Creating a Model of How to Live in Friendship with Life Itself: Celebrating An Educator and Education that Freed and Sang to Us

In this time where teachers are being overburdened and education itself is under attack, where propaganda and lies are being elevated and facts, science, and diverse examples of literature are being suppressed, it’s more important than ever to speak of schools where something very different occurs. Where not only critical thinking but compassion and the wisdom and freedom of young people is fostered.

 

Yesterday, I attended the celebration of life of Dr. Dave Lehman, who died recently. He, with his wife, Judy Lehman founded the Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS), a public secondary school where I was lucky enough to teach for 27 years. Dr. Dave was the principal from 1974-2004. I attended the event as a grieving colleague not as a reporter or chronicler. I didn’t get permission from all the wonderful organizers and speakers, so I can’t mention their names or quote exactly what they said. All I can attempt is to somehow discover and reveal, to you and myself, my feelings about Dr. Dave and the school.

 

The speakers evoked in me so many memories. I was reminded how Dr. Dave sang to us, or more characteristically, led us in song and joy. In fact, all during the afternoon, whenever I looked around me, I was surprised by memories. Time itself took on new meaning. A former colleague shared with me their own experience of this. We might recognize how then influenced now. But what about the “reverse?” How is now influencing then?

 

Here we were, people spanning over 50 years of history at LACS. For me, right over there was a student from my first year of teaching and another from when I retired. There was one who went with me to Toronto to study theatre and one who went whale watching near Boston. There was one who helped create a replica of a Paleolithic art cave or read John Paul Sartre. They were 15, 16, 17 then, are 50 now. 50! They have their own children now in the school. How does who they are now illuminate who they were then? Or who I was? Or am?

 

I was reminded how successfully the school served as a place where everyone concerned, young people and adults, students and teachers, administrators, counselors, and janitors, secretaries and nurses, were allowed and supported in taking responsibility for educating and being themselves. We were learning how to be compassionately aware of our role in creating a community in which we and others could thrive together.

 

I was reminded that Dr. Dave often spoke about relationships and community as being the heart of a school and education itself, so our school was structured accordingly. Some examples: Each student and staff member had a family that met twice a week to plan and support their education. There was a weekly all-school meeting (ASM) where democracy was taught by actually making decisions about the school. There were committees to help plan the ASMs, clean and beautify the school, give support to diverse groups, take ecological action, and mentor new students. Students had choices in what courses they took and input into what was taught. The course material often grew out of student questions and concerns. Students themselves voted to require, as part of their education, 60 hours of community service.

 

I got to the school after having left teaching for a while and drifting from one job or area of interest to another. Then a friend told me about an opening at LACS, and I went to an interview. It turned out all the diverse experiences that I had had, all the courses I had taken and subjects that I loved were exactly what the school needed. Before teaching at LACS, I didn’t understand the underlying themes in my story. I did not know the feeling of being both centered and capable of helping others on a daily basis. But then I did.

 

During the event I kept thinking: how does anyone start such a school? How did Dr. Dave do it? Where did the vision and dedication come from? The persistence? Confidence? He didn’t do it alone, of course. I mentioned his wife, Judy, who ran the office and was like a mother to so many of us. Once started, he recruited an amazing core of educators, ready to give their hearts and enormous amounts of time to the job and with little financial renumeration. Most were so committed to helping young people that, for many years, they gave up part of their salaries in order to increase the number of staff and variety of courses.

 

And through the first 20 years or so, the school was frequently questioned, doubted, and even attacked by administrators and sometimes residents of the area, for being too different, not fitting into their ideas of what a secondary school should be or what young people were supposed to be. But not often by students and parents. For many years, there was a long waiting list to get into the school; potential students had to choose to attend. Dr. Dave was a great protector. He so capably worked to protect the school and all of us while our education continued.

 

And he taught us about change. That it was life itself. As one speaker pointed out at the event, he didn’t let us ever get too attached to seeing or doing things one way. For example, he tried to change the 45-minute class structure to 90 minutes, to allow for longer teaching periods and increased involvement in learning. However, after a yearlong trial period, the students voted down the change. And Dr. Dave, instead of getting upset, honored the wisdom and choice of students. Now, some 90-minute classes remain but most are 45.

 

And maybe most of all, Dr. Dave cared about us and for us. He taught us a language of caring. One example: after I had a difficult surgery, he came to my house to help with my recovery. We talked philosophy, and he helped me think about something other than pain, something uplifting. He did such things for all the staff, as well as students. When doors of such deep honesty and heart are opened, they don’t close so easily. A model for how to better live in friendship with life itself is created.

 

That’s what this school did for so many of us. Uplifted us. This is what education is about. This is what leaders could and I think should be. I was lucky enough to have known him, to have worked with him. And to have worked and shared with so many people, so many young people and older ones. Such an amazing group of colleagues; such an amazing assortment of students. What a gift.

 

*Photo by Rebecca Costello.

Musing On a School “Where Dreams Are Born” Revisited: A Model of An Alternative Style Education

For too many students, schools are like factories. They are large institutions where they are inspected, tested, and rated until they are passed on to other schools or employers where they are further tested and rated.

 

But for others, at least many students from the Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS), a 6-12 public alternative in Ithaca, New York, school is a place where dreams are born. A place where the education of the capacity for imagination, for feeling that life is alive with possibilities, shares the stage with being a knowledgeable citizen and the capacity to think critically. This insight was inspired by a graduate of LACS, John Lewis. When he was a student, he created a mural of Peter Pan characters whose faces were those of students and staff from the school, youthful dreamers dreaming. I was lucky enough to teach there for 27 years.

 

In July 2014, before the pandemic and when teaching, learning, and gathering was easier, LACS had its 40th Anniversary Celebration reunion. I went to the reunion thinking about all the dreams students had had for their lives, thinking even about my own dreams. How many saw their dreams realized? How many would remember the school, and me, fondly and think we had prepared them well for the world? As soon as I opened the door to the beautiful guesthouse where the first reunion event was held, I had my answer.

 

But first, think about dreams. There are so many different, even conflicting, ways we use the word ‘dream.’ Night dreams can feel like an expression of what is most intimate to us, unknown to our own conscious awareness as well as to others. So, we often push them away.  We live our lives surrounded by a largely unknown territory of our own making.

 

Then there are daydreams. By daydreams we can mean those moments when we drift from the reality of now into flights of fantasy. Or we imaginatively explore possible courses of action or the meaning of different experiences. We use the mind like a chalkboard or play movies of our own creation and explore scenarios of what might be. We set our mind free.

 

How well we use our capacity to dream depends on how much we are aware of what we’re doing. After a night-dream, we might think of our self as the hero or heroine. But that can be deceiving. We perceive or experience each scene in a dream from either the perspective of a character in the dream who looks like us or from a “godlike” perspective looking down on it.

 

We can take this person who looks like us for the self, but I think this is a mistake. I think each dream image is ambiguous, probably in several ways, but one way is that each element of the dream is yours. You are not just any one character but everyone, the whole scene.

 

When you have the nightmare of being overwhelmed by a flood, you are not just the being overwhelmed. When you are hugged by the love of your life, you are both hugged and hugging. You can take in the whole as revealing something about yourself, not just one element of it.

 

And this gets us back to the reunion which lasted from Friday night to early Sunday evening. Saturday included an ASM, or All School Meeting, as part of a Symposium on Education. At LACS, once a week the whole school meets to discuss some issue or proposal or to share an event together. So, this was a poignant blast from the past for many graduates….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

**This is a re-write of an earlier piece published in From the Finger Lakes: A prose Anthology, and on this website.

 

***Mural by LACS graduate John Lewis.

The Interview

 

Sasha Lilley, producer and interviewer of Pacifica Radio’s Against The Grain, interviewed me a few weeks ago. The interview was about alternative education or student centered learning, the attacks on public schools, how to teach to meet the needs of a diverse population, and how to teach critical thinking using mindfulness. It was aired on the radio last week. Here is a link to it.

 

Mon 6.16.14 | The Radical Philosophy of Alternative Public Education | Against the Grain: A Program about Politics, Society and Ideas

 

In the interview, I talked about using questions to engage students and develop their critical intellect. As an illustration, I used the historical question: Why was Socrates executed by his city-state, Athens? In the interview, I did not give adequate background to the question.

 

Socrates, who was one of the most influential philosophers in history, certainly Western history, was probably both a hero and a pain in the butt. His methods clearly irritated many of his contemporaries. He was charged with impiety and with corrupting minors, by encouraging his students to question their assumptions and beliefs. He was the teacher of several notable people, including Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander The Great. He was executed in 399 BCE, just five years after Athens had lost the Peloponnesian Wars, had lost their once glorious empire and seen their democracy destroyed and rebuilt. The wars had spanned over 30 years. When given the opportunity to escape a death sentence but be exiled from his home, he declined. So, why was Socrates executed?

 

I was also unclear in explaining why test scores are poor vehicles for diagnosing what students have learned. When tests compare student achievement, as by using a curve or by ranking how the student stood in relation to other students, they do not say what a student actually knows. If everyone in a group does poorly, scoring 90% does not mean you did well. If everyone in the group is a high achieving student, scoring only 10% might be vey good.

 

And there are so many other reasons not to use standardized tests to assess student, teacher, or school achievement. So, why are the tests still pushed?

 

Also, this week LACS received good news. The radio interviewer asked me if an alternative school, which de-emphasized tests, grades and competition, could prepare students for the tests and other challenges of the world. I said yes. To support my assertion, the SAT scores for the year were announced this week. LACS outscored all the other schools in upstate New York. (Despite this, I still argue that standardized tests infringe on learning more than they assess it.)

 

I hope you enjoy the interview. Any questions or comments?

 

 

*The mural is by LACS students. The blue ox is the Blue ACS, symbol of the school.

There Are Alternatives

I realized recently that there is a great irony in my blogs. For most of my adult life, I opposed what I thought was happening in public schools. Now, I am defending them.

 

In the early 1970s, after teaching for a year in a “normal” or traditional public school context, I taught in a private “free school” until it closed, largely because there wasn’t enough money to keep it going. In 1985, I started working in an alternative public school, which was then called the Alternative Community School. (The name was changed to The Lehman Alternative Community School or LACS after the original principal and founder, Dr. Dave Lehman, retired.) What is meant by a “free” or an alternative school is not always agreed upon or clear. Today, ‘alternative’ is often used to refer to schools for high needs or “underachieving” students. However, it has an older definition, influenced by the progressive movement of the late 19th, early 20th century, as providing something meaningfully different from the predominant model of a public school. I can think of five characteristics of this difference which many of these schools share.

 

First, alternative schools are small. The free school I worked in had 20-30 students. LACS had 185 students when I started teaching there; by the time I retired, it had grown to 310 students, largely due to school district pressures. Traditional public schools are larger, at their worst factory-like institutions where students face great pressure to conform and can easily feel lost. The high school I attended, although at the time was considered a fairly good school (especially for the white middle-class students), had over 6000 students. The alternative is a community of learning, where everyone in the school knows, by face and hopefully by name, everyone else. Teachers and students get to know each other comparatively well, which fosters empathy and support.

 

Secondly, following A. S. Neill, Alfie Kohn, John Holt and others, alternative schools focus more on intrinsic and not extrinsic motivation. People have a natural drive to learn, as learning is necessary for survival. So, alternative schools aim to develop in students this personal and natural motivation. Traditional schools often track students and use grades to rank student learning. By ranking and comparing students they create competition which motivates through fear and hope of reward while undermining or hiding away intrinsic motivation. LACS and other alternative schools do not track students and some replace grades with detailed, narrative evaluations which give students deeper and more personal feedback on their learning. They motivate by documenting growth—and demonstrating that what students do is seen and heard by teachers.

 

Intrinsic motivation is developed by incorporating student interests, concerns, identity, and ways of learning in both the content and methodology of instruction. So, thirdly, the curriculum is tied more to real life concerns and the student’s own authentic and personal questions. I think the label “free schools” was inspired by the “freedom schools” of the 1960s.  As far as I understand it, freedom schools arose as part of the civil rights and voting rights movements. For example, in Mississippi, during the summer of 1964, schools for citizenship were created. In order to change the socio-political system and awaken “the conscience of the nation,” students needed to learn how to think and communicate well. Alternative schools, inspired by this struggle, aim to create a curriculum that has real meaning for students, that teaches critical thinking and talks about issues like justice, rights and power.

 

Fourthly, alternative schools are democratic. Decision making is not limited to administrators but shared with the entire school community. In this way students learn how to speak their minds. They learn that what they do day by day, even outside the formal classroom, is part of the curriculum.

 

There’s a fifth characteristic that is not always stated. Education is not just about preparing for the future and getting and holding a job. It is about learning how to live and learn right now. It is about empathy, compassion and relating not only to others but to our world. There are depths to the human heart and mind that can neither be measured nor ignored and education must be about those depths.

 

So, why have I changed my attitude toward public schools?

 

To begin with, I was upset when I discovered that what I was hearing in the news about the state of public education was often inaccurate or lacking context. Public schools, instead of failing their students, are mostly doing the best job possible considering the economic and other realities they are facing.

 

Also, a democracy requires an educated citizenry. Privately owned schools, because of agendas other than the simple education of their students, cannot do this. Only a public system has a chance at creating a situation where all children have even a relatively equal chance to learn and succeed. It’s very debatable right now that we have either a functioning democracy or an educated citizenry—but without public schools, the situation would only get worse.

 

My last school was and is a public school. And it is only one of many. There are schools and coalitions such as the Coalition For Essential Schools spread through several areas of the nation providing an alternative.  They should be supported against “reforms” that could destroy them. Contrary to what “reformers” are saying about the state of education in the U. S., these schools are doing for children what schools should do for children. Despite frequent cuts in staffing over the years, these schools continue to show the enormous possibilities inherent in a public school. They are giving students what they need to grow up, develop their minds and hearts, and discover their gifts. As one LACS student put it: “The school took me in. I went from a situation where I was led by the hand– or tied by a rope to other students—to one where I could decide where to go and what to do.” By needing to make meaningful choices, he learned the responsibilities of choice. Stimulating classes gave him “enough to think about for the rest of my life.” He learned how to learn (and think and communicate) because the school became the context for his life, not something removed from his life. Learning was not just academics. It was about the reality of living.

 

It is schools such as these that not only should be defended but modeled.

 

*The mural of Rosa Parks was painted by LACS students.