss. Some conversations last a few minutes. Some spin on for almost an hour as we weave back and forth between discussing the book and our own lives, allowing the text to shape us, form us, and draw us closer together. These incredibly rich and, at times, personal discussions only happen because we first shared a book together.
