Sober Chaos

During the heyday of "progressive" education in the 1930s, a celebrated cartoon showed a young pupil plaintively asking the teacher: "Do we have to do what we want again today?"

Such jokes may soon be back in style, for much of progressive education has been revived in the current movement toward "informal" education in "open" classrooms. Once again it threatens to become a fad. In hundreds of tiny private "free" schools and in public classrooms in nearly every state, the fixed rows of desks and the fixed weekly lessons have been abandoned. Instead, children roam from one study project to another, theoretically following their native curiosity and learning at their own uneven rates. But even the supporters of "informal education" are beginning to fear that many schools are adopting the new methods without making teachers apply them systematically. Dropping conventional constraints makes teaching "absolutely more difficult," says Lillian Weber, associate professor of education at the City College of New York. "You can't just stand there and wait for magic to happen."

Dewey's Heirs. A stocky, forceful divorcee who looks a bit like a traditional schoolmarm, Mrs. Weber, 54, is emerging as one of the nation's most thoughtful advocates of making informal education intellectually demanding. By now she has trained some 100 teachers who are using informal techniques with about 2,700 kindergarten-through-fourth-graders in New York City public schools; she also has a Ford Foundation grant to train ten consultants to spread her methods. She has put her studies of similar British experiments into an expert new book, The English Infant School and Informal Education (Prentice-Hall; $4.95).

Informal education, which still seems radical to regulation-loving school administrators, derives from insights into learning that go back to Montessori and Dewey, and have since been confirmed by psychologists like Jean Piaget. For older children as well as preschoolers, says Mrs. Weber, "the most intense form of learning is the child's learning through play and the experiences he seeks out for himself."

Gerbil Cages. Weber-style classes overflow into nearby corridors with an abundance of playthings that teachers in regular classrooms use only sparingly. There are cages of gerbils, collections of shells and leaves, art corners, carpeted areas where children can sprawl while they read. To encourage math and science, there is more than the usual amount of measuring equipment, from tape measures to stop watches. To encourage reading and writing, most of the materials have "activity cards" posing questions. Near a science book lying on a second-grade windowsill, for instance, the card asks: "Do you think our tree is a red maple tree? Look at the leaf on page 11 and sign your name under yes or no." Despite the appearance of chaos "the structure is far from haphazard," Mrs. Weber says. "It comes from what you decide to put in the classroom and how it's laid out."

Mrs. Weber herself studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Virginia, shifted to teaching in nursery schools and before long was directing a cooperative school in New York. She began demonstrating some of her ideas in a public elementary school in 1968. A natural teacher, she soon captivated the restless children with her improvisations. Example: to demonstrate a principle of weights and measures, she borrowed a baby from a visiting mother and had the children weigh it.

Pumpkin Play. Mrs. Weber's chief importance nowadays is as a teacher of teachers. In her workshops, she hacks up pumpkins and blows on pinwheels and encourages her students to do the same, so they can learn what many find surprisingly difficult--to see "with the child's eyes." She then offers a childish question and asks them to imagine how a child might pursue it. In one workshop, for instance, the problem was: "How many questions can you think up about feet?" The answers from the student teachers ranged from counting toes to evolution.

Since informal methods free teachers from lecturing most of the time, Mrs. Weber wants them to become, in effect, individual tutors. They must observe carefully what attracts each child and then guide him to "extend" his curiosity into systematic knowledge. But the child must not be allowed to drift. Since children in informal classrooms do not all cover the same subjects, Mrs. Weber believes they should compare experiences in group discussions. The teacher should keep a diary on the progress of each child.

Costs v. Gains. One problem with the method is that in large classes it requires teachers' aides, and many school systems cannot afford them. In New York City, recent staff cuts have forced some informal teachers to concentrate on keeping unruly children from interrupting, and to neglect unassertive children. But the method does bring results. After three years of open classrooms, third-graders at P.S. 144 were among the few in Harlem reading up to national standards. More important, the children show qualities that tests cannot measure: self-discipline and eagerness to work on their own.

Despite such results, the open classroom is still widely opposed. "Some teachers will never be comfortable with informal education," concedes Mrs. Weber. But far from trying to coerce the traditionalists, Mrs. Weber opposes the cyclical upheaval of educational revolution and counterrevolution. What she wants, she says, are "small changes that will last."

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