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The Proposal

How might students gain such depth of knowledge? Well, this proposal can be stated very simply: The basic idea is that children will be randomly assigned, during the first week of schooling, a particular topic to learn about through their whole school career, in addition to the usual curriculum. Topics might include such things as apples, the wheel, mollusks, railways, leaves, ships, cats, spices, etc. Students will meet regularly with their supervising teachers, who will give guidance, suggestions, and help as students build personal portfolios on their topics. The aim is that students, by the end of their schooling, will have built genuine expertise. The expectation is that this process will transform their relationship to and understanding of the nature of knowledge. It should also transform for each child the experience of schooling. It should also be emotionally satisfying, in the way that unforced learning commonly is.

By the time they graduate from school the students will be immensely knowledgeable about something. Indeed, each student will know close to as much about some specific topic as most experts. They will also recognize that the topic about which they have such expertise is something that has expanded so vastly in their understanding that they realize they know little compared to what there is to know about it.

The fruits of this curriculum innovation will be students who know something in great depth, and also who know something about the nature of knowledge, and who will have developed some humility and expertise in the face of casual knowledge claims by the inadequately educated. You might, skeptically, think that it might rather lead to students revolting against their topic, which becomes increasingly distasteful to them, or that it will lead them to intense boredom, or that they should, at least, be given choice in the topic, and the freedom to change their focus whenever they get fed up with a particular topic. And you may think, anyway, it would be impossible to implement. Mind you, one image the above proposal might bring to mind is of little Nathan howling in misery because he has just been told he has to study dust for the next twelve years, whereas his friend Jane has got the circus. Later I will discuss how one can make the reception of their topics into an important ceremony, in which there will be considerable anticipation and excitement about discovering what each student’s topic is to be, and how we can mitigate problems such as Nathan’s potential misery on discovering his topic. The students, and the rest of us, need to recognize that an underlying principle of this proposal is that everything is wonderful, if only we learn enough about it. Well, maybe not everything is wonderful, but it is ignorance that leads to boredom and failure to engage with topics. Bear with me on this one, and we’ll come back to such problems.

Sara, let us imagine, was assigned the topic of apples in her first week of school. She began her portfolio by drawing red and green apples, and indicated that one was a McIntosh and the other a Granny Smith. Then there was a list of apple varieties. The first part of the list was composed from the varieties Sara had found in shops, and then she had added some extra ones that grew locally that she found at a farmer’s market her parents took her to. Then there was a more elaborate list, clearly pulled from the Internet, but she had made some additional notes next to those she had eaten—notes about size and color and taste. She had a five-star system to indicate which she thought best.

Later Sara had noted that her list included only a very few of the 7,500 varieties that currently are cultivated around the world. She began a file on apple history, which included pieces about the earliest sweet and flavorful apples, such as those we eat today, being first identified in Kazakhstan four thousand years ago. She had a map identifying the area, and also a world map with small notes indicating places where there were very old records that mention apples.

Then she had a file on stories about apples: the Bible story of the Garden of Eden—though it mentions only “fruit,” it is usually assumed to indicate an apple; the Swiss story of William Tell shooting the apple off his son’s head; John Chapman, better known as “Johnny Appleseed”; the story of Newton’s falling apple; and so on. Then she had a file made up of games and verses and sayings about apples, and it included a section in which she had written definitions of such phrases as “the apple of my eye,” or “one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel,” and why people say, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” She has a picture of an old pirate ship under sail, with a brimming barrel of red apples on board, which she knows are there because they will save the sailors from scurvy, and will do the same for us.

As you flick through her portfolio as she enters secondary school you will see segments on the fact that apple trees are part of the rose family and that the biggest apple was approximately four pounds. She has a small file explaining why apples float. There is a note that the current Lady apple was first cultivated by an Etruscan woman called Api, and in France it is still called “pomme d’Api”—a good way to be remembered, Sara noted. The Greeks and Romans prized apples, and had cultivated about twenty varieties: Sara has a complex “family tree” showing the development from those early apples to our current abundance of varieties.

She also has a few pages of description of the Trojan War, with pictures of Helen and Achilles and all their storied crew. This excursion into the mists of myth becoming history grew out of her discovery of stories about apples, and one in particular about Eris, who, excluded from a wedding, tossed a golden apple that was to be awarded to the most beautiful woman present. Paris of Troy was appointed judge, and he, fatefully, chose the goddess Aphrodite after she tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. His taking Helen with him back to Troy launched the thousand ships and brought down the topless towers, and caused the death of noble Hector, tamer of horses, and the great Achilles, and the wandering and final return to Ithaca of wily Ulysses. All these adventures spun out of an apple.

In Sara’s portfolio is a beautiful large sheet on which she had written, almost like a medieval manuscript, a copy of W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” with illustrations of the “glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair” and of Wandering Aengus who had looked for the glimmering girl for so long, and thinking when he had found her that they would pluck “till time and times were done / the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”

She had a page attached, in which she noted that she first didn’t understand it well, but was attracted by its magic, and now she knows it so well, it goes everywhere with her, as do many other songs and poems and texts about apples, each able to generate rich images at appropriate times, and each making her life that little bit more interesting. Yeats’s poem added a dimension to her sense of apples. It set up resonances that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

Well, perhaps “Yeah, right!” is the appropriate response to this scenario. It is rather idealistic, of course. My aim here has not been to try to describe how the program might look year by year or what its practical problems might be—that’s something for the rest of the book—but to give a quick sense of where it can take a student, idealistic or not. It is intended to introduce students not just to a mass of detailed information about a topic, but also to enable them to discover ramifying knowledge and understanding about human experience, and to engage their imaginations and emotions. Not every topic can do that, so we will have to spend some time working out what range of specific topics will serve this project adequately, as well as looking at some new forms of teaching that such a project might call on. We will also have to examine in more practical detail what these portfolios might look like, where they might be stored, what students’ presentations might be like and what purposes they perform, and a number of other matters that will bring the ideal into the realm of the everyday school and its routines.

That’s it—a simple concept with wide-ranging ramifications: a new element of schooling that need not take very much time from the regular curriculum, but which will likely have a profound impact on the students, their knowledge, and their approach to the rest of the curriculum as the years go by. If implemented, students would all begin a new educational process of really learning something in depth. They would slowly work on accumulating their portfolios, and learning more and more. The quality of their learning would change with time, and their own interests would influence the direction of their portfolios. All the school system would require is that the portfolio keeps growing and the students keep learning more about their special topic.

Initially students will likely need significant help from the teacher charged to guide development of their portfolios. But as time goes by, students’ knowledge of their topic will exceed that of the teacher, and they will become increasingly autonomous in the way they continue their studies—some students might obviously be expected to become more independent earlier in their studies than others. Teachers will continue to monitor the portfolio’s development, and can counsel students and respond to their questions about new dimensions of their topic that they might explore.

As I suggested earlier, we should differentiate this new feature of the curriculum from the regular work students do in their classes. The introduction of the topics to students, though arbitrarily assigned, should be marked as important, as the beginning of what will be an unusual lifelong relationship. I think it important that the assignment of topics be made in some ceremonial context.

It could be something as simple as a kind of graduation ceremony, in which the students would be given an initial portfolio folder. It would seem desirable also that in some part of the ceremony, perhaps early on, the student performs an act, a taking on of the topic, and that there should be some symbolic expression whereby the student publicly claims ownership of the topic. Perhaps, the student should be the first one to voice the topic in public, with help if necessary. This need not be stressful for the students, and they may be supported in all parts of the ceremony, but they themselves will be the ones to announce in public what their topic is. The initial portfolio container they are given might have in it, for example, a tile that the student might then place on a special wall in the school on which multicolored tiles create an attractive mosaic.

The purpose of the ceremony is to emphasize the importance of what the students are taking on and also to engage the students’ commitment to their special topic. It might be good to hold the ceremony on a weekend morning, or at some time at which as many parents as possible can attend. I think also that the ceremony should be serious, and, crucially, lack any element of patronization. Children are no less intelligent than adults; they simply have had less experience and know less. This ceremony marks an initiation into the great human adventure of coming to know the world in symbolic terms.

A further distinctive feature of this project is that students will work alone for much of the time. They will meet with their supervising teacher, with older students who may have be working on the same topic, with parent volunteers, with college student volunteers, with school teacher-librarians, and with their friends. But the topic is theirs; it will be pursued in directions they wish; it is not to be graded or become in any way a part of credentialing or competition for awards or college or university places; it is an exploration of some area of knowledge that may initially seem uncomplicated but will gradually come to be seen as infinite.

I should emphasize a couple of features of the LiD program, even though it seems that mentioning them has little impact on some people’s assumptions about how it will work. First, the student’s topic is not intended to replace the rest of the curriculum! That is, the LiD program is a simple add-on to the current curriculum. Students continue with their regular schooling exactly as they do today, but LiD is an added program. We will have to explore the practical problems this raises later, but here I just want to emphasize that students are not supposed to learn everything “through” their topic. (The confusion may be due to some past proposals recommending precisely this replacement of the usual curriculum. Some radical theorists have suggested that students should begin with some self-chosen focus or questions. The curriculum would then be composed from the inquiries students use in trying to answer these important questions. Supporters of such a proposal expect, or hope, that as students follow up their interests they will gradually discover the whole world of knowledge driven by their own interests [e.g., Postman and Weingartner 1971]. LiD takes a quite different approach.)

Second, LiD is not to be another class. I don’t envision anything like a teaching slot given over to everyone working in a classroom on their LiD projects. Again, we will explore what organizational problems such an innovation might create, but LiD is not some alternative pedagogy that is supposed to replace current forms.