Please Mayor DeBlasio... Please Governor Malloy... Please Governor McAuliffe... Please...

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit. I cannot say it any more clearly than that.

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit.

Perhaps, if you are an American political leader, say a President or something, you personally have not walked through enough schools and watched enough children...

...though I suspect that Mayor-in-a-month DeBlasio and Governor Malloy and Governor-in-a-month McAuliffe all have in recent years. And so, if you walk through those halls, you know what we've been doing to children, you know the harm we have been doing to children, over the past 30 years, and especially the last 15, and especially the last five.

We haven't just been making children cry. We haven't just been scaring them. We haven't just been stealing their resources to enrich a few adults. We have been limiting their educations, and thus, their opportunities.

What is the definition of child abuse? I'm not going overboard here to suggest that the policies promoted by ALEC, Pearson, the Gates Foundation, and implemented by Arne Duncan, Mike Bloomber, Jeb Bush, and others do indeed constitute emotional and psychological abuse and denial of equal opportunity.

The testing which has destroyed our schools, and which has crushed the spirit of our children, and which has wrecked, in many cases, our children's love of learning, has no actual validity... it measures nothing of consequence. The imposed, even scripted (in New York City's case), curricula of the Common Core and its relatives, does nothing to build an educated society, but rather, limits the engagement and interest and intellectual diversity of our children. The attacks on those of us who are "different" - especially those of us who are dyslexic and ADHD (I'm looking at you, Common Core advocates and Virginia leaders) - are cruel and in my mind, constitutionally unfair.

Now what should school look like? This isn't rocket science Mr. Mayor, Governors. We know that first, we need to engage learners. Unengaged learners are, definably, not learners. Second, we need to toss our "grade level standards," and every test which goes with them, out the window. Grade level standards are designed - from the very start - to fail children, not help them succeed. They are based in the absurd fiction that all humans learn all things at the same rate. And that fiction is why those who created grade level standards and age-based grades at the start, did so in order to flunk out 80% of children before ninth grade began (five part series).

Ninth Grade English learning plot development

Then we need to Universally Design our schools, so we are assessing - and yes, we are smart enough to assess without bad tests - abilities and capabilities, not disabilities and human differences.

Through contemporary technologies and loads of free software choices (consider just the Freedom Stick Suite, it's free), with One-To-One computer initiatives based in student choice, with contemporary learning space design, and with teacher professional learning aimed at the creation of creative, informed, empathetic professionals. we can - we have proven that we can - develop schools which maximize the potential of every child, and that we can do that without breaking any banks (the savings on Pearson et al will get us half way there, the stopping of worksheet printing will generate the other half of the money we need).

Third Grade Writers

So this is a desperate plea to our leaders. New leaders and continuing leaders. Let's put a stop to more than a century of Industrial Education. Let's stop treating our children as the raw materials ready for the "value added" assembly line which will turn them into identical widgets for jobs which no longer exist. Let's stop assaulting our children with tests which do not help them learn and which do not help us help them learn.

Let us remake education as something humane and holistic. As something inspiring and committed to real human development.

You are leaders, please, lead. Starting right now.

Sixth Grade Writers

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Elwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson at the University of Virginia, 1905, and in various other addresses

"Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee and one of the country's most recognized experts on early literacy, calls the accommodation [use of Text-To-Speech technology for dyslexic students] "cheating." - EducationWeek

 - Ira Socol

The Third Technology

The "first technology" of school is time. That division of "educational time" from other time, and the subsequent divisions therein. School Days and weeks, and semesters, and years. Periods of time which are separated out for this and that. "It's time for reading but not science, science but not physical education, history but not literature."

The "second technology" is the division of "content" - the breaking of the world of global information into discrete parcels for easy delivery.

And the "third technology" is the environment which provides - depending on the school, either a "home base" or a "learning cell."

I spent the past week in schools which surround the lands of Thomas Jefferson - "the father of American public education." Walking hallways and libraries, sitting in classrooms, talking to principals and teachers and students. And the technology we focused on was that "third one," the space, the environment, that visual, aural, spatial reality which either makes humans comfortable and sets them free, or which traps them and limits their possibilities.

When I first enter a "learning space" I look at people's feet. Even second graders are usually 'trained enough' to know that they have to control their upper body in ways which please "the teacher." The teacher, too often, is watching them from torso up, as they sit at desks or tables, and the kids - most - work to avoid excess attention there.

But down below their feet tell a different story. They tap and bounce and roll and kick, they try to curl up or lash out, they scratch and move or slide onto their sides in sleepy boredom.

"What are you looking for," a University of Virginia doctoral student asked me on Thursday, "how do you know it's learning?"

I don't know if it's learning, but I can see engagement. I never have trouble telling if a kid in a school - or out of a school - is working on the learning process. You can see it in their eyes, and you can see it in their focus, and you can see it in their feet. Which isn't a quantifiable measure for Arne Duncan, but as Justice Potter Stewart might have said it, "I know learning when I see it."

So I looked at a lot of learning spaces last week. And I watched a lot of feet, and bodies, and eyes. I saw a remarkable pile of third graders in the coat closet area of Michael Thornton's classroom, six kids who heaped themselves on the floor like young puppies, four with laptops, two doing drawings, all touching, wriggling, talking, and working - investigating different subjects, different topics, but collaborating academically, spiritually, physically. A six-by-eight foot environment of learning safety discovered and built by eight-year-olds. In that room - not a great room, not a big room - other kids clustered as 'table groups' or lay alone on the rug or sat in twos and threes on the floor leaning against the wall. One girl built a kind of high nest near the window. Kids used paper and MacBooks, iPods and whiteboards. Even books. They asked each other first, rarely coming to 'the teacher.'

It was a wonderful space to be in, but it needed some color to soften the hard white edges. And it needed the Interactive White Board at a height where third graders could use it as a touch-screen computer. And it needed more soft flooring and place where kids might draw on the floor. And it needed lamps with differing light levels to mark out areas.

And that's the kind of environmental dreaming we were doing.

Come learn together... Jefferson's Academical Village at the University of Virginia

In School Libraries we moved to toss out furniture - so often bought for once-a-month faculty meetings - and create open carpeted spaces with pillows and lapdesks and kid-sit-on-the-floor height tables. Where we imagined "creation centers" where kids would find creativity to be contagious. And where we sought to break the walls - at least conceptually - which separate those libraries from the school and the outside world.

In school corridors we found those extra "urban spaces" where kids might gather, or might seek out privacy, and wondered how to enhance those spots through furniture, aesthetics, and contemporary communications technology. In school entries we wondered how light and color might welcome, and shift young brains.

In classrooms less evolved than Mike Thornton's we wondered how to shift furniture, color, lights, technology to create differing spaces which might make that room a safe place for all kids to recharge, to inspire, to explore from, rather than act as a room for information distribution.

"For Thomas Jefferson, learning was an integral part of life. The "academical village" is based on the assumption that the life of the mind is a pursuit for all participants in the University, that learning is a lifelong and shared process, and that interaction between scholars and students enlivens the pursuit of knowledge." And I hope we see every school that way. And Jefferson also said, "Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements," which suggests that we must re-design and re-construct constantly, based in the needs of the moment.

I began my week in Virginia talking about "Colonialism in Education." The idea that we must not insist that the only way for children to succeed is to become clones of the educational policy makers. And I ended the week talking mostly about architecture and ecological systems and environments. Because this "third technology" - that environment - enframes both what we - adults in school - do, and what students see and imagine. If a class has desks in rows, only a few things can happen. If a class has a variety of spaces, many more things can. If classrooms have open views of the school and the outside, learning is seen in a continuum, if a classroom has paper covering the door window and drawn blinds - we are telling children that learning starts and stops in a defined space. And if kids are comfortable they will imagine, dream, and investigate. And if they are not, they will resist and shut down.

Walk your school on Monday. Walk your halls. Is your environment an academical village which inspires? or is it something else?

- Ira Socol