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New York City
May 2003

Thoughts on Middle Level Education

It is not often that faculty authorize a Dean to speak for them, but I am representing the adolescent education faculty and Department chairs of St. John’s University’s School of Education to address one of the most critical issues in American education today—what to do about our middle schools.

While peer pressure has the bodies of our middle school children and pop culture has their minds, there is little to suggest ways of recapturing our children from both of these often negative influences. There are all too compelling reasons middle school young people choose NOT to succeed. Every child has to be treated differently at this age. Middle schools must be caring places that attract people; in this case not only the children but their families.

We need a strong, clearly defined statement on middle schools that articulates the difference between this stop along the learning path and the high school model that too frequently becomes the structure under which middle schools operate, by default. Alfred North Whitehead reminded us decades ago of the “romance” permeating the child’s desire to learn “precisely.” The word “wonder” which this learned mathematician/philosopher used to try to describe a child’s education culminated in his famous statement...”cursed be the dullard who destroys wonder.”

We should address: the difference between current junior high schools and a revolutionary middle school approach, how to create a structure that provides room for instructional teaming, and the kind of fascinating interdisciplinary work with literacy as its base that will enable children to comprehend what they are reading and to apply both thinking and feeling skills to the acquisition of knowledge relevant to their future.

Freeing ourselves from a definition of middle schools based on overpopulation, and where any combination of grades 5-9 suffices as the base for a middle school, we should admit that our main problem with middle schools is that, organizationally, most do not make sense. Nor are current school buildings, designed for other combinations of grades, adequate to the task of providing facilities for a learning style setting appropriate to middle school age youngsters. We should address the kind and quality of facilities we need to support a true middle school concept.

For much the same reason we must rid ourselves of the idea that fifth graders are adolescents (again, to compensate for too many children in elementary schools) and focus our energies on a combination of 6th through 9th grades that makes sense in a given community.

Finally, the middle school should be a place of refuge for children who get into trouble from the close of school until 8PM, on weekends and in summers, where excellent teacher/social worker/heath professional mentoring takes place Where there are some good models across the nation they should be studied. There are more than a few where the opportunities of the 21st century are being used fully and where school becomes a place for children to look toward the realization of their natural aspirations to succeed in a changing world. These are happy places in what can be an unhappy period of a child’s life. We owe our children this happiness, this romance with education, this freedom to escape to learning, this discipline born of response to the child’s current and future needs.#

Jerrold Ross, Ph.D. is the Dean of Education at St. John’s University In NYC

 

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