Putting Life into Learning

In Spinster, her vivid novel pub lished in 1959, Sylvia Ashton-Warner told of a loving, slightly balmy school teacher who taught Maori children in back-country New Zealand. Herself a teacher for 17 years in Maori schools (but a grandmother rather than a spinster), Novelist Ashton-Warner endowed her heroine with an extraordinary gift for handling young Maori minds in conflict with civilization. Dropping the fictional cloak, she has now expounded her singular methods in Teacher. Published this week (Simon & Schuster; $5), it may well be the year's best book on education.

A Force of Energy. New Zealand's brown Maori children, descendants of proud warriors and seafarers, live by the rules of "take, break, fight and be first," writes Teacher Ashton-Warner.

As a "force of energy" that swings from love to hate in seconds, they drive teachers batty. Most teachers aim to tame them by putting "your foot on their neck," and by spooning out futilely alien education from pap-filled primers that extol civilized white virtues. As a result, Maori kids tend to hate reading, fall behind in school, and wind up being labeled "stupid." It is just such frustration (or repression), argues Teacher, that leads some Maoris to become neurotics, brawlers, defeatists and alcoholics.

Since all this parallels the problems of teaching U.S. slum children, the book's solution may be applicable far beyond the backlands of New Zealand. The author argues for what she calls "organic teaching"--a way to spur nonlearners to read and write by bringing their inner feelings into the tasks.

Fear & Sex. "I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents, destructiveness and creativeness," writes Author Ashton-Warner. "To the extent that we widen the creative channel, we atrophy the destructive one." To achieve that requires an unconventional kind of teaching--not imposing education from the outside, thereby fostering frustration and aggressiveness, but inducing the child to reach out from inside himself.

The idea is to make children hunger for learning, to want to possess it. Teacher Ashton-Warner discarded orthodox books, charts and lesson plans in favor of "the moving currents of children's interests," whatever they might be, in "the hot prison of the moment." In the formal sense, she says, "I teach style, and only style."

To teach reading, she sought to find out what words held the most intense meaning for her pupils. "Pleasant words won't do. Respectable words won't do."

What worked were words that touched upon wellsprings of inner life, especially fear and sex. To build a "key vocabulary," Teacher Ashton-Warner daily asked her tots, "What word do you want?" Among the words children chose: love, kiss, darling, ghost, bomb, alligator, police. Each child took home "his" word, printed on a big card, learned it without effort. Using these "one-word captions of the inner world," the kids went on to write a daily autobiographical story. Sample: "Mummie got a hiding off Daddy. He was drunk, she was crying." Or: "My Father got drunk, and He drank all The beer by He self, and we had a party."

While keeping "a strict watch on grammar and punctuation," Teacher Ashton-Warner never criticized content, except to prod children into completing the ideas that they started writing about. When a child complained, "I'm sick of writing," she said, "Well, go and write, 'I'm sick of writing.' " She avoided distracting pictures ("already there in the child's mind"), downgraded those ubiquitous primer words come and look, which she calls "among the weakest words in the language." At seven, her "backward" Maori kids wrote at least a page a day.

Body-Talk. As for reading, the tots' own writings became their primers--"a set of graded, brand-new stories every morning"--and every day they read them aloud to one another. From hundreds of such "books," Teacher Ashton-Warner put together four formal "Maori Transitional Readers," reflecting "the temperament of the pa" (Maori village), a life full of "tears, tenderness, brawls, beer, love and song."

Teacher Ashton-Warner's "organic" methods also spanned numbers, taught in the fields and woods by counting and drawing birds, insects, trees and flower petals. In the classroom, she broke routine with free-form dancing ("body-talk") to the music of Schubert, Beethoven, and such ditties as "Just a little hula hula, hey ha, hey!"

As one result, Teacher Ashton-Warner got many of her Maori kids through the "infant room" (primary school) in two years rather than the conventional three. As another, she got low marks from some school inspectors, appalled to find aborigines whirling to the hula hula in a proper British Commonwealth classroom. Her "transition readers" were never published; in fact, someone burned them under circumstances that Author Ashton-Warner refuses to discuss. Teacher, however, will undo a lot of the damage.

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