So far, we have been talking mainly about the reform of elementary education. In part, this is because of the intrinsic importance of the early years, in part because this is where the greatest change is occurring, and where there is the clearest evidence that schools can be humane and free without in any way sacrificing intellectual development.

But change is needed at the secondary level as much as at the primary. "Not too many of us realize bow bad American schools are from the point of view of humanity, respect, trust, or dignity," Charles E. Brown of the Ford Foundation, a former Superintendent of the Newton, Massachusetts, schools, told a Daedalus conference on adolescence. And secondary schools are the worst of all. Because adolescents are harder to "control" than younger children, secondary schools tend to be even more authoritarian and repressive than elementary schools; the values they transmit are the values of docility, passivity, conformity, and lack of trust. These unpleasant attributes might be tolerable if one could view them, so to speak, as the price to be paid for "a good education'~-good, that is to say, in academic terms. Such is not the case; as we have seen in Chapter 5, mindlessness affects the high school curriculum every bit as much as the elementary curriculum. And the junior high school, by almost unanimous agreement, is the wasteland--one is tempted to say cessp ool~of American education.

Reform has been slower in the secondary than in the primary schools.-in.-part, at least,- because-the problem,~_are more com ___~04176 plekand the soluti - on ' s a good AeaLless -obvious. "Many p here," -IGeo_ffr6y'_ C-aston' writes, "are becoming a little concerned about the rather romantic notion that the model infant school methods can simply be carried on upwards into the junior school and beyond. "1

Clearly they cannot. While children in informal infant schools work at what interests them, the teacher easily and decisively influences those interests through the environment she creates. Teenagers, on the other hand, arrive in school with their interests, their likes and dislikes, and their values much more clearly formed. They are far less susceptible to the teacber's influence; one of the characteristics of growth, as Jerome Bruner of Harvard emphasizes, is the "increasing independence of response from the immediate nature of the stimulus." Moreover, teenagers are subject to a far wider range of influences outside the classroom-influences from their own peer culture, as well as from the adult culture as transmitted by parents and the mass media. 2

The problem is complicated still further by the fact that adolescents learn in different and more complex ways than young children. During adolescence, "something very special happens," as Jerome Bruner puts it, "when language becomes increasingly important as a medium of thought." It becomes increasingly important because, roughly between the ages of twelve and fifteen, young people gradually gain command over what Piaget calls formal operations-the final "stage" of cognitive development. The emergence of formal operations makes it much easier for adolescents to think about their own thoughts, to think systematically about the future, to deal with concepts, propositions, and hypotheses as well as with objects, and to understand and handle metaphors.

What they think about is a matter of considerable importance, for it is during adolescence, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead suggested, that "the lines of character are graven. How the child emerges from the romantic stage of adolescence is how the subsequent life will be moulded by ideals and coloured by imagination." Hence the content of the curriculum cannot be left to chance; education is a process that cannot be separated from what it is that one learns. The transcendent objective, to be sure, is not mastery of a body of knowledge per se, it is, in Jerome Bruner's formulation, "to create a better or happier or more courageous or more sensitive or more honest man." But other institutions also have that goal, among them the family and the church. The raison d'8tre of the school-society's ultimate justification for creating a separate, formal, educational institution, and for making prolonged exposure to it compulsory -is the conviction (the faith, if you will), that, as Bruner also puts it, "The conduct of life is not independent of what it is that one knows" nor "of how it is that one has learned what one knows."

The growth that occurs during adolescence makes possible substantial changes both in what is learned and how it is learned. Since their growing command over language, abstraction and metaphor enable high school students to transcend their own experience and environment, high school, even more than elementary school, is where they can begin to come into possession of the culture, which is to say, the world created by the perceptions, discoveries, creations, imaginations, and thoughts of men. In a way and with a subtlety and. sophistication that the elementary school cannot attempt, the high school can concern itself with the transmission of culture as Matthew Arnold defined it in Culture and Anarchy: "to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere." No democratic society can afford to do less.

The "best that has been thought and known" is embodied in large measure in the scholarly disciplines. What is crucial about the disciplines, however, is that they are not mere bodies of knowledge or collections of information; they are conceptual models, or paradigms, which men have constructed to give meaning to experience, "to make sense out of some portion of the world or of life," as Ralph Tyler puts it. "I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a 'body of knowledge,"' Sir Karl Popper writes, but "rather as a system of hypotheses; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipations which in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests." 3

Several things follow from this. The first is that a major emphasis must be to give students an understanding of the fundamental structure of the disciplines they study. "This is a minimum requirement for using knowledge," Jerome Bruner writes in The Process of Education, the most influential contemporary work on curriculum, "for bringing it to bear on problems and events one encounters outside a classroom-or in classrooms one enters later in one's training. 4 Emphasizing structure does not mean turning classes into bull sessions or derogating the importance of mastering a body of information and data. As Alfred North Whitehead, an early advocate of emphasizing structure, insisted, "There is no royal road to learning through an airy path of brilliant generalizations." On the contrary, he argued, education involves "a patient process of the mastery of details."

But mastery of details is the means, not the end. Emphasizing structure means emphasizing the concepts that give meaning to the details, that enable students to distinguish relevant from irrelevant details and to apply their knowledge to new situations and problems. "Your learning is useless to you," Whitehead also maintained, "till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination. What, in the way of detail, you continually require will stick in your memory as obvious facts like the sun and the moon; and what you casually require can be looked up in any work of reference." The function of education, he added, "is to enable you to shed details in favor of principles." 5

To be able to "shed details in favor of principles," one needs depth of understanding and practice in its use. Hence Whitehead's "two educational commandments": "Do not teach too many subjects," and "What you teach, teach thoroughly." Or as Bruner formulated the question some four decades later, "whatever is introduced, let it be pursued continuously enough to give the student a sense of the power of mind that comes from a deepening of understanding." Respect for competence is one of the distinguishing characteristics of adolescence-witness the intense interest in sports and in driving a car, activities in which standards of competence are clearly defined. Adolescents should not be denied the satisfaction that comes from competence in intellectual and esthetic activities as well.

If students are not to regard knowledge as dogma, they must also understand something of its ephemeral character and, even more, the degree to which the "truth" of a discipline is a function of its structure and its method of inquiry. They need to understand the different kinds of evidence and proof that different disciplines use, that is to say, as well as their different degrees of dependability, and they need to understand the ways in which conceptual structures produce new knowledge and then change themselves in response to that knowledge. In short, students need to study the grammar or syntax of the disciplines, as well as their structure and content. 6

But which disciplines? In what sequence? With what content? Taught in what way?

To educational traditionalists, the answers are obvious. "Certain intellectual disciplines are fundamental in the public school curriculum," Professor Arthur Bestor of the University of Illinois, wrote in The Restoration of Learning, the most serious and thoughtful of the attacks on progressive education that appeared in the 1950s, "because they are fundamental in modern life. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are indispensable studies in the elementary school because no intellectual life worthy of the name is possible or conceivable without these particular skills. Science, mathematics, history, English, and foreign languages are essentials of the secondary school curriculum because contemporary intellectual life has been built upon a foundation of these particular disciplines. . . . In some far-distant future the list of fundamental disciplines may be somewhat different, just as it was somewhat different in the past." James D. Koerner, another thoughtful and influential advocate of "basic education," offers much the same list. "For most young people," he writes, the aims of education "are best attained through an education based . . . on the principal areas of human knowledge: English and foreign languages, history, mathematics, and the natural sciences. 7

The questions are not that simple, nor are the answers quite so cut and dried. Apart from the fact that they omit the arts, indeed the entire esthetic realm, altogether, Bestor's and Koerner's lists raise more questions than they answer. Take history, for example. We can agree immediately that all students need some knowledge of the past if they are to understand the present and aspire to the future, and that a study of history therefore is a must. But the history of what? Taught bow, with what emphases, and with what relations to other subjects or disciplines such as political science, economics, sociology, psychology? Bestor's answer is forthright and unequivocal: "History as history is indispensable to education for intelligent citizenship." [Emphasis his] Indeed, history, in his view, is the quintessential discipline, "the one discipline in the traditional secondaryschool curriculum which is perennially and consistently concerned with the perspective of time-with development, adaptation to change, progress, crisis, and decline. In this respect history is not one of the social sciences," he continues, "but an indispensable complement to them. It stands out against the social sciences as a critic of the errors that result from their partial view of society. . . . History cooperates with and learns from the other disciplines concerned with man and society, but it has its own tasks, its own techniques, and its own system of values."

One may question Bestor's thesis, however, without in any way succumbing to the fuzzy antiintellectualism of the kind of "social studies" curriculum he was attacking, for it is by no means clear that the historian's traditional chronological approach-"history as history"-is in fact the best way to give students an understanding of, and feeling for, the past. Indeed, it is by no means clear that history is a discipline at all, that there is any such thing as "history as history." "Everything in our world has a history, and the man who wants to understand any particular thing or field is well advised to inquire into its history," the philosopher John Herman Randall, Jr., of Columbia writes. "Everything that is, is historical in character, and has an existence that can be measured in time. And this historical aspect which any particular thing has and possesses is an essential part of what it is. But 'just history' in general seems to have no meaning," Professor Randall continues, "unless it be taken as synonymous with knowledge as a whole. History is not a 'thing' at all; it is not a noun, a 'substance.' It is rather a cbaracter, an adjective, a predicate. Or put in somewhat more formal terms, 'history' is not a distinctive subject-matter to be inquired into. It is rather at once a trait of all subject-matters, something to be discovered and understood about each of them; and a distinctive way of inquiring into any subject-matter-though by no means the only way. 8 One consequence,. Professor Randall argues, is that "for any understanding of the histories that things possess, the social sciences are essential," since their subject matter is the processes of change, By the same token, a knowledge of history is essential to the study of the social sciences, since they are fundamentally historical in character, dealing as they do with temporal and therefore historical institutions and structures.

A number of historians who have been concerned with curriculum reform agree. "I find constantly that my friends in the social sciences are of greater help to me in thinking about problems in history than historians are," Professor Elting Morison of Yale reports. Organizing the materials of history on a chronological basis "has its uses and purposes," Morison argues, "but frequently if you reorganize the data in a different kind of way, or take only part of it which is relevant to a kind of question you have in mind, you find all different kinds of information coming out which you can't get from the organization of a single situation within a chronological form." If the purpose of the curriculum is "not knowing history but having an historical sense," the purpose might be served more effectively by selecting a limited number of episodes or periods or problems and treating them in greater depth. 9 In fact, this kind of "postholing" approach, used in the social studies curriculum developed by Educational Services Inc. and in the high school social science curriculum developed by the historian Edwin Fenton and his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, seems to give students a far greater understanding of the ways historians work, of the nature of historical inquiry, as well as of the historical process, than does the conventional course.

Bestor's dicta are no more reliable when we turn to the sciences, where, he assures us, the curriculum that was developed at the turn of the century has proven to be "the curriculum not for the year or the decade, but for the century." The study of the sciences "as organized into the systematic branches of biology, chemistry, and physics" around the turn of the century, Bestor flatly states, "represented a genuinely international consensus of views" which contained "the means of adjusting itself to the regular advances in knowledge that were occurring," guaranteeing "that changes in the curriculum of the elementary and secondary school would be moderate and evolutionary in character. The quantum theory, Einstein's principle of relativity, and non-Euclidean geometry," he continues, "might affect certain details in certain high-school courses, but could hardly call for wholesale revision of the high-school curriculum, because, quite, obviously, these advances in scientific theory could not even be apprehended without thorough knowledge of the fundamental physics and mathematics which alone the high school was concerned with teaching."

What is "quite obvious" to Bestor, however, is not at all obvious to the scientists themselves. The first of the major reforms of the science curriculum, for example, developed by the Physical Science Study Committee under the leadership of Jerrold Zacharias and Francis Friedman of MIT, began, as its name suggests, "in revolt against the fractionation of chemistry and physics at the high school level into separate disciplines," a fractionation which the Committee members felt made no sense. The revolt was abortive because it proved impossible, at that juncture in time, to get chemists and physicists to work together. Hence the PSSC devoted itself exclusively to revising the high school physics course. The changes were neither "moderate" nor "evolutionary"; on the contrary, the new course-as intellectually rigorous as one could ask for--dropped about half of the material treated in the traditional course, limiting itself to two concepts (the "wave particle duality" and the modern concept of the atom) which the PSSC members felt "lay at the heart of the modern physicist's outlook upon his universe." 10

Despite the fact that the PSSC physics course was developed by some of the most distinguished physicists in the United States, it became clear by the mid-1960s, if not earlier, that this was not the curriculum for the year, the decade, or the century, as Bestor described the course it replaced. In part, this is because of the diversity of the student population to be served, in part because no single course can "cover" physics or do more than provide an introduction to it, and physicists themselves disagree on which concepts and approaches to emphasize. As a result, Educational Services Inc. (now part of Education Development Center, Inc.), which had sponsored the PSSC course, also developed an Introductory Physical Science course for the ninth grade, to provide the framework students needed for the new physics course as well as for the new courses being developed in chemistry and biology. The National Science Foundation sponsored the creation of a wholly new high school physics course, with a more humanistic and historical approach -"Project Physics," under the direction of Professor Gerald Holton of Harvard, a philosopher and historian of science as well as a physicist. Still another group, the Secondary School Science Project at Princeton, took up the PSSC's original desire to develop an integrated approach to the physical sciences, creating a tenth-grade course on "Time, Space and Matter," which employs principles of chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, and mathematics in trying to explain the nature of the physical world."

Nor was physics a lonely exception. In approaching the revision of the high school biology course"twenty years behind the advancing front of science, and in important respect . . . a full century in arrears"-the members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences concluded that "the life sciences are so diverse, both in point of view and in methodology, that there is no single best way to organize a high school course in biology." As a result, they created three separate courses, reflecting the three major approaches to the biological sciences: the genetic and developmental, the biochemical and physiological, and the ecological and evolutionary. 12 Two groups of chemists have been working on two different approaches to high school chemistry, neither designed as the definitive approach. And the mathematicians, of course, disagree violently over the most appropriate approach to the teaching of mathematics. 13

In short, there is, and can be, no one curriculum suitable for all time, or for all students at a given time. "The evocation of curiosity, of judgment, of the power of mastering a tangled set of circumstances, the use of theory in giving foresight in special cases," Whitehead declared-"all these powers are not to be imparted by a set rule embodied in one set of examination subjects." To insist that there is only one curriculum is to confuse the means of education with the end.

This is in no way to suggest, however, that any one piece of learning is as good as any other, and that high school students therefore might just as well study whatever interests them. Knowing one thing is not the same as knowing another, and some things are more worth knowing than others. Surely a man cannot be considered educated unless he has at least some understanding of science. "It is not at all necessary that the average man should be acquainted with the latest theory of the universe or the newest hormone," George Sarton, the most distinguished historian of science, argued, "but it is very necessary that he should understand as clearly as possible the purpose and the methods of science." Nor can a man be considered educated unless he has some knowledge of the past, some understanding of the human condition ("A sense of tragedy and triumph achieved through the study of literature," Jerome Bruner writes, "is surely as important to modern man as a sense of the structure of matter achieved through the study of physics"), some knowledge of the nature and dynamics of human society, and some knowledge of language and of the arts.

Certain skills or abilities are also essential to the educated man: the ability to learn for himself, to take hold of a subject and "work it up" for himself, so that he is not dependent upon his teacher's direction; the ability to think for himself, "to ask the right critical questions and to apply rigorous tests" to his hunches, so that he is not dependent upon the ideas and opinions of others; the ability to respond to beauty, the beauty of nature s well as the art made by his fellow man; and the ability to communicate his ideas and feelings to others. The fact that there is no one curriculum to be specified for everyone does not mean, herefore, that there should be no curriculum at all. "The most dangerous intellectual aspect of the contemporary scene," as Robert A. Nisbet suggests, is the inability of so many of the young (and so many of the would-be young) to distinguish between authority and power.

What is crucial so far as the schools are concerned is that 0 authority resides not only in individuals and institutions, but in the culture as well. In Nisbet's words, "There is the authority of learning arid~ taste; of syntax and grammar in language; of scholarship, of science, and of the arts. In traditional culture there is an authority attaching to the names of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Newton and Pasteur in just as sure a sense of the word as though we were speaking of the law. There is the authority of logic, reason, and of genius. Above all, there is the residual authority of the core of values around which Westerq.-culture has been formed."

The greatest and most frightening manifestation of the genration gap, moreover, is the new generation's rejection-at imes, its inability even to understand-the authority of culture till and the responsibilities that follow from it. "Their lack of a sense of history is bewildering," Paul Goodman says of the students he knows. "They do not really understand that tech nology, civil law, and the university are human institutions, for which they too are responsible"; they do not understand "that these institutions, works of spirit in history, are how Man has made himself and is." But "if they treat them as mere things, rather than being vigilant for them," Goodman worries, "they thmselves become nothing. And nothing comes from nothing." 14

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to bring the young into co - ntact with, and possession of, their culture. To do this, high schools must offer more than just a potpourri of courses. This is not to say that they should provide a single curriculum or sequence that every student must follow, come what may; given the mood of the present generation, nothing would be more self-defeating, more likely to turn students away from the cul ture. Since the time of Socrates, at the very least, it has been a truism that a teacher must start where his students are if he is to take them someplace else. For this generation of students, it means starting with more freedom than previous generations have enjoyed.

But the teacher, as Plato's Dialogues illustrate so beautifully, must do more than simply start where his students are; he must also take them somewhere else. To do that, be must have some convictions about where they should go, convictions, that is to say, about what is worth learning. The real conflict, therefore, is not between "freedom" and "restraint"; it is between rival judgments about what is most worth knowing. The conflict need not be resolved: it is not essential that teachers and students share the same educational goals, only that they have educational goals-goals that can be articulated into some coherent structure. For education, as Daniel Bell argues, "is a confrontation with a discipline, a confrontation with a teacher." 15

Education is also a confrontation with oneself. "In fact, there is only one process," the philosopher Marjorie Grene writes, "that is ourselves trying to make sense of things, trying to find significance in what would else be chaos . . . Learning is a transformation of the whole person." 16

All the more so during adolescence, whose "central developmental task," as Edgar Friedenberg puts it, "is self-definition. Adolescence," be writes, "is the period during which a young person learns who he is, and what be really feels. It is the time during which he differentiates himself from his culture, though on the culture's terms. 17 For this to happen, adolescents need a good deal of freedom-what Erik Erikson calls a "psychosocial moratorium" for personal exploration and growth, for a "search for something and somebody to be true to." 18

The kind of education we have been talking about is a necessary part of this process of growth and exploration, for the adolescent passion for self-definition is a product of cognitive, not just sexual and physiological, maturation. It is, indeed, the mental structures that emerge during adolescence, and that a well-conceived curriculum is designed to enhance, that make self-definition possible, for they enable young people to think abstractly-to reflect on the meaning of their own thoughts, experiences, and feelings, and to conjure up the full range of alternatives for the future. "Such cognitive orientation," Erik Erikson points out, "forms not a contrast but a complement to the need of the young person to develop a sense of identity, for, from among all possible and imaginable relations, he must make a series of ever narrowing selections of personal, occupational, sexual, and ideological commitments." Or as Piaget succinctly puts it ' "affectivity is nothing without intelligence. Intelligence furnishes affectivity with its means and clarifies its ends."19

In short, the proper kind of education gives meaning and direction to the search for identity, preventing it from being a mere exercise in narcissism. Indeed, the school has a special obligation in this regard: more than any other institution, it has the capacity, and therefore the obligation, as Friedenberg puts it, "to clarify for its students the meaning of their experience of life in their society." It does this by helping students develop the knowledge and skills they need to make sense out of their experience-their experience with themselves, with others, with the world-not just during adolescence, but for the rest of their lives.

For this to happen, it is not just the curriculum that will have to change, but the entire way in which high schools are organized and run. As we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, students at present are hardly permitted, let alone encouraged, to confront either their teachers or themselves. They are given little opportunity, and no reason, to develop resolute ideas of their own about what they should learn, and in most schools they are actively discouraged from trying to test those ideas against their teachers'. By and large they are expected to learn what the faculty wants them to learn in the way the faculty wants them to learn it, and no nonsense, please. Freedom to explore, to test one's ideas as a means of finding out who one is and what one believes-these are luxuries a well-run school cannot afford. As one student summed it up, "It's all a question of what they want to produce, not what we want to become." The result, at best, is to persuade students that knowledge has no relation to them, no relevance for the kinds of lives they will lead; at worst, it produces the kind of alienation, the rejection of authority, the rejection of the whole notion of culture, of discipline and of learning, with which we are now contending.

Fortunately, there are signs of change, in part as a response to student dissent, in part as a result of the growing distaste a number of teachers and administrators feel for the way schools are run, and their conviction that schools can be more humane, that students can handle and benefit from greater freedom and responsibility. Whatever the reasons, there would appear to be a growing ferment in high schools around the country.

The changes now going on fall into three broad categories:

• Modest changes in school regulations designed to create a freer and more humane atmosphere outside the classroom;
• Somewhat bolder attempts to humanize the schools as a whole-for example, by cutting the number of required classes, leaving students with a third or more of their time unscheduled, to be used for independent study, for taking more elective courses, for fulfilling some course requirements outside the classroom, or for relaxation and leisure;
• Radical experiments involving changes of the most fundamental sort-reordering the curriculum and indeed the entire teaching-learning process, and in some instances broadening the very concept of what constitutes a school.

Most of the changes are of the first sort, in response to- the growing student hostility to arbitrary or demeaning rules and regulations. Schools all over the country-some voluntarily, some in response to court orders-are abandoning codes governing dress and appearance, codes that usually are as inane as they are unenforceable. (Schools with dress codes, for "ample, may forbid girls from wearing slacks on the grounds that they are provocative, while permitting the mini-est of miniskirts; schools that forbid boys from sporting beards have bearded teachers.) Inane or not, the codes are resented, and properly so, as invasions of the students' privacy and as exercises in arbitrary power. It is hard to persuade students that a school respects their rights and values their individuality when its rules specify, as does one fairly typical suburban school's, that "Whatever, in the judgment of the faculty, is considered bizarre, unusual, eccentric or careless in personal appearance and dress will not be tolerated."

A good many schools, moreover, from Maine to Florida and from New York to California, are dropping the demeaning requirement that students must have a pass to go to the toilet or get a drink of water, along with the insane regulation that forbids them from using the library without first getting a library pass. Some schools are going further, permitting students to use their unscheduled time as and where they see fit, instead of requiring them to be in a study hall or other specified place during so-called "free" periods, and in the cafeteria during the lunch hour. (One of the stranger school traditions is the one that treats first graders, but not high school students, as capable of going home for lunch.) Here and there, schools are turning over some of the responsibility for formulating rules of conduct to the students themselves or to student-faculty committees. Some are even experimenting with freedom of the press, placing the responsibility for maintaining minimum standards, e.g., avoiding offensive language or illustrations, on the student editors.

Like it or not, more and more high schools are going to have to make more and more changes of these sorts. In California, New York, and Connecticut, for example, as well as in a number of other states, schools that have tried to enforce codes governing dress and grooming in the traditional waysuspending the offending student or denying him "class privileges"-have had their codes overruled by the courts on the grounds that dress and personal adornment are a form of self-expression subject to the same constitutional guarantees as any other. Any regulations a school makes, California Superior Court Judge W. G. Watson stated in expressing the court's decision in the case of Myers v. Arcata Union High School, "must reasonably pertain to the health and safety of the students or to the orderly conduct of school business. In this regard consideration should be given to what is really health and safety . . . and what is merely personal preference. . . . In a society as advanced as that in which we live," the judge added, "there is room for many personal preferences . . ."

To be sure, a good many teachers, principals, and parents question the advisability of relaxing the rules in any way. There is too much freedom already, they argue. As evidence, they point to high schools where there is a flourishing traffic in narcotics, with students using drugs freely in the bathrooms, cafeterias, and even the classrooms themselves. (In some schools, a boy can hardly go to the bathroom without seeing other students "mainlining," i.e., injecting, or sniffing, heroin.) Or they point to schools where authority has broken down altogether, with students disrupting classes, vandalizing or stealing school property, and generally terrorizing both teachers and students. For schools of this sort, it would be irresponsible as well as nalve to suggest that freedom is a panacea.

Whether or not it is a panacea, however, freedom happens to be a constitutional right; as the Supreme Court has put it, "neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone." Moreover, the notion that students have constitutional rights which the school cannot infringe is no whim of the moment; it is firmly rooted in the law. As far back as 1943, the Supreme Court made it clear that compulsory school attendance did not mean that students surrendered their rights at the schoolhouse door. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court declared, "protects the citizen against the State itself and an of its creatures-the Board of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." 20

Now, as a result of a series of test cases, many of them brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and its various affiliates, schools are being forced to recognize the Constitution, and in some cases to recognize their own state education codes, which they have also been violating in wholesale fashion. It seems clear, for example, that the almost universal practice of "denying class privileges," suspending, or expelling students without any kind of due process simply will not stand. As a minimum, a student has a right to receive advice in writing of the charges against him, with a summary of the evidence on which the charges are based, along with a formal hearing at which (he and his parent or guardian) may be represented by counsel, with the right of cross-examination, and a reasonable time in which to prepare the defense. It seems equally clear that students have the right to peaceful protest, as well as the right to distribute their own publications. 21

School officials who have freedom forced upon them may discover that it is a better solvent of disorder than repression. "The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia," George Orwell wrote in 1940, "is their inability to see that human society must be based on common decency." Orwell might just as well have been talking about teachers, principals, superintendents, and school board members, and the apparent inability of so many to see the need for common decency in the human society that is the school. Certainly it is clear that repression does not work, that "cracking down" serves only to breed more defiance and disruption, which breeds more repression, and so on, ad infinitum. And all the more so when "cracking down" is accompanied by the kind of arbitrariness, racial prejudice, assumption of student guilt, and general disregard of individual rights that characterizes "difficult" schools. In a war between faculty and students, the students are bound to win; there are more of them, and when put to the test, they can be disruptive in the most ingenious ways.

Since repression fails anyway, it may be worth trying freedom. There is evidence that it can workthat even "difficult" and "disruptive" students can respond to an atmosphere of trust, particularly if administrators do not confuse trust and confidence in the students with sentimentality about them.

ITEM: A large (3,000 students) comprehensive high school in a suburban city wracked by racial and ethnic conflict had posted uniformed guards throughout the school in a futile attempt to maintain order. A new principal removes the guards, telling the students, in a series of meetings on the first day of the school year, that he has done so out of respect for their maturity and confidence in their ability to maintain order. While conveying empathy and affection for them, his manner at the same time makes it clear that he is no sentimental pushover. The principalM! also goes to great pains to win the respect and confidence ofn the leaders of the black and dominant white ethnic student groups, asking them to report instances of racial and ethnic slurs and tension so that be can take prompt action. The selffulfilling prophecy works: despite enormous tension in the adult community, the school remains calm. Over Easter vacation, the students return the compliment, deluging a local radio station with some two and a half million postcards to elect the principal "principal of the year" in an area-wide contest.

Recognizing that a freer and more humane atmosphere is educationally sound as well as constitutionally necessary, high schools in a number of communities around the country-among them, Melbourne, Florida; Abington, Pennsylvania; Silver Spring, Maryland; New York City; Troy, New York; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Decatur, Illinois; Fullerton, California-have taken a variety of measures to humanize the school as a whole, and to put more of the responsibility for their learning on the students themselves. As the John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, one of the more innovative of these schools, states its goals, "The purpose of the program . . . is to provide an environment which will focus on the individual-a climate where student responsibility is emphasized, where conformity is not imposed, where learners solve problems important to them, where interest is high, and where there is an active commitment to discovery and learning."

One of the ways in which high schools are finding it possible to inch toward greater freedom and responsibility for their students is through the adoption of so-called flexible modular scheduling, a technique first developed, and advocated with missionary zeal, by Professor Robert Bush of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and Dr. Dwight Allen, formerly of Stanford, now dean of the University of Massachusetts' School of Education. In most high schools, the day is divided into a fixed number of periods of equal length (usually forty to fifty minutes), so that every meeting of every class lasts the same amount of time. Flexible scheduling uses a shorter time moduletypically sixteen, eighteen, or twenty minuteswhich makes it possible to provide class periods of varying length-forty minutes, say, for a lecture or demonstration, sixty or eighty minutes for a seminar or small group discussion. The technique makes it easier for teachers to adapt their teaching style to the purpose at hand.

What should be emphasized, however, is that flexible scbeduling is simply an administrative technique that makes possible, but in no way guarantees, a freer and less restrictive atmosphere. All too often, in fact, the technique turns out to be a kind of gimmickry in which nothing much changes but the length of the periods (and not always that) and the vocabulary with which the program is described.

ITEM: "I charge you with the responsibility of becoming your own man or woman," the principal of a California high school, well publicized for its early adoption of "flexible modular scheduling," tells his students in the opening sentence of the school's student handbook. Becoming your own man or woman does not extend, however, to deciding how to dress or look; the handbook contains a dress code with sixteen separate regulationg, governing such matters as the length of a boy's sideburns ("no longer than the bottom of the ear"), the length of his hair ("no longer than the top of the normal dress-shirt collar in back"), whether or not he can sport a beard (he cannot), the use of sunglasses ("may be worn inside school building only upon a physician's recommendation"), the length of a girl's skirt ("Skirts shall allow freedom of movement and shall not be more than three inches above the top of the knee cap when standing"), and the styling of their footwear ("Sandals or shoes must have back or heel straps").

ITEM: "Our school philosophy commits us to the development of the inquiring, creative mind and the self-directed individual," a Wisconsin high school-also a user of flexible modular schedulingdeclares in its statement of principles. But the school's "self-directed individuals" are placed in detention if they chew gum, come late to class, or violate what the school calls its "Alight Policy," which reads as follows:

No student should be in the corridors after the 4 minute passing time unless he has an approved pass. Students must plan their day in such a manner as to remain in each classroom or study area for the entire length of the mod. Once a student has "alighted" he must remain in that room until the end of the mod. Violators will be assigned detention make-up duty. Although some movement in the corridors will occur at the termination of each module, students are not to use the occasion to take a 4 minute rest every 20 minutes. During unscheduled time students are expected to stay in one area or room as much as possible. Students who have consecutive modules of unscheduled time should plan to spend at least 2 mods in a given location before moving to another area.

However, a number of schools are using flexible modular scheduling to break out of the usual rut. A fairly common practice, for example, is to arrange programs so that scheduled lectures, discussions, and classes occupy only part of each student's week, with a substantial portion of his timegenerally 30 to 40 percent-left unscheduled. In some such schools, students are free to use the time in any way they wishfor recreation and leisure, for independent study projects, or to complete assignments. In others, students are technically free but are expected to use the time mainly to complete work assigned by their teachers or to probe more deeply into some aspect of a course. In most, teachers and administrators find it hard to let go of the traces. Even so, such schools are a lot more humane than most, since students have the freedom of the building during their free time, i.e., they can work in the library, a study hall, a lounge, or what have you, instead of being herded into a supervised study hall where talking is forbidden and a pass required to go to the john or get a drink of water.

ITEM: At Abington, Pennsylvania High School's North Campus, students have about 30 percent of their time unscheduled. During these periods, students may use the library, which includes a typing area and audio-visual room, or one of two "study centers"; or they may go to a "learning resource center," one for each of the major subject areas (English, foreign languages, math, science, and social studies), which has specialized collections of books, magazines, and journals, as well as a good bit of technological gadgetry, e.g., videotape lectures and science demonstrations, tape recorders, 8-mm. cartridge loop viewers. Students may also use the gym, the photography dark room, or greenhouse; they may just relax in the student lounge or the "talking commons"; or they may take a short noncredit course which they or the faculty may devise. (The reduction in the number of scheduled classes gives teachers the time to offer such courses, as well as the time to confer with colleagues or students, to prepare their lectures, to take in-service courses, or even to relax.) To make sure that they use their "free" time "productively," students attend a weekly "freshman orientation seminar during the first of the two years (ninth and tenth grades) they spend at the North Campus. The' seminar aside, the school keeps fairly close tabs on how and where students spend their time. Nearly half the time, officials report, is spent in the library and learning centers and about onethird in the study centers, with little more than 10 percent of the time spent in the areas set aside for relaxation. Students who seem unable to use their time productively-never more than 3 percent of the enrollment of 2,000, according to school records-are required to spend their unscheduled time in carefully supervised study halls for a twoweek interval, repeated as deemed necessary.

ITEM: Lakeview High School in Decatur, Illinois, encourages students to use their unscheduled time for a variety of activities, distinguishing carefully between individual study and independent study. If students are working by themselves but doing work a teacher assigned, the process cannot honestly be called independent. Hence the faculty distinguishes four "levels" of activity students may engage in during their unscheduled time. Level I is conventional homework-a specific assignment that is due on a specific date, usually the next day or two. Level 11"Project Work"-is homework in which students have some discretion in the choice of topic, and generally a somewhat longer period of time in which to complete it. Level III"Contract Work"-involves proceeding through a course at the student's own rate; class attendance is optional, and the student takes tests as he is ready for them, with the teacher, however, remaining responsible for evaluation of the work that is done. Level IV is true independent study-work that a student initiates, plans, and evaluates on his own, drawing on the faculty for advice or evaluation as he sees fit.

A happy by-product of this kind of flexibility is its tendency to stimulate examination of a good many other school practices. One of the most deeply embedded traditions, for example, one that James B. Conant reinforced with his studies of the American high school, is the notion that educational quality can be measured in terms of time rather than knowledge. "Improvement would come about almost automatically in most schools," Dr. Conant declared, "if seven years of English and social studies were required and if, instead of a two-year course in a foreign language, a sequence of four years of at least one foreign language were offered . . ." 22

Maybe; but students can be, and usually are, as illiterate in a foreign language after four years as they are after two; it would make eminently better sense to judge the quality of a school's language offerings by some measure of competence in reading, writing, and speaking the language. And whether a school is improved by offering another year or two of English and social studies depends, of course, on what it is that students learn during that extra time. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner call this tradition "The Vaccination Theory of Education," since it implies that "a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again." 23 One of the more encouraging aspects of the current ferment, therefore, is the fact that here and there schools are questioning this tradition and are trying to shift the emphasis from time served to knowledge gained.

ITEM: Students at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, may elect to fulfill course requirements on their own, outside the classroom; in the 1968-69 school year, some 40 percent of the student body chose to do so for at least one course. The student is expected to take the initiative; he and his teacher then determine how he will satisfy the requirementwhether be will simply cover the assigned material on his own, or whether-the more usual approach-he will make a more intensive study of some concept or problem that interests him. Student and teacher also decide in advance what materials will be covered; whether or not the student will come to class, and how often; and how frequently, and in what ways, his work will be evaluated, e.g., via research papers, essays, oral reports, discussions, etc. When agreement is reached, a "contract" is drawn up which the student, his parents, and the teacher sign.

Some schools are also questioning the notion that a course has to last a minimum of one semester, offering "mini-courses" of varying lengths, particularly in areas of special interest to the students:

ITEM: At the Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School in Hamilton, Massachusetts, thirty miles north of Boston, all classes for seniors were suspended for a two-week period at the end of the 1968 school year, to provide time for courses sponsored, organized and in many cases, run by the seniors themselves. (The faculty was agreeable, since the last few weeks of senior year are thrown away anyway.) A member of the student council sent seniors a questionnaire asking them what they would like to study during the period, and then circulated the tabulations among the faculty, many of whom discovered that students wanted to study subjects they had always wanted to teach, but had never been able to fit into the curriculum. Departmental lines were crossed as teachers began volunteering their services for the various mini-courses-such things as film criticism, filmmaking, poetry writing, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and marine ecology, along with more mundane courses in "Home Mechanics for Girls ... . Cooking for Boys," and the like.

The program was a success, affecting the faculty as much as the students. Teachers were surprised to find that students they had regarded as slow or apathetic appeared bright and eager when they were free to study what interested them. "Freed from the stigma of homogeneous grouping," Robert R. Hayward, a member of the EngJish Department, writes, "many of our notbound-for-college seniors elected the more intellectual minicourses. (Used to their apathetic performance in general classes, we were amazed by their sophisticated handling of difficult subjects in mixed discussion groups. They sometimes outdid the brightest seniors in their penetrating observations about Bergman's The Virgin Spring or his Smiles of a Summer Night.)" 24 As a result, the school has continued the program for seniors and expanded it to other students, bringing in volunteer experts from the community-several ministers, an artist, a disc jockey, assorted psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers-to teach part or all of a number of the courses. Now the experience is seeping into the regular curriculum: teachers are beginning to involve students in planning courses and are starting to question the wisdom of homogeneous grouping, letter grades, and other school practices.

The question of grades and their impact on the teachinglearning process is receiving increasing attention, with a growing number of students and teachers proposing modification of the present system, or its elimination altogether.

ITEM: In the high school equivalency program he runs for high school dropouts-mostly Negroes from the streets of Portland and other Northwest cities, Mexican-American and Anglo migratory workers, and Indian Americans-Professor Arthur Pearl of the University of Oregon has dropped the usual grading system altogether. Teachers and students share a mutual responsibility, he argues. If a student does not learn, the teacher may be to blame as well as the student; both should hold themselves accountable. Hence teacher and student negotiate a contract at the beginning of the course, setting target dates at which the student will take the exam for each unit of work. If a student feels that be is not ready for the test when the date comes around, he can renegotiate the contract with the instructorafter discussing why he's not ready.

When be does take the exam, the student receives one of two grades-"pass," or "have not passed yet," in which case the contract is again renegotiated. The grade itself can also be appealed if 'a student feels he has been marked unfairly. Once there is a means of adjudicating grievances, Pearl argues, the student-teacher relationship can change from the usual adversary relationship to one of partnership--essential, in his view, if students are to become responsible, self-directed learners.

Teachers and administrators retain their authority; "it would be the cruelest of deceptions," Pearl says, "to suggest to students that they have unlimited decision-making powers." But that authority, he insists, must be exercised responsibly, which means that no more rules should be promulgated than are absolutely necessary, and that those promulgating rules must be willing to defend them in terms of their purpose.

Only a handful of schools (discussed in Sections IV, V, and VI below) have been willing to go this far, fearing that any drastic modification of the traditional grading system would handicap their students in the battle for college admission. Some, however, are trying to tinker with the system in an effort to dffset or reduce some of its adverse effects, awarding grades for required courses but not for electives. This kind of tinkering fails to come to grips with the real problem: how to make evaluation serve the ends of education, instead of being the end itself. Indeed, by continuing the traditional system for the required courses and dropping it for electives, schools obscure the real issue. What is wrong with the present system is not the use of grades per se, but the fact that the awarding of a grade has been divorced from the larger function of evaluation, thereby preventing it from fulfilling its proper educational purpose.

And evaluation is an important part of the teaching-leaming process. Tests, examinations, term papers, projects, etc., are useful to students, teachers, and administrators alike. They provide teachers, for example, with a means of determining the degree to which they are achieving their objectives. A well-constructed examination enables the teacher to judge the effectiveness of his teaching, since it reveals-sometimes traumatically-just what it is that students have learned, and what they have not learned or have misunderstood. A good exam may also reveal weaknesses in the curriculum, and suggest ways by which it, too, can be improved. Exams can be useful to school administrators as well, providing a means of evaluating the effectiveness of the institution and the soundness of the assumptions on which its curriculum is based. 25 But teachers and administrators rarely view examinations in these lights; if students do poorly, the reflection is on them, not on the teacher or the school.

Evaluation is even more important, of course, to the student himself. Tests should warn him when be is falling below minimum standards of performance. More important, examinations should make it possible for a student to test his knowledge and competence by giving him an opportunity to apply it in a new way or to a new situation or problem. This in turn can help the student discover what he knows and what be has failed to understand or to learn. The feedback must be prompt, however; the student must learn quickly where be went wrong if an exam is to help him improve his performance. Since students will have to judge their own performance after they leave school, it is important, too, to provide as much experience as possible in self-evaluation. 26

Schools rarely use tests for these purposes, either, except, perhaps, as a storm signal. It is a rare high school, for example, in which a student ever sees his final examination paper again, once be has handed it in; in most schools, there is no feedback at all. (If evaluation were the goal, teachers would give their final exams well before the end of the semester, to allow time to return the exams to the students with detailed comments and suggestions.) The procedure thus makes it clear to students that the purpose of testing is not evaluation but rating-to produce grades that enable the school to rank students and sort them in various ways for administrative purposes. The result is to destroy any interest in learning for its own sake; what is worth learning, the students quickly realize, is what will be asked for on the exam. Hence the inevitable question that chills the conscientious teacher's soul: "Will we be responsible for this on the final?"

One of the measures of how far we have to go in reforming the American high school is the fact that the changes we have been discussing can be described as major steps forward. They areif one measures them against the high school as it now is. Compared to the repressive, almost prison-like atmosphere of most high schools, the ones we have been talking about are bastions of freedom and trust. And to the extent to which they have put more of the responsibility for learning, for seeking out, for probing, on the students themselves, they are affecting a basic part of the educational process.

For the most part, however, these schools have not addressed themselves to the basic questions of educational purpose. Indeed, the changes they have introduced, important and welcome as they are, sometimes have the effect of avoiding the really bard questions. Independent study, for example, is an important means; it is not an end in itself. "Schools have got to stand for something," Charles E. Brown insists. Or as Wilford M. Aikin, who directed the Eight-Year Study, wrote in 1942, "It is not enough to create better conditions for learning. It is equally necessary to determine what American youth most need to learn." That necessity remains; the high school, in Aikin's phrase, must "rediscover its chief reason for existence."

Only a handful of schools are engaged in that kind of an attempt-among them, the Parkway Program in Philadelphia, the Newton, Massachusetts, High School, in its Murray Road Annex, and John Adams High School in Portland. None as yet can be judged a success; they are still too new and too tentative and experimental (the oldest, at this writing, is in its third year of operation, the youngest, in its first) for any such judgments to to be made. They demand close study nonetheless, because of the seriousness with which they are raising fundamental, questions about both the means and the ends of education.

The architects of the Parkway Program in Philadelphia-the "school without walls," as it is sometimes called-are questioning virtually every one of the traditional assumptions about what constitutes a school, and what constitutes an education. The starting point, in fact, is the conviction, expressed by the program's director, John Bremer, a forty-two-year-old Englishman, that "It is not possible to improve the high school; it has reached the end of its development. We need a new kind of educational institution." 27 Under the auspices of the Philadelphia Board of Education, and with funding from the Ford Foundation, Bremer is attempting to do precisely that-to fashion an almost totally new kind of institution.

Parkway departs from tradition in a number of respects. One of the most striking is the absence of any building or campus. "Learning is not something that goes on only in special places called classrooms, or in special buildings called schools," Bremer writes; "rather, it is a quality of life appropriate to any and every phase of human existence, or, more strictly, it is human life itself." Hence "the spatial boundaries of the educational process in the Parkway Program are co-terminous with the life space of the student himself." The program is designed to "help the student to live learningly within his present life space," and to help him expand that space.

In a sense, then, the "school" is the city of Philadelphia itself. Parkway has its own faculty, to be sure, composed of teachers transferred from other Philadelphia high schools, plus a number of university interns. It also has its own headquarters on the second floor of an old building in downtown Philadelphia, three blocks from City Hall, with offices for the faculty, study rooms, and a general area for students to hang out in during their spare time. Learning is not confined to classrooms, however, or to the conventional school day or school year. The courses offered by the regular faculty may be held almost anywhere-in a meeting room in a public library, a museum, a "Y," a university or research institute laboratory, a school building, or a teacher's home.

ITEM: A Spanish class meets in a building in Spring Garden, the Spanish-speaking section of Philadelphia. After an hour or so of classroom instruction, the students walk around the neighborhood, practicing the language by striking up conversations with storekeepers or passers-by. "It's really amazing because you realize bow many flaws you make in your speech patterns much better than any record could give you," one student, who had been failing in Spanish in his former school, observes. "You don't have to sit in the classroom and fold your hands and say you will not learn. You learn by experiencing, by doing different things, by really going out."

ITEM: A geometry class learns "by really going out," too. The students meet in the teacher's apartment for formal instruction, then go about the city, trying out what they've learned. "We had one class in Logan Circle, where we tried to figure the diameter of the circle itself," a student reports. "That's something new; you know you have to get certain measurements and everything-not just that you're told you have a circle of such and such a distance. You couldn't waste your time finding irrelevant facts, because you were going to get soaked by the big fountain there if you did. You actually learn by going out and doing what you're learning in theory, which is something I never did before."

In addition to the courses offered by the Parkway faculty, students are expected to choose at least one "institutional offering"--a course or activity offered by one of the many scientific, business, cultural, and journalistic institutions concentrated along and around the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, from which the program's name derives. The offering may be a formal course, a work-study program, a research-assistantship or apprenticeship, or simply a chance to hang around and watch, or to participate in the institution's activities in any way the student or the cooperating "teacher" may see fit. Cooperating institutions include the Philadelphia Zoo, which offers a course on "The Animal Kingdom"; the Franklin Institute, one of the best science museums in the United States; the Museum of Art; the Insurance Company of North America, which offers a course called "What's the Risk?"; Smith, Mine & French, a leading drug manufacturer, which gives a course in "The Modern Corporation"; a local television station (KYW) and newspaper publisher (The Philadelphia Bulletin and the Inquirer); the Police Department and District Attorney's office, members of which teach a course on law enforcement; and the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, where students take a Itcourse" in "Law and Civil Rights" by helping the director in investigating complaints and preparing cases. The object is to reconnect the schools with the larger community, not through the conventional field trip, but through some continuing experience. What matters, in Bremer's view, is less where the student is than that he "have enough time to find out what it is like to live in that place, to be a real part of it, and for it to be a real part of him."

Students are also encouraged to work in one of these institutions-for some, as a means of social service, for others, as a source of income, for still others, as a means of clarifying their thinking about a career after school, and for all, as a way of testing some of the skills acquired in the classroom. "The skills acquired should always be tested by something outside the educational system," Bremer argues. "If a student cannot do something-in an office, on a train, at the airport-somewhere, that he could not do before, it is highly doubtful that he has learned anything; it is certain that he has not learned anything useful. To incorporate this kind of 'reality-testing' is very important because it helps the student to develop his own feedback system."

In effect, then, students plan their own education, subject to the constraints of the state education law, which specifies minimum "Carnegie units" in English, math, social studies, language, etc., for a high school diploma. They are helped in doing so by assignment to a "tutorial group"-fifteen or sixteen students, a teacher, and a university intern-wbich meets for two hours, three times a week. The tutorial group is responsible for counseling and support and for continuing evaluation of the student's program and performance; while students receive only two grades, pass or fail, evaluation is regarded as an integral part of the educational process. "Our students have to learn to be responsible for their own education, to make choices, and to face the consequences of those choices," Bremer believes. Hence students are also involved in running the school, through "town meetings" of the entire student body and through participation in smaller "management groups." Bremer's purpose, as he puts it, is "to make the school's organization and administration part of the educational process, instead of being a precondition to it."

The tutorial group is also responsible for giving students a mastery of the basic skills of language and mathematics; given society's growing dependence on symbols, mastery of these "intellectual virtues," as Bremer calls them, is essential. To that degree, therefore, there is a prescribed curriculum; but each tutorial group decides the specific content. "I assume the students need intellectual virtues," Bremer says. "What I don't assume is that I happen to know what they are, or that I can force students into acquiring them." To set up a list of topics or subjects is both silly and arrogant, be maintains, when, "given any student, you do not know-you cannot know-where he is in his learning process, what he needs to learn right now, or what he ought to be learning now." Hence the program is designed to provide the maximum opportunities for students to learn what they want to learn. As Bremer sees his function, it is to find and establish "starting points for learning"-to help the student discover where he can begin to learn, so that he can take over the responsibility for his own education. What he then learns is his business.

What Bremer hopes the student will learn is bow to livewith others as well as with himself. To define the purpose of the curriculum, Bremer quotes Whitehead ("There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations") and Socrates ("For our conversation is not about something casual, but about the proper way to live"). Everything that is done in education, he argues, must be judged in the light of this search for "the proper way to live"; everything that is done must itself be an appropriate way to live. This means placing great emphasis on the quality of the relationships among students, teachers, and administrators, which means keeping the "learning community" small. "Since learning is a human activity," Bremer writes, "the problem of bow to enter into the learning process, or to be a learner, can be restated in terms of group membersbip--bow to be a member of a learning community." And that "learning community" is intended to be one in which teachers as well as students are learning, 28 and in which students and teachers as well as administrators are involved in planning and evaluating the curriculum. "Every school should have, as part of its curriculum, the continuing re-creation of its own curriculum," Bremer writes.

It is too early to make any firm judgments about the Parkway Program and its applicability to other situations; more experience is needed at Parkway itself, and in other cities. One has to wonder, for example, whether the program is sui generis to Philadelphia; as the Parkway Program's introductory booklet observes, "the unique and specific importance of the Parkway institutions lies in the unparalleled wealth of material and human resources which they bring to a very small area of the city"-a wealth and a concentration that few cities can match.

One has to wonder, too, whether museums, newspapers, business firms, universities, and social service agencies would be willing to cooperate if a substantial proportion of Philadelphia's high school students were enrolled in something like the Parkway Program, as Bremer proposes. Since the program is experimental, it began with only 143 students in the spring of 1969, expanding to five hundred in the 1969-70 school year. 29 Each cooperating institution, therefore, has bad to accommodate only a relative handful of students. If they were asked to find room for hundreds or thousands of students, the institutions might very well change their minds.

Bremer himself believes that these resources are not critical, and that the program could be duplicated anywhere. What is critical, in his view, is the absence of a central building, not the presence of museums and other cooperating institutions, for it is the lack of a traditional school building that forces the creation of a distinctive social structure.

Evaluation is difficult, too, because there was a certain intellectual flabbiness in a great many of the courses being offered during the first semester, when our visit was made. Bremer hopes the flabbiness will be temporary; there is a tendency, observable in other programs, for teachers, once they are released from the rigidities of the traditional curriculum and school organization, to swing to the opposite extreme, turning classes into extended "rap sessions." Usually, both students and teachers tire of this fairly rapidly and return to some more structured curriculum or approach. At Parkway, however, the temptation may have been even greater, in view of the fact that the tutorial groups are responsible for guidance and support, as well as for instruction in language and math-functions Bremer believes can and should be combined, but which the faculty has tended to see as separate. The flabbiness may also be encouraged by Bremer's insistence that only "starting points" should be prescribed, and not goals-an insistence which the students translate to mean that school is defined as the place where everyone does "his thing." There is a certain irony, indeed, in Bremer's latitudinarian approach to curriculum; he himself teaches a course in Greek and another on Plato, and draws freely on his rigorous, somewhat classical education (the universities of Cambridge and Leicestershire and St. John's College) to argue the case for an absence of rigor and an emphasis on the here and now. One wonders whether his students will have the same qualities of intellect.

And yet the visitor cannot help but be impressed by the excitement Parkway has generated among its students, and the seriousness with which they seem to be thinking about their education.

ITEM: An eleventh-grade student, asked how Parkway differs from the school she had been attending, said, "First of all, the pressure. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself-to get good grades. I never had any problems, I really didn't need to put the pressure on. But I didn't know I was even putting the pressure on myself. Here you begin to realize, you know, Why am I doing this? What do you want? Why are you getting an education? You're not getting it for anybody else, you're getting it for yourself. I think that's the biggest difference. Before, I used to get the grades, I used to study. If I had a particularly nice teacher, I'd try to please him or whatever. And here, you know, I don't feel -I have to show anybody that I am, you know . . . if I want to learn something, nobody else is responsible for my education except myself, and nobody's going to come up and pat you on the back and say, 'You're not doing your best and you're not going to get an education.' It's up to me now.1)

ITEM: A sixteen-year-old boy, asked if he felt he had learned more than usual at Parkway: "I really think so, because now I'm finally starting to pay attention." Why? "It's become more interesting, it's more of a personal thing like an impartation of knowledge from one person to another, instead of, 'You'll learn this, that's it, put it down on the test paper, IT mark it, you'll pass.' But now the teachers are concerned: 'I'll help you, you know; if you're not doing well, we'll see what we can do; if we can work out an arrangement, I'll tutor you.' . . . It's the way I think school should be, You don't come from nine to three and sit there and listen to the teacher blah, blab, blab, put the answers down on the test sheet, get up and walk out and forget it. Here it's made interesting enough for you to want to know. On the bad weather days here I fought my mother to come; she'd say, 'You're not going to school today,' and I'd get up and walk out-whereas I bad the worst attendance record on record at the old school; I was absent 112 days last year."

The significance of the Parkway Program, in short, lies in the kinds of questions it is asking, and not necessarily in the answers it has tentatively suggested.

At least two other schools are asking the same kinds of questions, but in an attempt to reform the high school rather than to create an entirely new kind of institution. In its small experiment in the Murray Road Annex, for example, the Newton, Massachusetts, High School is trying to find out how far students can go in accepting responsibility for their own education, and how far students and teachers together can go in jointly creating and managing their own educational program.

In its original conception, interestingly enough, the Murray Road Annex experiment was not very different from some of the programs described previously, for example, John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Lakeview High in Decatur, Illinois. When the program began in September 1967, the 107 juniors-Newton High students who had voluilteered for the experimentwere expected to take a minimum of four and one half majors. These courses-English, math, social studies, French, and physical education-were rigidly scheduled into three mornings, leaving students and teachers free to use the rest of the week for additional work in these subject areas, or to pursue other interests. During their free time, students had the use, without supervision, of any space in the building not being used for a class and, with parental permission, could leave the building to work anywhere else-to use a library, take a course somewhere else, etc. In the major subjects, however, students were to do homework, take exams, receive grades, and be given regular Newton High credits; students and faculty were free to decide on methods of evaluation and other rules and procedures only in the elective areas.

This initial approach was modified soon after the program began, when the Murray Road faculty decided that awarding grades in the major subjects was incompatible with their goal of encouraging students to take responsibility for their own education. Self-education, they argued, involved a number of processes: self-assessment of one's strengths and weaknesses and interests and needs; consideration of alternative goals and of alternative ways of meeting them; choice of a course of action; and selfevaluation of one's progress. Awarding grades would undermine all of them, encouraging students to direct their energies toward pleasing the teacher rather than setting and meeting their own goals and evaluating their progress toward them. At the same time, the faculty recognized that high school students may not yet know enough about the subject in question, or may not yet be able to see themselves in a sufficiently objective light, to rely solely on their own evaluation. Hence Murray Road students' records contain two written evaluations, one by the student and one by the teacher, as well as a brief description of the course content.

Students took responsibility from the beginning. They formed a committee to sound out colleges on their receptivity to this kind of unconventional program; using this information, as well as information gleaned from soundings taken among students and faculty, another committee reviewed the curriculum and suggested a number of changes for the second year, to permit students to meet the subject-major requirements in a variety of ways. They proposed and organized committees to develop friendly relations with the local residents, and to develop an afternoon program for children in the neighborhood, who bad been creating problems by running through the building and occasionally damaging property. (The Murray Road Annex is housed in an old elementary school that had been vacant for some time.) They worked with the faculty in creating and running a tutoring program in a number of Newton elementary schools; nearly three-quarters of the students participated. They worked with the faculty too, in discussing the program with parent and other community groups, as well as in evaluations of the program. And they proposed and organized, and in some cases taught, a number of new courses. These electives, many of which are taught by parents, university students from the area, or other volunteers from the community, frequently are held in the evening or on a weekend; they may meet in a student's home, the home of the person offering the course, a library, or what have you. As one student puts it, "We have a course wherever there is a floor we can sit on. All this meeting in teachers' homes, kids' homes, and the like," he adds, "has blurred the distinction between school and life."

The emphasis throughout is on developing and maintaining an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, and concern. "You can't give personal freedom," Barry Jentz, a young Murray Road English teacher observes. "You have to create an environment where people learn to make themselves free; that environment is one of trust."

It wasn't easy for the students to "learn to make themselves free"; discovering that freedom is more than the absence of restraint and developing the self-discipline that would enable them to use their freedom were slow and sometimes painful. At first, for example, the multiplicity of choices presented a problem. Unaccustomed either to the freedom or the richness of the offerings, some students tended to bound from course to course and seminar to seminar. As one student later described the process, "Instead of finding out what we were interested in, we tried to be the winner of a game called 'How many courses can you take at Murray Road?" As a result, some students loaded themselves down with more work than they could do, and some never finished anything, dropping one course as they took up another. Other students were simply paralyzed by the need to make a choice; most bad difficulty learning bow to organize their time, and themselves. But by and large they did learn-not only how to discipline their time, but also how to set realistic goals when they found they bad made unwise choices.

ITEM: From a student's evaluation of his first year's experience. "Last year I had problems of selfdiscipline in various areas such as math and history. My other self-discipline problems were my attitude and lack of organization of my time. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do so I couldn't organize my time to suit any particular goals. I wanted to practice the piano and to write music. I wanted to do something interesting in my subjects, but I didn't know what that was exactly. The result was that I let things evolve; some things turned out better than I expected (music) and some things went terribly. (In math I started in honors, dropped it, and eventually I ended up hurriedly learning enough to pass the Curriculum I exam.) I also wasted an abominable amount of time complaining and listening to complaints about the world, school, and a multitude of things."

ITEM: From another student's evaluation. "When it comes to improving on discipline, we have two choices: we can either change the structure so that it leaves less room for misbehavior, or we can continually struggle day by day to improve our self-discipline. To do the fornier-to make Murray Road a more structured school with greater disciplinary action-goes completely against the basic premise on which we have been working all year-that we want to learn to discipline ourselves. The only alternative I see is to continue as we have been-arguing, getting frustrated, learning slowly how to discipline ourselves. I see no way of changing the structure to help us in this kind of collective personal struggle."

ITEM: From a parent's evaluation. "When my son was unhappy at Newton High School and doing poorly I could never decide whether he was the problem or if perhaps he was right when he said that much of the school did not teach him anything. I feet now he was sincere. This year he cannot get enough of all he is learning-he spends every minute singing the praiscs of Murray Road, but he does not talk about freedom, bull sessions, fooling around and indifference but downright, genuine desire to make papers perfect, an absolutely amazing love for every teacher, an incentive which has focused his every bit of energy toward doing better today than yesterday and suddenly a hunger for many tomorrows which will enable him to do more. . . . With less pressure from school routine that was so great at Newton High, my son has pressured himself more, putting study first and working to conclusions. I believe his scope has broadened-his desire to absorb more and more. . . . If he had stayed at Newton High School, I see the possibility of his wings never spreading. I had no idea so much could unfold in so short a time."

The students learned to handle feelings, too, and to view feeling as an aspect of thought. "Feelings are important at Murray Road," one student remarked, in explaining how the school differed from the regular high school. "Even in a subject like math it becomes harder and harder to separate feelings from thinking ... .. Yeah," another student chimed in. "I remember bearing myself say in class, 'Now I know what I'm about to say is emotional, so don't take it too seriously'-and suddenly I thought, 'Who says we shouldn't take emotion seriously? Who says that a reaction to a situation is only valid if it is cerebralT Sure, feelings are important and there's no reason to delegate them to some sort of second place. So now I don't, and I don't think many others do, either."

As a result of this concern with feeling, as well as the emphasis on freedom and responsibility, students also learned a great deal about themselves-about their strengths and weaknesses, their beliefs (their real beliefs), their ability to take responsibility, to work with others, and so on. They also learned a great deal about their teachers, for the first time seeing them as human beings with strengths and weaknesses and feelings of their own.

ITEM: From a student's self-evaluation. "I haven't done all the things I wanted to do, but just by not doing them I learned about myself. I learned how much I didn't know about all those ideals I'd been advocating. . . . I've changed in that I will tell you all this too, because I know there was a time when I wouldn't have."

ITEM: From another student's evaluation. "Unfortunately, I succeeded at Newton High without a great deal of work. Without really pursuing things and without really doing excellent work. It's much harder being at Murray Road, and it took me a while to really discover this. At the high school I was able to do a great many things, not really as well as I could have, and still pull A's, etc. When I arrived at Murray Road I was very excited by all the options and became rapidly overextended. The standards here, which are self-imposed, are much harder to fulfill. To really fulfill them, one must do a few things excellently rather than many things fairly. . . . At first, I thought I was destined to another hell-raising year in French. But soon I realized that teachers need cooperation from the class, and that teachers have feelings as well-which must sound over-obvious, but I never considered teachers' feelings before."

One of the principal ways in which the Murray Road students have learned how to handle freedom and responsibility-one of the principal means by which they have learned to respect and trust their teachers-bas been through the teaching they have done, in the tutoring program, or in the courses they have taught for their fellow students.

ITEM: From a student's self-evaluation. "I gave tutoring all I had and I learned so much from itmore about revising my expectations than anything else. I had to learn to be flexible in teaching and in dealing with kids. I learned photography in order to teach it. I learned mostly through failure, but now I know something about what kids want, what they need and the timing of an activity. . ."

ITEM: From another student's evaluation of the tutoring program. "Before I began teaching for myself I never thought about how a teacher might feel about things. I guess I always took my teachers' role for granted, and more times than not I suppose I thought they were all very comfortable. One thing my teaching experiences have taught me is that this is not true. Teachers can be different inside, just like I fluctuate inside as a student. Sometimes there is comfort and security, but in a teacher there can also be fear and insecurity. Many of these things are unrecognizable to students perhaps because they already have the teacher role stereotyped in their minds."

ITEM: A student, evaluating a course he had taught in comparative religion. "This course was a barren enthusiasm course, meaning I was really excited about studying different religions, but I didn't know why I wanted to study them or what specific areas I wanted to study. The course failedfor the above reasons and for others. First the course was organized at the very beginning of the year when all the students were running around trying to take as many courses as they could. . . . Secondly, it didn't have a teacher. Although Murray Road aims toward more student-oriented, student-directed courses, a teacher has to be present for nearly every one of the classes. There has to be an authority figure, older and exerting influence over a group studying a whole new field. For these reasons the course failed, and I learned from my failure."

The teachers, too, have learned a great deal-about themselves and about their students. For the most part, the teachers were as unused to freedom as their students, and they, too, have had to struggle to answer some of the hard questions about freedom: what it is; how much is too much; how much is not enough. Some teachers had to learn how to let go of the reins. "I didn't realize until the end of the year that students could handle more freedom than they already have," one teacher confessed. "For a long time I distrusted the students' ability to take responsibility or follow it through. Now I think the students are very able to take on all sorts of responsibility." Other teachers had to learn that there are times when students want and need direction, that freedom is not merely the absence of restraint. They had to learn that freedom and structure are quite compatible with each other-that indeed, a certain minimum of structure may be a prerequisite to freedom.

ITEM: Seeing freedom and structure as antithetical, several teachers refused to give their students any direction when the first semester began. They simply sat back in class, waiting in silence for the students to take over; the frustrated students, not knowing how to proceed, sat in equally stony silence, waiting for the teacher to begin. In time, the teachers realized that they were being overly rigid, that the students, especially at the very beginning, needed some structure and direction, and that complete teacher passivity was not the only alternative to the traditional teacher-dominated classroom they had rejected. The students, in turn, realized that they were also being too passive, and they gradually took on more responsibility. "Teachers and students are really working together here," one student remarked, in recalling the frustration of those first few days. "The teachers are changing and developing with us."

At times, the process of "changing and developing" was as painful for the teachers as it was for the students."You have to be willing to be hurt, criticized, evaluated, and to see the truth of how others see you," one teacher explains, observing that before teaching at Murray Road, she would not have been able to "open up" to a hundred students. There were times, indeed, when teachers found themselves as exposed and vulnerable as the students-for example, when a teacher offered an elective course, and had to withdraw it when there were no takers. Nonetheless, the teachers are as enthusiastic about the program as the students. "When a teacher can see how be makes a difference in his student's life," one explains, "he is more willing to expend his time and energy." "In the conventional school," another teacher adds, "most teachers don't begin to realize their teaching potential because they don't feel they will make a difference in the institution." At Murray Road, teachers know they make a difference. In part because of the program's small size, but in part also because of its basic character, there is no gulf between teachers and administrators; the teachers handle both functions. "I used to think that teachers should teach and administrators should administer," one teacher says. "Now I feel that determining schedules, arranging class offerings, and teaching are all part of one whole; I wouldn't want to give up any of it."

One of the most important, and sobering, lessons to be learned from the Murray Road experiment, however, is that freedom frightens both students and teachers-that many who clamor for freedom are afraid to try it when the opportunity arises. "Familiarity breeds contempt," Dewey wrote in The Child and the Curriculum, "but it also breeds something like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and . . . through custom we finally embrace what at first wore a hideous mien."

So it was at Newton when the Murray Road program was announced in the spring of 1967. With nearly 1,000 students eligible-applications were invited from the entire sophomore class at Newton High-school officials expected a flood of applications and planned to select a representative sample of 150. The flood turned out to be a trickle; only 107 studentsforty-seven boys and sixty girlsapplied, all of whom were accepted. The faculty was equally cautious; fewer teachers volunteered for the program than bad been expected, with some of those who bad been most vocal in calling for greater freedom holding back when they beard what was being planned. They, too, preferred the security of the known.

Neither the program's apparent success, moreover, nor the evident enthusiasm of both students and teachers, have produced any stampede to get into Murray Road, although the number of applicants has exceeded the number of places. In the second year, enrollment rose to 115-ninety seniors, who chose to remain for a second year, and twenty-five juniors, selected by the faculty from a somewhat larger number of applicants. Enrollment remained the same in the 1969-70 school year, with twentyfive seniors, forty-five juniors, and forty-five sophomores. The hesitation stems from several factors, in addition to fear of the unknown and a preference for the security that the traditional structure seems to provide. Going to Murray Road, as the students attending it explain, requires more than opposition to the traditional school; it demands a commitment to one's own education, and it takes more effort and may cause more pain, albeit of a different sort than in the conventional school. Many students are reluctant to make that commitment.

Other students held back because of their fear, or their parents', that attending Murray Road might hurt their chance of getting into college. (This is the reason fewer boys than girls applied.) The fear is understandable; it is also greatly exaggerated. Colleges are a good deal more flexible in their admission requirements than students and parents-or high school principals and guidance counselors-realize; and for the most part, the more prestigious the college, the more flexible it tends to be. Parents were particularly concerned, for example, about the absence of grades and therefore of class rankings at Murray Road, but only two colleges refused to accept applications on that account.10 More to the point, students in the first graduating class, who were accepted in such schools as Harvard, Barnard, Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins, had no more difficulty gaining admission than students in the regular Newton High program.

Both Parkway and Murray Road, it should be emphasized, are limited experiments designed to test a number of ideas about the nature and purposes of education. Their small size, together with the fact that their students and their faculties are both selfselected volunteers, makes it difficult to know the degree to which their various approaches can be applied in other circumstances. Many of the Newton teachers and administrators who are most enthusiastic about Murray Road, for example, question its applicability to Newton High, with its student body of 2,700; this degree of freedom and flexibility, they argue, can work only in a very small, intimate environment. Charles E. Brown, under whose aegis the experiment was conceived and begun (be was superintendent at the time) disagrees sharply. "If we can't create a sense of community with 2,700 students," be asked a group of Newton teachers and administrators, "bow can New York City survive?" Nonetheless, Newton officials are moving very cautiously in the attempt to apply some of the Murray Road experience elsewhere.

The most important experiment in secondary education, therefore, may well be the one being tried in Portland, Oregon's new John Adams High School. The kinds of fundamental questions being raised at Murray Road and at Parkway are also being raised at Adams-not in the rather precious, hothouse atmosphere of those two schools, but in what Adams' principal, Robert Schwartz, accurately describes as "a classic urban high school." Unlike Parkway and Murray Road, there is no self-selected student body at Adams; it is a district high school to which all students living in its district are assigned. The great majority of the 1,280 students come from working-class or lower-middleclass families; 25 percent are black, and based on past experience, only a third or so are likely to go to college.

What makes Adams so important is not only the size and nature of its student body, however, but the fact that it is also the most comprehensive and systematic, and perhaps the most carefully thoughtout, attempt to create a new kind of secondary school. How successful that attempt will be remains to be seen; since Adams did not open its doors until September 1969, we can do no more here than indicate what Schwartz and his colleagues hope to do. What is clear is that the school is a real testing ground; if radical reform succeeds at Adams, it can succeed elsewhere, too.

Curiously enough, the Adams experiment had its genesis some three thousand miles to the east of Portland. In the fall of 1967, a group of secondary school teachers in their final year of doctoral study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education began meeting regularly to discuss the possibility of establishing a new kind of high school, whose principal objective, as they defined it, "would be to find better ways of helping adolescents to learn."

Their thinking was influenced by a number of sources, apart from their own experiences and their work at Harvard. One was their fascination with the way in which teaching hospitals like Massachusetts General combined the diverse, and sometimes contradictory, functions of patient care, education and training of new doctors, re-education of experienced doctors, and basic and applied research. Another was Robert J. Schaefer's Deweyan notion of "the school as a center of inquiry." "The school must be more than a place of instruction," Dean Schaefer argued forcefully in his little volume, published as the Harvard group was formulating its plans. "It must also be a center of inquirya producer as well as transmitter of knowledge." For one thing, our ignorance about teaching and learning is so massive that university scholars cannot produce the necessary knowledge working alone; they need the help of the schools as Well. But the schools also need the university. "When divorced from appropriate scholarship," Schaefer writes, "teaching resembles employment as an educational sales clerk." Thus, schools must be made into centers of inquiry for teachers as well as students if they are to attract teachers as well as students to the life of the mind . 31

The result was a formal proposal by Schwartz and his colleagues for the creation of what they called a "clinical high school" in which "the instruction of children and youth, preservice and inservice teacher education, basic and applied research, and the development of curriculum materials" would all take place, with senior faculty members holding university appointments. 32 With the help of Dean Theodore Sizer and several other members of the Harvard faculty, the proposal was circulated widely among school superintendents and deans of education schools throughout the country. After talks in five cities, the group decided on Portland, which was in the process of building a new comprehensive high school intended to be a center for curricular innovation. The superintendent, Dr. Melvin Barnes, and the board of education offered the new school the setting for the experiment, and Oregon State University, the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, and the Teaching Research Division of the Oregon State System of Higher Education offered joint appointments to the senior members of the clinical school faculty. In August 1968, therefore, Schwartz and three other members of the Harvard group moved to Portland to begin planning for the clinical school, which opened in September 1969.

In a sense, then, Adams High is really two schools: a comprehensive high school; and a professional school concerned with the education of teachers, its own and others, as well as with educational research. The pre-service and in-service teacher education aspects will be discussed in Chapter 11, when we turn to the problem of teacher education. Our concern here is with the way in which the high school function itself is being handled.

The school resembles the ones. we have been describing in a number of respects. For example, students are scheduled for only half of each day. During the other half, they may receive tutoring in math, reading, writing, or some other basic skill, work on an independent study project, participate in a tutoring program or a "work experience" program, take one or more elective courses, or just relax. The electives include a full range of vocational training courses as well as a traditional college preparatory program. And students, in conjunction with their parents, may decide whether to receive conventional letter grades in their required and elective courses, or to take them on a credit-no credit basis. In short, the freedom to be conventional is respected, along with the freedom to experiment.

The most important part of the Adams High day, however, is the scheduled half, in which every student takes a required three-year sequence in general education. The high school is subdivided into four "houses," each containing 320 randomly assigned students, a guidance counselor, a guidance intern, an administrative aide, and its own instructional staff. The staff consists of interdisciplinary teams of teachers, drawn from English, social studies, math, and science, who design, implement, and evaluate a general education program for their house. Since each team is autonomous, it must grapple with the gut question of what ought to be learned, as well as deciding how it should be learned. While the program varies from house to house, it tends to be problem-oriented; the curriculum for the opening week, for example, was created by racial incidents that occurred on opening day. Schwartz's hope is that students and teachers will move from the problems that evoke their interest to a study of the intellectual disciplines needed to illuminate and deal with them-that the general education course, in short, will have serious intellectual content.

The risks are large. For the moment, at least, Adams is committed to heterogeneous grouping in the general education program; one of the questions being tested is how-or whetherthe entire spectrum of student ability and interest can be contained in a single class. The answers are unknown. There is a risk, moreover, of intellectual flabbiness; the young, swinging teachers pride themselves on their ability to relate to their students, and at the beginning tended to pander to them, turning "general education" into a three-hour daily bull session. "I hope the intellectual bankruptcy of that approach will become apparent," Schwartz confessed early in the first semester.

He is relying on more than hope. One of the things that distinguishes Adams from the experiments just described is the hard-headed recognition that structural changes are a means to a larger end and not only an end in themselves. "The critical issues in secondary education have less to do with free time," Schwartz argues, "and more with reordering the curriculum itself, and with involving both teachers and students in the process." It is not a question of either/or; both are essential if a school is to find some tenable middle-ground between the Bruners and Schwabs, on the one side, and the Holts and Friedenbergs on the other. "Admittedly we found it much easier to abolish hall passes, give kids more free time, and in general create a reasonably humane climate than to figure out the essentials of a new curriculum," Schwartz confided midway through the school year. "But without the kind of climate we are creating," he added, "no curriculum would make much difference; the environmental issues must be dealt with before we can wrestle with the what-knowledge-is-of-most-wortli kind of question. 33

What gives reason for hope that the school will come to grips with all the questions is the fact, as the school's senior researchers have written, that "Adams is committed to becoming an experimental school with more than its own intuitive claims to substantiate its value." That commitment in turn means that the school must create and maintain a climate that encourages the teachers themselves, as well as outside scholars, to engage in the systematic study of the processes of teaching and learning and to use such study as a basis for revising the curriculum, the teaching strategies, and the school organization. "Given the publicly stated goals, aims, or objectives of Adams," the researchers continue, "the entire staff has the obligation to confront certain kinds of questions, and the responsibility of seeking personally convincing answers to those questions."

The questions go to the heart of what the school is about:

1. In what ways do you want people to be different after their contact with you than they were before?
2. What would you be willing to accept as evidence that you had succeeded?
3. What would you regard as undeniable evidence that you had failed and therefore should make changes?
4. How might you go about finding some kinds of evidence, however tenuous, for determining either success or failure?
5. How can you gather evidence in a way that is meaningful to someone else? 34

Asking, of course, is not enough; teachers need help in trying to find the answers. Hence the teaching teams work under the guidance of a staff of "curriculum associates" holding joint university and public school appointments. These senior men are expected to "bring a combination of professional competence and skills in scholarly inquiry" that will enable them to provide a kind of leadership and guidance not usually found in secondary schools. Moreover, the school's clinical cbaracter-its attempt to combine the instruction of adolescents, the education of teachers, research on pedagogy, and development of new curricula in a single institution-means that a number of tensions and conflicts are built into its basic structure. Senior staff are responsible to at least two constituencies, the university and the community, which have conflicting interests. The expectation, at least, is that the conflicts will be quite fruitful-tbat "the university will keep the school intellectual and serious, and that the community will keep it relevant and honest." Anyone concerned with reforming secondary education will want to watch the Adams High experiment with the closest interest and attention.

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1 From a letter to the author.