The individual is not born into this reality as a fully functioning, self-actualized, mature adult. Each and every individual must grow, develop, learn, and mature at his or her individualized rate. The first institution for this education is the mother and the family. The next institution is the school. In the United States, children begin school early at five years of age when they enter kindergarten. They are slated to continue for twelve more years until graduation from high school. Those who choose and are able to overcome the financial hurdles and admissions standards for a college education must work four more years to earn their college degree. At this point, individuals who seek a masters degree must continue to work one or two more years depending upon their choice of major for their graduate degree. Doctors and lawyers go to school longer than most students. Tallying this up, individuals in the United States are in school for 13 to 20 years starting from age five. My granddaughter is three years old and she goes to “cool school” (day care) three times a week. So, if all goes well for her she will be in school for at least 15 to 22 years.
Educational institutions are paramount in the formation of the developing character and consciousness of the individual. During my twenty-five plus years of teaching experience, I have witnessed the tension that can easily develop between the educational institution and the family of the child when differences of opinion regarding the upbringing of the child manifests itself. Throughout my teaching career, I have often deferred to the wishes of the family because I believe that the general culture in the United States ascribes strongly to the belief that the rights and responsibilities of parents to care for their children is not to be lightly challenged. I have also challenged the wishes of parents during my teaching career when I could demonstrate that those wishes were actually detrimental to the child. The obvious but extremely dramatic example would be when childhood abuse issues need to be ruled out. Teachers are mandatory reporters. In these extreme cases, civil authorities must be involved again demonstrating that the rights and responsibilities of parents cannot be lightly overruled. Still, there are plenty of less dramatic issues of tension between educators and parents which are raised during parent conferences.
It must also be noted that I experienced more harmony as opposed to disharmony between myself and the parents of the children that I have taught. Overwhelmingly, it was my experience that involved parents have only the best intentions for their children and are willing to listen to the teachers concerns and openly discuss all differing perspectives. Parents who are not involved in their child’s education do not present much of a problem because they are not involved. While lack of involvement greatly reduces tension between the educational institution and the family, non-involvement is not beneficial for the child.
I have taught in private schools and public schools. In my experience there is a significant difference between a private school education and a public school education. Since the state of Massachusetts passed a law that all children must be educated until age 16, the state had to make sure that all children had a school in which to be educated. No state can pass a law which is impossible for the citizens to obey. If the state had no schools, or not enough schools for all children to attend but writes a law that says all children must be educated until age sixteen, then that state, having passed such a law, must provide schools for all children so that all parents have the opportunity to be law-abiding citizens. Hence, education is not a privilege nor a right.
The state is required to make sure that all children have access to the means to be educated until the age required because the state passed a law requiring all children to be educated. Special education laws are not about the privilege nor the right of being educated but about access to education. Therefore, by law, all barriers to education must be removed. Public schools are obliged to educate all children. Private schools are not obliged to teach all children. Expulsions of students in private schools are more easily accomplished than expulsions of students from a public school. The private schools in which I worked had a handbook which all parents had to sign in order to have their children enrolled in that private school. The signed handbook served as a contractual agreement between the private school and the family. Students could be expelled for not following the prescriptions recorded in the handbook.
In the latter years of my career I taught in a public school system that adopted this technique of having a handbook that parents signed as a means to facilitate a clear understanding between the family (parents and children) and the public educational system. The handbook attempted to clearly state the responsibilities of all concerned parties. While this handbook did not remove the obligation of the state to educate all students, it did help in legal procedures when tensions between the school and the family were played out in our judicial system.
I am a believer in clarity. If all parties are clear about the particulars of a given situation, then solutions to problems are more easily discovered than when there is confusion about the particulars. It was my experience that tensions between the family and the educational institution were more easily resolved in the private sector than in the public sector. To be law-abiding citizens, parents did not have to send their child to a private school. Education in the private school was an agreed upon contract between the private school and the family. Abide by the handbook or leave. It was simple. Such a situation is not so simple for public school systems because they are obliged to teach all children.
Given the nature of contractual agreements, private schools are able to clearly define that institution’s value system which it requires all parties to follow. Breaches of that value system form the grounds for expulsion due to a breach of contract. This is the framework that could require non-Catholic students to fully participate in daily Catholic religion classes with respect and diligence mandated by the Catholic elementary school of my primary school years.
It is my belief that public schools have a very difficult time teaching, modeling, and demonstrating a given value system because of the separation of church and state and the diverse opinions of what values to embrace and how to require adherence to that value system. Private educational institutions can be very clear about their expectations whereas public educational institutions tend to be more confused about implementing and operating by a clearly defined value system upon which all parties agree. The value system of our public schools is ultimately the value system delineated by the laws of the United States of America. To get a feel for such a value system, go to a well-stocked law library and take a full measure of all of the texts that explain and delineate the value system expressed by our legal code. Overwhelming! Confusing! Argumentative!
Code of Behavior and the Educational Institution
The code of behavior, which is to say the value system of the educational institution influenced by agápē, is extremely more simple than the legal code represented in the pages of a voluminous and definitive law library. All aspects of said educational institution is based upon one simple prescript:
to facilitate and support the development of each and every individual to the highest level of humanity that the individual can achieve and to develop, maintain, sustain, and model the inherent benefits of reciprocity in facilitating and supporting such a development.
To be crystal clear: This prescript is a value system. Educational techniques, methods, learning theories, and other principles are another matter gleaned from what humanity has recorded over the years as having positive outcomes for the students.
One of the teaching and learning theories or beliefs presented in one of my college classes was that students learn or remember what is modeled over what is said. My experience also taught me that students learn or retain very little from a lecture form of instruction. Adults who were teaching me outside of the school environment also advocated the “learn-by-doing” method. Finally, in the marketplace, knowledge appropriate for the job to be completed is required but that experience in doing the job has very high value. Many believe experience is more valuable than ‘textbook learning’.
Critical conclusion:
Modeling by all of the educational staff is paramount for student success which is facilitated through employing the learning-by-doing approach.
Under this understanding of agápē, what concrete example would demonstrate the effect of agápē influencing structural decisions of the educational institution? Merging the agápē prescript to nurture as previously described with the structural approach of learning-by-doing regarding the inherent benefits of mutual reciprocity would require the facilitation of some type of student-to-student tutelage. To demonstrate such an implementation, I would propose that a portion of the students’ day be designated as a student mentoring study hour. During this time, students would meet with their assigned student mentor to receive assistance from an upper class student to improve personal performance. An obvious organization of this student mentoring hour would be to have:
high school seniors tutor tenth graders (12 – 10),
high school juniors tutor ninth graders (11 – 9),
tenth graders tutor eighth graders (10 – 8),
ninth graders tutor seventh graders (9 – 7),
eighth graders tutor sixth graders (8 – 6),
seventh graders tutor fifth graders (7 – 5),
sixth graders tutor fourth graders (6 – 4),
fifth graders tutor third graders (5 – 3),
fourth graders tutor second graders (4 – 2),
third graders tutor first graders (3 – 1).
First and second grade students would only receive tutoring assistance. The role of providing mentoring services would begin at the third grade level. Kindergarten students are primarily concerned with becoming well acclimated to the social and learning environment of the school. Given the age and maturity level of kindergarten students, they need to be under direct teacher influence at all times during their first year in school.
Another structural example that merges students-mentoring-students with the educational institution would be Student Team Learning which was a method promoted by Johns Hopkins University. I gained my understanding of Student Team Learning from an inservice conference in the fall of 1981. I was teaching in an intercity middle school in Baltimore, Maryland at that time. The student body of this school was entirely African-American. I implemented Student Team Learning in my daily classes as I found it most helpful to have students focus on improving their basic performance while also aiming to perform at their highest level possible. Students in each of my classes were divided up into teams of four students each. Each of these teams were constructed according to criteria set forth by Johns Hopkins University. For a given unit of study, I had to formulate an accurate list of the students in that class form the highest performer to the lowest performer. Each team had:
one student from the group of high performers,
one student from the group of low performers,
two females,
two males,
and cultural and/or racial diversity.
Students would study in teams to prepare for future tests. A pretest on the unit was administered before the unit was introduced. Students were instructed not to worry about doing well on the pretest because the pretest was designed to show the teacher what was already known and unnecessary to teach. A class list from high performers to low performers was constructed from the pretest and previous differences between each student’s pretest/posttest scores. Another factor that teachers should incorporate in rating students would be the learning rate of the student (how fast information is absorbed and understood). Once the pretest had been evaluated and the teams formed, the teacher began teaching the unit. Time was scheduled for teams to study together and assist each other. The goal of course was for every student to learn everything being taught. It has been my experience that it is rare for everyone in the class to get a 100% on every test given. Human children, like human adults, are a diverse group. The practical goal in teaching is to ensure that all students learn all of the basic (needed) information and then learn as much additional unit information as they possibly can.
One aspect of Student Team Learning that I highly valued was the student’s improvement score. Improvement scores were extremely individual and were based on the student’s history of performance. This worked as follows: The pretest was given, then scored and the team was formed. The unit was broken down into digestible chunks and the teacher began teaching the first chunk. Teams had appropriately scheduled time to study and help each other. When the teacher felt that all of the basic information had been absorbed, a test was given and a score was rendered. This score was to be compared to a predicted score based on the student’s past history. If the student matches the predicted score exactly then no improvement points are awarded. If the student’s score was higher than the predicted score, then the improvement points awarded was the post-test score minus (-) the predicted score up to a total of ten points. The team score was the total of all improvement points. Once the first post-test of the first chunk of information in the unit was taken and scored, it was subtracted by two points and became the predicted score for the next test. If a student received a perfect score (100%), then that student received ten improvement points.
Individualizing the evaluation of student performance in this setting was very revealing. Take a look at performances from two students on the same team. One student was from the high performing group of students and the other from the low performance group. The high performer scored a 27 on a 30 item test. The low performer scored a 15. The high performer had a previous test score of 25, so the predicted score was calculated as 23, giving that student an improvement score of 4 points. The low performer had a previous test score of 11, so the predicted score was calculated as 9, giving that student an improvement score of 6 points. To this accounting add one of the average or middle performers to these statistics. The average performer had a predicted score of 22 but scored a perfect test (30). Since this student scored a 100% on the test, this student received 10 improvement points.
Ranking Predicted Score Actual Score Improvement Points % correct
high 23 27 4 90%
middle 22 30 10 100%
low 9 15 6 50%
The student who demonstrated the highest improvement was the middle-ranked student followed by the low-ranked student and lastly the high-ranked student. Mathematical statistics do not tell the whole story when evaluating student performance.
This example is quite good at demonstrating how agápē may affect the educational institution and in turn may affect the general condition of the citizenship. When I implemented Student Team Learning as I described here, I did encounter some tension between myself and some students and families. This tension was, and is, revealing.
The high-ranking student was performing well and many parents would be proud of a score of 90%, but this student had the capacity to answer all questions correctly. While the predicted score was 2 points below his previous actual score of 25, this student should score a perfect test at some point. Depending on a multitude of other considerations I, as the teacher, would not lower this student’s predicted score below a 25 because what I want to see from this student is a perfect score. True improvement for this student is to study more, or to study more efficiently, to gain perfect test scores. I would raise the predictable score of the low performer to 11 and leave the middle-ranked student at the same score to see if that student will score perfectly again. If so, then I would raise that predictable score to 25. This middle performer has the potential to move into the high-performer group.
That said, consider the following alternative to understanding the high performer’s scores. What if this high performer told me that the reason that his or her actual score of 27 was not the perfect score of 30 because that student was spending most of the study time helping the low performer on the team? What would be the correct teacher response? This is the point of distinction between agápē principles and philía principles.
A large part of successfully teaching is knowing when and what student behavior to reinforce. The above scenario of the high performer demonstrates the dilemma that the teacher must resolve. Should the teacher reinforce helping a struggling student or should the teacher encourage this student to abandon the struggling student and focus on personally gaining as much knowledge for him or herself? This situation also demonstrates competing responsibilities of a holistic teacher. The holistic teacher commits to the responsibility of teaching or facilitating the development of the total being of the student. Holistic teachers teach the whole person — the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, the creative, the reflective, and all other components of the complex human being. Other teachers who do not ascribe to holistic teaching commit to teaching the curriculum only — Math teachers teach math; English teachers teach language arts.