The Fundamental Elements and Differences in School curriculum in Kenya.

INTRODUCTION
The modernization development paradigm has dominated the development scene for about half a century now. This is the kind of development that sought to maximize on the immediate concern pertaining to the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth. As a result of the many years of such accumulation; we are informed that one billion of the world’s people live in absolute poverty a condition described by former World Bank president M.C. Namara as so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy and disease as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency. The human development report of the United Nations Development programme (UNDP) also supports this assertion as it observes that, of the 4.6 billion people in the developing countries, more than 850 million are illiterate of these, 64% are women. The report adds that nearly a billion people in developing countries 22% lack access to improved water sources, while 2.4 billion, 52% lack access to basic sanitation. Nearly 325 million primary and secondary age girls and boys are out of school. Of these, 56% are girls ,11 million children under age five are said to be dying each year from preventable cause’s equivalent to more than 30,000 a day. An estimate 1.2 billion people 26% within developing societies live below the international poverty line of less than $1 a day. This reality is said to be unacceptable in the world of plenty.
The report further informs us that a total of 34 million people in developing countries were living with Hiv/Aids by end of 2008. A total of 169 million children underage five were underweight in 2006. While infant mortality in the developed world was 18 per thousand in 1985, the average was 110 per thousand in Africa. Life expectancy was placed at 73 and 50 respectively. If per capita gross national product was the reliable or at least universally acceptable indicator of development, this was US $9,380 for developed world in 1985 against US $750 for Africa.
A recent survey conducted by a local research group, FinAccess show that only 12% of Kenya are employed and 44.2% of the population rely on agriculture as the main source of livelihood. About 18.6% depend on others for financial support as the remaining 15.6% run personal enterprises.
The survey reveals that the group with the highest mean income is the employed with an average salary of Ksh 7,950 per month. The rest have an average of a monthly income of about Ksh 3000. About 0.8% of working Kenyans makes over Ksh 100,000 a month as 1.3 per cent earn between Ksh 50,000 and Ksh 100,000.
Another 6.4 per cent make between Ksh 20,000 and 50,000 a month while 9.9 per cent between Ksh 10,000 and Ksh 20,000 over the same period. Close to 77.7 Kenyans make less than Ksh 10,000 a month. FinAccess says 3.0 per cent of the Kenyans earn nothing at all. Meanwhile, 18.6 per cent make less than 1,000 a month.
Despite the worrying numbers, Kenya is yet to achieve the key middle-income economic status in mid-June 2014 following a move by the government to increase the size of economy by 20 per cent. This has prompted increase investment opportunities that will create thousands of jobs for locals.
According to the European theory, men are divided into classes-some to toil and earn, others to seize and enjoy. According to our modern world theory, all are to have equal chance for earning, and equal security in enjoyment of what they earn. The latter tends to equality of condition the former, to the grossest inequalities. Tried by any Christian standard of morals, or even by any of the better sort of heathen standards, can any one hesitate, for a moment in declaring which of the two will produce the greater amount of human welfare and which therefore is more comfortable to the divine will?
The European theory is blind to what constitutes the highest glory as well as the highest duty of a state. Its advocates and admirers are forgetful of that which should be their highest ambition, and proud of that which constitutes their shame. How can any one possessed of humanity look with satisfaction upon the splendid treasures, the golden regalia, deposited in tower of London or in Windsor palace, each an India in itself; while thousand around are dying of starvation , or have been made criminals by the combined force of temptation and neglect? The present condition of Ireland cancels all the glories of the British crown. The brilliant conception which symbolizes the nationality of Great Britain as a superb temple, whose massive and gran proportions are upheld and adorned by the four hundred and thirty Corinthian columns of the aristocracy, is turned into a loathing and a scorn when we behold the five millions of paupers that cower and shiver at its base. The galleries and fountains of Versailles, the louver of Paris, her Notre Dame, and her madeleine, though multiplied by thousands in number and in brilliancy would be no atonement for the hundred thousand Parisian outriders without bread and without work. The galleries of painting and of sculpture at Rome at munish, or at Presden which odd forth the divinest ideals ever executed or ever or ever conceived, are but an abomination in the sight of hegren and of all good men, while actual living beings- beings that have heart to palpitate and serve to agonize and affection to be crushed or corrupted are experimenting all around them upon the capacities of human nature for suffering and for sin. Where standards like these exist and are upheld by councils and by courts by fashion and by laws, Christianity is yet to be discovered at least, it is yet to be applied in practice to the social condition of men.
But, is it not true that modernity, in some respects, instead of adhering more and more closely to her own theory; is becoming emulous of the baneful example of Europe? The political and economical dynamics between the two extremes of society is lengthening, instead of brighten with every generation, fortunes increase on the hand and some new privation is added to poverty on the other. We are verging towards those extremes of opulence and of penury, each of which unhumanizes the human mind. Perpetual struggle for the base necessaries of life, without ability to obtain them, makes men wolfish. Avarice on the other hand sees in all the victims of misery around it, not objects for pity and succor, but only clued materials to be worked upon into more money.
I suppose it to be the universal sentiment of all those who mingle any ingredient of benevolence with their nations on political economy, that vast and overshadowing private fortune are among the greatest dangers to which the happiness of the people in republic can be subjected. Such fortunes would create a feudalism of a new kind, but one more oppressive and unrelenting than that of the Middle Ages. The feudal lords in England on the continent never held their retainers in a more abject condition of servitude than the great majority of foreign manufactures and capitalists hold their operates and laborers at the present day. The means employed are different; but the similarity in result is striking. What force did then, money does now. The villain of the middle ages had no spot on the earth which he could live, unless one was granted to him by his lord. The operatives or laborer of the present day has no employment and therefore no bread, unless the capitalist will accept his services. The vassal had no shelter but such as his master provide him. The manufacturer or farmer prescribes the rate of wages under whatever pretext he pleases; and they too have no alternative but submission or starvation.
Now, surely nothing had universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, which the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be servile dependents and subjects of the former. But, if education be equally diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor in different classes are essentially antagonistic; but the modern world’s have in some degree, appreciated the truth, that the unexampled prosperity of the state-its comfort, its competence its general intelligence and virtue- its attributable to the education, more or less perfect which all its people have received: but are they sensible of fact equally important namely; that it is to this same education that two thirds of the people are indebted for not being today the vassals of as severe a tyranny, in the form of capital, as the lower classes of Europe are bound to in the form brute force?
Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin is the greatest equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of social machinery .I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make disdain and abhor the oppressions of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor. Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth. The wanton destruction of the property of others- the burning of hay-ricks and corn ricks, the demolition of machinery because it supersedes hand labor, the sprinkling of vitriol or rich dresses- is only agrarianism run mad. Education prevents both the revenge and the madness. On the other hand, a fellow –falling for one’s class or taste is the common instinct of heart not wholly sunk in selfish regards for person or for family. The spread of education by enlarging the cultivated class or taste, will open a wider area over which the social feeling will expand; and, if this education should be more than all things else to obliterate fictitious distinctions in society.
The main idea forth in the creeds of some political reformers or revolutionizers is that, some people are poor because others are rich. This idea supposes a fixed amount of property in the community, which by fraud or force, or arbitrary law is unequally divided among men; and the problem presented for solution is, how to transfer a portion of their property from those who are supposed to have too much to those who feel and know that they have too little. At this point, both their theory and their expectation of reform stop. But the beneficent power of education would not be exhausted even though it should peaceably abolish all miseries that spring from the co-existence, side by side of enormous wealth and squalid want. It has a higher function. Beyond the power of diffusing old wealth, it has the prerogative, of creating new. It is thousandstime more lucrative than fraud and adds thousands –fold more to a nation’s resources than most successful conquest. One time Nelson Mandela said that “Education is the strongest weapon to conquer the world”. Knaves and robbers can obtain only what was before possessed by others. But education creates and develops new treasures-treasures not before possessed or dreamed of by any one.
CAN WE USE SCHOOL TO CREATE A NEW SOCIAL ORDER
If we may now assume that the child will be imposed upon in some fashion by the various elements in his environment, the real question is not whether imposition will take place, but rather from what source it will come. If we were to answer this question in terms of the past, there could, I think be but one answer: on all genuinely crucial matters the school follows the wishes of the groups or classes that actually rule society; on minor matters the school is sometimes allowed a certain measure of freedom. But the future may be unlike the past. Or perhaps I should say that teachers, if they could increase sufficiently their stock of courage, intelligence and vision. Might become a social force of magnitude. About this eventuality I’m not over sanguine, but a society lacking leadership as ours does, might even accept the guidance of teachers. Through powerful organization they might at least reach the public conscience and come to exercise a larger measure of control over the school than hitherto. They would then have to assume some responsibility for more fundamental forms of imposition which, according to my argument can not be avoided.
That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my conviction. To the extent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school there will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes ideals and behavior of coming generation. In doing this they should resort to no sub refuge or false modesty. They should say neither that they are merely teaching the truth nor that they are unwilling to wield power in their own right. First position is false and second is aincompetence. It is my observation that the men and women who have affected the course of human events are those who have not hesitated to use the power that has come to them. Representing as they do, not the interests of the moment or of any special, but rather the common and abiding interest of the people, teachers are under heavy social obligation to protect and further those interest. In this they occupy a relatively unique position in society. Also since the profession should embrace scientist and scholars of the highest rank, as well as teachers working at all levels of educational system, it has at its disposal, as no other group the knowledge and wisdom of the ages. It is scarcely thinkable that those men and women would ever act as selfishly or bungle as badly as have the so called ‘practical’ men of our generation- the politicians, the financiers, the industrialist. If all of these facts are taken into account, instead of shunning power, the profession strives to use that power fully and wisely and in the interest of great masses of the people.
This suggest, as we have already observed that the educational problem is not wholly intellectual in nature. Our 8.4.4 system of education therefore cannot rest content with giving children an opportunity to study contemporary society in all of its aspects. This of course must be done, but I’m convinced that they should go much further. If school are to really effective, they must become centers for the building, and not merely for the contemplation, of our civilization. This does not mean that we should endeavor to promote particular reforms through educational system. We should however, give toour children a vision of possibilities which lie ahead and endeavor to enlist their loyalties and enthusiasm in the realization of a vision. Also our social institutions and practices, all of them should be critically examined in the light of such a vision.
The important point is that fundamental changes in the economic system are imperative. Whatever services historical capitalism may have rendered in the past and they have been many its day are numbered with its deification of the principle of selfishness, its exaltation of the profit motives, its reliance upon the forces of competition, and its placing of property above human rights, it will either have to be displaced altogether or changed radically in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost. In views of the fact that the urge for private gain tends to debase everything that it touches, whether business, recreation, religion art or friendship, the indictment against capitalism has commonly been made on moral grounds. But today the indictment can be drawn in other terms.
Capitalism is proving itself weak at the very point where its champions have thought it impregnable. It is falling to meet the pragmatic test; it no longer works; it is unable even to organize and maintain production. In its present form capitalism is not only cruel and inhuman; it is also wasteful and inefficient. It has exploited our natural resources without the slightest regard for the future needs of our society; it has forced technology to serve the interest of few rather than many; it has chained the engineer to the vagaries and equalities of the price system, it has plunged the greatest nations of the world into a succession of wars ever more devastating and catastrophic in character; and only recently it has brought on the world crisis of such dimensions that entire economic order is paralyzed and millions of men and women in all great industrial countries are deprived of their means of livelihood. The growth of science and technology has carried us into a new age where ignorance must be replaced by knowledge, competition by co-operation, and trust in providence by careful planning and private capitalism by some form of socialized economy.
Already the individualism of the pioneer and the farmer, produced by free land, great distances, economical independence and largely self-sustaining family economy is without solid foundation in either agriculture or industry. Free land has long since disappeared. Great distances have been shortened immeasurably by invention. Economics independence, survives only in the traditions of our people. Self-sustaining family economy has been swallowed up in a vast society which even refuses to halt before the boundaries of nations. Already we live in an economy which in it functions is fundamentally cooperative. There remains the task of reconstructing our economic institution and reformulating our social ideals so that they may be in harmony with the underlying facts of life. The man who would live unto himself alone must retire from modern world. The day of individualism in the production and distribution of goods is gone. The fact cannot be overemphasized that choice is no longer between two forms of collectivism: the one essentially democratic, the other feudal in spirit; the one devoted to interest of the people, the other to the interests of a privileged class.
The objection is course raise at once that a planned, coordinated and socialized economy managed in the interest of the people, would involve severe restrictions on personal freedom. Undoubtedly in such economy the individual would not be permitted to do many things that he has customarily done in the past. He would not be permitted to carve a fortune out of the natural resources of the nation , to organize a business purely for the purpose of making money, to build a new factory or railroad whenever and wherever he pleases, to throw the economic system out of gear for the protection of his own private interests to a mass or to attempt to a mass of great riches by the corruption of his political life, the control of the organs of opinion, the manipulation of the financial machinery, the purchase of brains and knowledge, or the exploitation of ignorance frailty and misfortune. In exchange for such privileges as these, which only the few could ever enjoy we would secure the complete and uninterrupted functioning of the production system and thus lay the foundations for a measure of freedom for the many that mankind have never known in the past. Freedom without a secure economic foundation is the only word: In our society it may be freedom to beg, steal, or starve. The right to vote, if it cannot be made to insure the right to work is, but an empty bauble. Indeed it may be less than a bauble: It may serve to drug and dull the senses of the masses. Today only the members of the plutocracy are really free and even in their ease freedom is rather precarious. If all of us could be assured of material security and abundances, we would be released from economic worries and our energies liberated to grapple with thecentered problems of cultural advance. Also, let those whose memories reach back a dozen years, recall the ruthlessness with which the privileged classes put down every expression of economic or political dissent during the period immediately following post independence in Kenya. When property is threatened constitutional guarantees are but scraps of paper and even the courts and churches, with occasional exceptions, rush to support the privilege and vested interest.
Under existing conditions however, no champion of the democratic way of life can view the future with equanimity. If democracy is to be is to be achieved in the industrial age, powerful classes must be persuaded to surrender their privileges and institutions deeply routed in popular prejudice will have to be radically modified or abolished. And according to the historical record, this process had commonly been attended by bitter struggle and even bloodshed. Ruling classes never surrender their privileges voluntarily. Rather do they cling to what they have been a costumed to regard as their rights, even though the heavens fall? Men customarily defend their property; however it may have been acquired as tenaciously as the proverbial “Mother defends her young”. There is little evidence from the pages of Kenyan history to support us in hope we may adjust our difficulties through the method of sweetness and light since the settlement of the first colonist among them, the young man who boarded the ss matiana; destined for Mombasa, Michael Blundel was barely 19 years old, when he got board the ship in October 1925.
His mission was clear: he was determined to tame Africa and learn farming. A month later Blundel was disabused of all his romantic dreaming of Africa when his ship docked in Mombasa and he had to wade through deep waters in a boat to dry land as there were no berth. The recollections of the man who opted out of law degree to venture in Africa where he would chart Kenya’s post independence and colonial times acting as a bridge between the colonialist and the freedom fighters are captured in his book” A love affair with the sun”. Rail commuter transport at the time was at its infancy.
Although he had sacrificed the comfort of London to learn farming in Kenya, Blundel was shocked to learn that he waste break his back for the next one year without pay. But he considered himself lucky because some sons of Britain’s aristocracy had to pay as much as ￡ 30 a month to be taught how to tame the African jungle by failed farmers.
This is a dark picture. If we look at the future through the eyes of the past, we find little reasons for optimism. If there is to be no break in our tradition of violence, if a bold and realistic program of education is not forthcoming, we can only anticipate of a struggle on increasing bitterness terminating in revolution and disaster. And yet, as regards the question of property, the present situation has no historical parallel. In earlier paragraphs I have pointed to the possibility of -completely disposing of economical problem. For the first time in history we are able to produce all the goods and services that our people can consume. The justification, or at least the rational bases, of the age-long struggle for property has been removed. This situation gives to teachers an opportunity and a responsibility unique in the annuals of education.
In an economy of scarcity, where the population always tends to outstrip the food supply, any attempt to change radically the rules of the game must inevitably lead to trial by the sword. But in an economy of plenty, which the growth of technology has made entirely possible, the conditions are fundamentally altered. It is natural and understandable for men to fight when there is scarcity, whether it isover air, water, food or women. For them to fight over the material goods of life in Kenya today is sheer insanity. Through the courageous and intelligent reconstruction of their economic institutions they could all obtain not only physical security, but also the luxuries of life and as much leisure as men could ever learn to enjoy. For those who take delight in combat, ample provision for strife could course be made, but the more cruel aspects of the human struggle would be considerably softened. As the possibilities in our society begin to dawn upon us, we are all, I think growing increasingly weary of the brutalities, the stupidities, the hypocrisies and the gross inanities of contemporary life. We have a haunting feeling that we were born for better things and that the nation itself is falling far short of its powers. The fact that other groups refuse to deal boldly and realistically with the present situation does not justify the teachers of the country in their customary policy times are literally crying for a new vision of Kenyan destiny. The teaching profession, or at least its progressive elements, should eagerly grasp the opportunity which the fate has placed in their hands.
Such a vision of what Kenya might become in the industrial age I would introduce into our school as the supreme imposition, but one to which our children are entitled- a priceless legacy which it should be the first concern of our profession to fashion and bequeath. The objection will of course be raised that this is asking teachers to assume unprecedented social responsibilities. But we live in difficult and dangerous times – times when precedents lose their significance. If we are content to remain where all is safe and quiet and serene, we shall dedicate ourselves as teachers have commonly done in the past, to a role of futility, if not of positive social reaction. Naturally with respect to the great issues that agitate society, while perhaps theoretical possible is practically tantamount to giving support to the forces of conservatism. As justice Holmes has candidly saidin his essay on natural law,” We all, whether we know it or not, are fighting to make the kind of world that we should like” if naturality is impossible even in the dispensation of justice, whose emblem is the blind-folded goddess, how is it to be achieved in education ? To ask the question is to answer it.
To refuse to face the task of creating a vision of a future Kenya immeasurably more just and noble and beautiful than the Kenya of today is to evade the most crucial; difficult and important educational task. Until we have assumed this responsibility we are scarcely justified in imposing and mocking the efforts of so called patriotic society to introduce into the school a tradition which, though narrow and unenlightened, nevertheless representing an honest attempt to meet a profound social and educational need. Only when we have fashioned a finer and more authentic vision than they, will we be fully justified in our opposition to their efforts. Only then will we have discharged the age long obligation which the older generation owes to the younger and which no amount of sophistry can obscure. Only through such a legacy of spiritual values will our children be enabled to find their place in the world, be lifted out of the present morass of moral indifference, be liberated from senseless struggle for material success, and be challenged to high endeavor and achievement. And only thus will we as a people put ourselves on the road to the expression of our peculiar genius and to the making of our special contribution to the cultural heritage of our race.
2.0 THE SAMPLE OF SCHOOLS
With the above discussion as a theoretical backdrop, the social-class designation of each of the five schools will be identified and the income, occupation and other relevant available social characteristics of the students and their parents will de described. The first three schools are in medium sized informal settlements in Nairobi, and the other two are in a nearby Nairobi suburb.
The first two schools I will call working-class schools. Most of the parents have temporary and unstable jobs. Less than a third of the fathers are skilled, while the majorities are unskilled or semiskilled jobs. During the period of this study (2011-2013), approximately 74 percent of the fathers were unemployed. The following occupations are typical factory workers, construction workers, watchmen, domestic workers welders, semiskilled and unskilled assembly line operatives, petro station attendants, auto mechanics and maintenance workers. Less than 20 per cent of the women work, some part-time and some full-time, on assembly lines, textile and stores, as waitress, barmaids, or sales clerks. Of the standard eight parents, none of the wives of the skilled workers had jobs. Approximately 10 per cent of the families in each school are at or below the UN poverty line of US $1.25 a day, most of the rest of the family incomes are at or below Ksh 3000 except some of the semi-skilled workers whose incomes are higher. The income of the majority of incomes is higher. The income majority of the families in the two schools (at or below Ksh 7,950) are typical of approximately 79 percent of the families in Kenya.
The third school is called the middle-class school, although because of neighborhood residence pattern, the population is a mixture of several social classes. The parents occupations can be divided into three groups: a small group of blue collar workers who are skilled and well paid workers such as printer in medium sized media houses, the second group is composed of parents in working-class and middle-class white collar-jobs: women in office jobs, technicians, supervisors in industries, and parents employed by the city council (such as firemen, policemen and several of the school teachers). The third group is composed of occupation such as personnel managers in local firms, accountants, middle management and a few small traders (owners of shop in the area). The children of several local medical practitioners attend this school. Most family income is between Ksh 20000-50000, with a few higher. This income range is typical of 6.4 percent of the families in Kenya.
The forth school has a parent population that is at the upper income level of the upper middle-class and is predominantly professional. This school will be called the affluent professional school. Typical jobs are cardiologists, corperate, lawyers, or engineer; executive in media houses. There are some families who are not as affluent as the majority (the family of the superintendent of the district’s school and the one or two families are in which the fathers are skilled workers). In addition, a few of the families are more affluent that the majority and can be classified in capitalist class (a partner in a prestigious Nairobi stock exchange and some brokerage firms). Most family incomes are between Ksh 250,000-500,000. This income span represents approximately 0.6 per cent of the families in Kenya.
In the school the majority of the families belong to the capitalist class. This school because most the fathers are top executive in the government (for example the senators, governors, permanentsecretaries, state ministers). C.E.O in major multinational cooperation-for example, Safaricom, East Africa breweries, BAT, Sameer group, G.M. A sizeable group of fathers are top executive in all the financial firms in Kenya. There are also a number of fathers who list their occupations “general counsel” to Particular Corporation and these corporations are also among the large multinationals. Many of the mothers do voluntary works in junior league, lion’s club rotary, other services groups, some are intricately involved in party politics, and some are themselves in well paid occupations. Almost all the families income are over 950,000, with some in the Ksh 1.8 million range. The incomes in this school represent less than 0.1 per cent of the families in Kenya.
Since each of the five schools is only one instances of elementary education in a particular social context, I will not generalize beyond the samples. However, the examples of school work which follow will suggest characteristic of education in each social setting that appears to have theoretical and social significance and be worth investigation in a larger number of schools.
3 SOCIALCLASSES AND SCHOOLWORK
There are obvious similarities among schools and classrooms. There are school and classrooms rules teachers who ask questions and attempt to exercise control and who give work and homework. There are textbooks and test. All of these were found in the five schools. Indeed, there were other curricular similarities as well: all school and standard eight used the same math book and series; all standard eight had at least one boxed set of an individualized reading program available in the room (although the variety and amounts of teaching materials in classrooms increased as the social class of the school population increased and, all standard eight language arts curriculum included aspects of grammar.
This section provides examples of work and work related activities I each school that bear on the categories used to divine social class. Thus, example, will be provided concerning students relation to capital (for example, as manifested in any symbolic capital that might be acquired through schoolwork) students relation to person and types of authority regarding school work; and students relation to their own productive activity. The section first offers the investigator’s interpretation of what schoolwork is for the children in each setting and then presents events and interactions that illustrate the assessment,
3.1 WORKING-CLASS SCHOOLS.
In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow. These notes are to be studied. Work is often evaluated not according to whether the children followed the right steps.
The following examples illustrate these points. In math, when two digit divisionswere introduced, the teacher in one school gave a four minute lecturer on what the terms are called ;( which number is the divisor, divided, quotient and reminder). The children were told to copy these names in their note books. Then the teacher told them the steps to follow to do the problems, saying “This is how you do them”. The teacher listed the steps on the board, and they appeared several days later as a chart hung in the middle of the front wall: “Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring down”. The children often did examples of two-digit division. When the teacher went over the examples with them, he told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it themselves. “Three into twenty –two are seven: do your subtraction and one is left over”. During the week that two digit division was introduced (or at any other time) the investigator did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate two-digit division to any attempt to relate two –digit division to any other mathematical process. Nor was there any attempt to relate the steps to an actual or possible thought process of the children. The observer did not hear. The terms “divided, quotient” and so on, used again. The math teacher in the other working-class school followed similar procedure regarding two –digit division and at one point her class seemed confused. She said, “You’re confusing yourselves. You’re tensing up. Remember, when you do this, it’s the same steps over and over again-and that’s the way division always is”. Several weeks later, after a test, a group of her children, “still didn’t get it” and she made no attempt to explain the concept of dividing things into groups or to give them manupilbles for their own investigation. Rather, she went over the steps with them again and told them that they” needed more practice”.
In the other areas of math, work is also carrying out often unexplained fragmented procedures. For example, one of teachers led the children through a series of steps. To make a 1-inch grid on their paper without telling them that were to making 1-inch grid or that it would be used to study scale. She said,’ take your ruler. Put it across the top make a mark at every number. Then move your ruler down to the bottom. No, put it across the bottom. Now make a mark on top of every number. Now draw a line from……..” at this point a girl said that she had a faster way to do it and the teacher said, “No, you don’t; you don’t even known what I’m making yet. Do it this way or it’s wrong.” After they had made the lines up and down and across, the teacher told them she wanted them to make a figure by connecting some dots and to measure that using the scale of 1-inch equals 7km. Then they were to cut it out. She said “Don’t cut until I check it”.
In both working class schools, work in language arts is mechanics of punctuation (commas, periods, question marks, and exclamation points), capitalization and the four kinds of sentences. One teacher explained to me, “Simple punctuation is all they’ll ever use”. Regarding punctuation, either a teacher or ditto stated the rules for where, for example, to put commas. The investigator heard the classroom discussion of the aural context of punctuation (which of course is what gives each mark its meaning) nor did the investigator hear any statement or interence that placing a punctuation mark could be a decision-making process, depending for example, on one’s intended meaning. Rather, the children were told to follow the rules. Language arts did not involve creative writing. There were several writing assignment throughout the year, but in each instances the children were given ditto, and they wrote answers to questions on the sheet. For example, they wrote their “autobiography” by answering such questions, as “where were you born?” “What is your favorite animal?” on a sheet entitled “all about me”.
In one of the working-class, had a science period several time a week. On the three occasions observed the children were not called upon to set up experiments or to give explanations for the facts or concepts. Rather on each occasion the teacher told them in his own words what the book said. The children copied the teacher’s sentences form the board. Each day that preceded the day they were to do a science experiment, the teacher told them to copy the directions from the book for the procedure they would carry out the next day and each experiments, the teacher went over what they had “found” (they did the experiments as a class, and each was actually a class demonstration led by the teacher). Then the teacher wrote what they have “found” on the board, and the children copied that in their notebooks. Once or twice a year there are science projects. The projects is chosen and assigned by the teacher from a box of 3-by-5 inch cards. On the card the teacher has written the question to be answered, the books to use and how much to write. Explaining the cards to the observer, the teacher said,” it tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn’t do it”.
Social studies in the working-class schools is also largely mechanical, rote work that was given little explanation or connection to larger contexts. In one school, for example although there was a book available, social studies work was to copy the teacher’s notes from the board. Several times a week for a period of several months the children copied these notes. The standard eight classes in one of the schools were to study” history and the government of Kenya”. The teacher used booklet she had been issued with, by the ministry of education. Each day she put information from booklet in outline form on the board and the children copied it. The type of information did not vary: the name of province, its main products, main business, and the tribes in these regions. As the children finished coping the sentences, the teacher erased them and wrote more .Children would occasionally go to the front to pull down the wall map in order to locate the province they were copying, and the teacher did not dissuade them. But the observer never saw her refer to the map; nor did the observer ever hear her make other than perfunctory remarks connecting the information the children were copying. Occasionally the children colored in a ditto and cut it out to make a stand-up figure (representing, for example a man roping a cow in central). These were referred to by the teacher as their social studies “projects”.
Rote behavior was often called for in classroom work. When goingover math and language arts skills sheets, for example, as the teacher asked for the answers to each problem, he fired questions rapidly and the scene reminded the observer of a sergeant drilling recruits; above all the questions demanded that you stay at attention:” The next one? What do I put here.....Here? Give us the next” or “How many commas in these sentences? Where do I put them……The next one?”
The four standard six teachers observed in the working-class schools attempted to control classroom time and space by making decisions with out consulting the children and without explaining the basis for their decisions. The teacher’s control thus often seemed capricious. Teachers, for instance, very often ignored the bells to switch classes-decide among themselves to keep the children often the period was officially over to continue with the work or for disciplinary reasons or so(the teacher) could stand in the hall and talk. There were no clocks in the rooms in both school and children often asked, “What period is this?” “When do we go for games?” The children had no access to materials. These were handed out by teachers and closely guarded things in the room “belongs” to the teacher. “Kioko, bring me my garbage can.” The teacher continually gave children orders. Only three times did the investigator hear the teacher in either working-class school preface a directive with unsacarstic “please” or “let’s “ or “would you”. Instead, the teachers said “Throw you gum away- if you want to rot your teeth, do it at your own time”. Teacher made every effort to control the movement of the children, and often shouted, “why are you out of your seat?!!! If children get permission to leave the classroom, they had to take a written pass with time and date.
The control that the teacher is less than they would like. It is a result of constant struggle with the children. The children continually resist the teachers’ order and the work itself. They do not directly challenge the teacher’s authority or legitimacy, but they make indirect attempts to sabotage and resist the flow of assignments.
Teacher: I will put some problems on board. You are to divide.
Child: We got divide?
Teacher: Yes
Several children :( Groan) not again. Teacher Wanjiku, we have done this yesterday.
Child: Do we put the date?
Teacher: Yes. I hope we remember we work in silence. You are supposed to do it on white paper. I’ll explain it later.
Child: Somebody broke my pencil. (Crash- a child falls out of his desk.)
Child: (repeats) Teacher Wanjiku, somebody broke my pencil.
Child: Are we going to be here all morning? (Teacher comes to observe, shakes his head and grimaces, and then smiles.)
The children are successful enough in their struggle against work that there are long periods where they are not asked to do any work but just to sit and be quiet. Very often the work that the teachers assign is “easy”, that is, not demanding and thus receives less resistance. Sometimes a compromise is reached where, although the teachers insist that the children continue to work, there is a constant murmur of talk. The children will be doing arithmetic examples, copying social studies notes, or doing punctuation or other dittos, and all the while there is muted but spirited conversation-about somebody’s broken arm, an afternoon disturbances the day before and so on. Sometimes the teachers themselves joining in the conversation because, as one teachers themselves joining in the conversation because, as one teacher explained to me, “it is a relief from routine.”

3.2 MIDDLE-CLASS SCHOOL.
In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If one accumulates enough right answers, one gets a good grade. One must follow the directions in order to get the right answers but the directions often call for some figuring some choice, some decision making. For example thechildren must often figure out by themselves what the directions asked them to do and how to get the answer: What do you do first, second, and perhaps third? Answers are usually found in books or listening to the teachers. Answers are usually words, sentences, numbers, or facts and date one writes them on the paper and one should be neat. Answers must be given in the right order and one cannot make up.
The following activities are illustrative. Math involves some choice: one may do two-digit division the long way or the short way, and there are some math problems that can be done “in your head”. When the teacher explains how to do two-digit division, there is recognition that cognitive process is involved; she gives several ways and says, “I want to make sure you understand what you’re doing- So you get it right” and, when they go over the homework, she asks the children to tell how they did the problem and what answer they got.
In social studies the daily work is to read the assigned pages in the text book and to answer the teacher’s questions. The questions are almost always designed to check on whether the students have read the assignment and understood it: who did so-and-so; what happened after that, when did it happen, where and sometimes, why did it happen? The answers are in the book and in one’s understanding of the book, the teacher’s hints when one doesn’t know the answers are to “read it again or to look at the picture or at the rest of the paragraph. One is to search for the answer in the “context” in what is given.
Language arts are “simple grammar what the need for everyday life.” The language art teacher says, “They should learn to speak properly, to write business letters and thank-you letters, and to understand what nouns and verbs and simple subjects are”. Here, as well, actual work is to choose the right answers, to understand what is given. The teacher often says,” Please read the next sentence and then I’ll question you about it”. One teacher said in some exasperation to a boy who was fooling around in the class, “if you don’t know the answers to the question I ask, and then you can’t stay in this class! [Pause] you never know the answers to the questions I ask and it is not fair to me- and certainly not you!”
Most lessons are based on the textbook. This does not involve a critical perspective on what is given there for example, a critical perspective in social studies is perceived as dangerous by these teachers because it may lead to controversial topics; the parents might complain. The children however, are often curious, especially in social studies. The questions are tolerated and usually answered perfunctorily. But after a few minutes the teacher will says, “All right we’re not going any further. Please open your social studies workbooks.” While the teacher spend a lot of time explaining and expanding on what the textbook says, there is little attempt to analyze how or why things happens , or give thought to how pieces of culture, or say, a system of numbers or elements of language fit together or can be analyzed. What has happened in the past and what exist now may not be equitable orfair, but (shrug) that is the way things are and one does not confront such matters in school. For example, in social studies after a child is called on read a passage about the pilgrims, the teacher summarizes the paragraph and then says, “So you can see how strict they were about everything. A child asks, “Why?” “Well, because they felt that if you’re not busy you’d get into trouble” Another child asks, “is it true that they burned women at the stake?” The teacher says, yes, if a woman did anything strange, they hanged them” (sic) what would a woman do you think, to make them, them burn them?(sic) see if you can come up with better answers than my other (Social studies) class” several children offer suggestion to which the teacher nods but does not comment. Then she says “Okay, good” and calls on the next child to read.
Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either linguistically or in graphic form. On the occasions when creativity or self-expression is requested, it is peripheral to main activity or it is enrichment or ‘fun’. During a lesion on what similes are, for example, the teacher explains what they are, puts several on the board, gives some other examples herself, and then asks the children if they can “make some up”. She calls on three children who give similes, two of which are actually in the book they have opened before them. The teacher does not comment on this and then asks several others to choose similes from the list of phrase in the book. Several do so correctly, and she says, “Oh good! You are picking them out! See how good we are?” Their homework is to pick out the rest of the similes from the list.
Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects, either. Social studies projects, for example, are given with direction to “find information on your topic” and write it up. The children are not supposed to copy but to “put it in your own words” Although a number of projects subsequently went beyond the teacher’s direction to find information and had quite expressive covers and inside illustrations, the teacher’s evaluative comments had to do with the amount of information, whether they had “copied” and if their work is neat.
The style of control of the three standard six class teachers observed in this school varied from some what easy going to strict, but in contrast to working-class schools, the teachers decision were usually based on external rules and regulation-for example, on criteria that were known or available to the children. Thus, the teachers always honor the bells for changing classes, and they usually evaluate children’s work by what is in the textbooks and answer booklets.
There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children, and the assignments are perceived as having little to do with their interests and feelings. As one child said, what you do is “store facts up in your head like cold storage- until you need it later for a test or your job”. Thus, doing well is important because there are thought to be other likely rewards: a good job or college.
3.3 AFFLUENT PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL
In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. The students are continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involves individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas and choice of appropriate math and material. (The class is not considered an open class-room, and the principal explained that because of the large number of displine problems in standard six classes this year they did not departmentalize. The teacher who agreed to take part in the study said she is “more structured” this year than before) the products of work in this class are often written stories, editorials and essays, or representation of ideas in mural, graph or craft form. The products of work should not be like everybody else’s and should show individuality. They should exhibits good design, and (this is important) they must also fit empirical reality.
Moreover, one’s work should attempt to interpret or” make sense” of reality. The relatively few rules to be followed regarding work are usually criteria for; or limits on, individual activity. One’s product is usually evaluated for the quality of its expression and for the appropriateness of its conception to the task. In many cases one’s own satisfaction with the product is an important criterion for its evaluation. When the right answers are called for, as in commercial material like”Knowzone” it is important that the children decide on an answer as result of thinking about the idea involved in what they’re being asked to do. Teacher’s hints are to “Think about it some more”
The following activities are illustrative. The class takes home a sheet requesting each child’s parents to fill in the number of cars they have, number of television sets, refrigerators, games, or rooms in the house and so on. Each child is to figure the average number of types of possession owned by the standard five families for comparison. There work should be “verified” by classmates before handing it in.
Each child and his family have made a geoboard. The teacher asks the class to get their geoboards, from the side cabinet, to take a handful of rubber bands and then to listen to what she would like them to do. She says, “I would like you to design a figure and then find the perimeter and area. When you have it, check with your neighbor. After you have done that, please transfer it to take the graph paper and tomorrow I’ll ask you to make up a question about it for someone. When you hand it in, please let me know whose it is and who verified it. Then I have something else for you to do that’s really fun.(pause) find the average number of chocolate chips in three cookies I’ll give you three cookies, and you’ll have to eat your way through, I’m afraid!” Then she goes around the classroom and gives help, suggestions, praise and admonitions that they are getting noisy. They work sitting or standing up at their desks, at benches in the back or on the floor. A child hands the teacher his paper and she comments, “I’m not accepting this paper. Do a better design”. To another child she says, “That’s fantastic! But you’ll never get the area. Why don’t you draw a figure inside [the big one] and subtract to get the area?”
The school county requires the standard six classes to study ancient civilization (in particular, Egypt and Burkina Faso. In this classroom, the emphasis is on illustrating and re-creating the culture of the people of ancient times. Thefollowing are typical activities: The children made an 8mm film on Egypt, which one of the parents edited. A girl in the class wrote the scripts, and the class acted it out. They put the sound on themselves. They read the stories of those days. They wrote essays and stories depicting the lines of the people and societal and occupational divisions. They choose from the list of projects, all of which involved grapic representations of ideas: for example make a mural depicting the division of labor in Egyptian society”.
Each child wrote and exchanges a letter in hieroglyphics with a standard six class in another class, and they also exchanged stories they wrote in cuneiform. They made a scroll and signed the edges so it looked authentic. They made each an occupation and made an Egyptian plague representing the occupation, simulating the appropriate Egyptian design. They carved their design on a cylinder of wax, pressed the wax into a clay, and then baked the clay. Although one girl did not choose an occupation but carved instead a series of gods and slaves, the teacher said, that’s all right Maggy, its beautiful” As they were working, the teacher said, “Don’t cut into your clay until you’re satisfied with your design”.
Social studies also involve almost daily presentation by the children of some events from the news. The teacher’s questions asked the children to expand what they say, to give more details, and to be more specific. Occasionally she adds some remarks to help them see connections between events.
The emphasis on expressing and illustrating ideas in social studies is accompanied in language arts by an emphasis on creative writing. Each child wrote a rebus story for the standard one class who they had interviewed to see what kind of story the child liked best. They wrote editorials on pending decisions by the school board and radio plays, some of which were read over the school intercom from the office and one of which was performed in the auditorium. There is no language art textbook because, the teacher said. “ The principal want us to be creative.” There is not much grammar, but there is punctuation. One morning when the observer arrived, the class was doing punctuation ditto. The teacher later apologized for using the ditto. “It’s just for review,” she said “I don’t punctuate that way. We use their language.” The ditto had three unambiguous rules for where to put commas in the sentences. As the teacher was going around to help the children with ditto, she repeated several times,” where you put commas depends on how you say the sentence. It depends on the situation and what you want to say.” Several weeks later, the observer saw another punctuation activity. The teacher had printed a five paragraph story on an oak tag and then cut it into phrases on the floor). The point was not to replicate the story, although that was not irrelevant. But to, “decide what you think the best way is”. Punctuation marks on cardboard pieces were then handed out, and the children discussed and then decided what mark was best at each paragraph the teacher asked,” Are you satisfied with the way the paragraphs are now? Read it to yourself and see how it sounds. “Then she read the original story again, and they compared the two.
Describing her goals in science to the investigator, the teacher said, “We use ESS (elementary science study) it is very good because it gives a hand on experience-so that they can make sense out of it. It doesn’t matter whether it [what they find] is right or wrong. I bring them together and there’s value in discussing their ideas”.
The products of work in this class are often highly valued by the children and the teacher. In fact this was the only school in which the investigator was not allowed to take the original pieces of the children’s work for her files. If the work was small enough, however and was on paper, the investigator could duplicate it on the copying machine in the office.
The teacher attempt to control the class involves constant negotiation. She does not give direct orders unless she is angry because children have been too noisy. Normally she tries to get them to foresee the consequences of their actions and to decide accordingly-for example, lining them up to go see a play written by the standard seven class. She says. “I presume you’re lined up by someone with whom you want to sit. I hope you’re lined up by someone you won’t get in trouble with” The following two dialogues illustrate the process of negotiation between students and teacher.
Teacher: James, you’re behind in your SRA this making period.
James: so what
Teacher:Well, last time you had a hard time catching up.
James: But I have my (music) lesson at 10:00
Teacher: Well, that doesn’t mean you’re going to sit here for twenty minutes.
James : Twenty minutes!ok.(he goes to pick out on SRA booklet and chooses one, put it back, then takes another one, and bring it to her.)
Teacher: Ok, this is the one you want, right?
James:Yes.
Teacher:Ok, I’ll put tomorrow’s date on it so you can take it home tonight or finish it tomorrow. If you want.
Teacher :( To a child who is wandering around during reading) Kevin, why don’t you do reading for concepts?
Kevin:No, I don’t like reading for concepts.
Teacher:Well, what are you going to do?
Kevin: (pause) I’m going to work for my science project.
One of the few governing the children movement is that no more than three children may be out of the classroom at once. There is school rule that anyone can go to the library at any time to get a book. In the standard six classes I observed, they sign their name on the chalkboard and leave. There no passes. Finally, the children have a fair amount of officially sanctioned say over what happens in the class. For example, they often negotiate what work is to be done. If the teacher want to more on the next subject, but the children say they are not ready, they want to work on their present projects some more. She very often lets them do it.
3.4EXECUTIVE ELITE SCHOOL
In the executive elite school, work is developing one’s analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a problem. Schoolwork helps one to achieve, to excel and to prepare for life.
The following are illustrative. The math teacher teaches areas and a perimeter by having the children derives formulas for each. First she helps them, through discussion at the board, to arrive at A=W*L as a formula (not the formula) for area. After discussing several, she says “can anyone make up a formula for perimeter? Can you figure that out yourselves? (Pause) knowing what we know, can we think of a formula? She works out three children suggestions at the board, saying to two yes, that’s good one”, and then asks the class if they can think of any more. No one volunteers. To prod them, she says, “If you use rules and good reasoning, you get many ways” Peter, can you think up a formula?”
She discusses two-digit division with children as a decision-making process. Presenting a new type of problem to them, she asks, “What is the first thing you’d think? Scolla?” Scolla says, “To find my first partial quotient”. She responds, “Yes that would be your first decision. How would you do that?” Scolla explains, and then the teacher says, “Ok, we’ll see how that works for you”. The class tries this way. Subsequently, she comments on the merits and short comings of several other children’s decisions. Later, she tells the investigator that her goals in math are to develop their reasoning and mathematical thinking and that unfortunately, “there’s no time for manipulables”.
While right answers are important in math, they are not “given” by the book or by the teacher but May challenged by the children. Going over some problems in late May, September the teacher says,” Raise you hand if you do not agree”. A child says, “I don’t agree with sixty-four” [to class] please check it.Owen, they are disagreeing with you. Kristen, they are checking yours. “The teacher emphasized this repeatedly during September and October with statements like, “Don’t be afraid to say you disagree. In the last [math] class, somebody disagreed and if you still think we’re wrong then we will check it out” By thanksgiving, the children did not often speak in terms of right and wrong math problems but of whether they agreed with the answer that had been given.
There are complicated math mimeos with many wordproblems. Whenever they go over the examples they discuss how each child has set up the problem. The children must explain it precisely. On one occasion the teacher said, “I’m more-just as-interested in how you set up the problem as in what answers you find. If you set up the problem in a good way, the answer is easy to find”.
Social studies work is most after reading and discussion of concepts and independent research. There are only one occasionartistic, expressive or illustrative project. Ancient Athens and summer are rather societies to analyze. The following questions are typical of those that guide the children mistake did parcels make after the war?” What mistakes did the citizens of Athens make? “What are the elements of civilization?” How did Greece build an economic empire?” “Compare the way Athens chooses its leaders with the way we choose ours.” Occasionally the children are asked to make up sample question for their social studies tests. On an occasion when the investigator was present, the social studies teacher rejected a child’s question by saying, “That’s just a fact. If I asked you a question on a test, you’d complain it was just a memory! Good question, asked for concepts”.
In social studies-but also in reading, science and health-the teachers initiated classroom discussion of current social issues and problems. These discussions occurred on every one of the investigator’s visit and teacher told me, “These children’s opinions are important-it is important that they learn to reason thing through.” The classroom discussions always struck the observer as quite realistic and analytical, dealing with concrete social issues like the following: “Why do we have inflation, and what can be done to stop it “Why do companies put chemicals in food when the natural ingredients are available.” and so on. Usually the children did not have to be prodded to give their opinions. In fact, their statements and the inter-changes between them struck the observer as quite sophisticated conceptually and verbally and well informed. Occasionally the teachers would prod with statements such as, “Even if you don’t know [the answer], if you think logically about it, you can figure it out.” And, “I’m asking you [these] questions to help you think this through.”
Language arts emphasized language as complex system, one that should be mastered. The children are asked to diagram sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize irregular verb conjunction (he lay, he has lain, and so on…..), and to use the proper participles, conjuctions and interjection in their speech. The teacher (the same one who teaches social studies) told them, “It is not enough to get these right on the test; you must use what you learn [in grammar classes] in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that.”
Most writing assignment isboth research reports and essays for social studies or experiments analyses and write-ups for science. These are only an occasional story or other “Creative writing assignment. On the occasion observed by the investigator (the writing of a Halloween story), the points the teacher stressed in preparing the children to write involved the structural aspects of a story rather than the expression of feelings or other ideas. The teacher showed them a filmstrip, “seven parts of a story,” and lectured them on a plot development, mood, setting, characterdevelopment, consistency and the use of logical or appropriate ending. The story they subsequently wrote were, in fact, well-structured, but many were also personal and expressive. The teacher’s evaluative comments, however, did not refer to the expressiveness or artistry but were all directed toward whether they had “developed” the story well.
Language arts work also involved a large amount of practice in presentation of the self in managing situations where the child was expected to be in charge. For example, there was a series of assignment in which each child had to be a “student teacher”. The child had to plan a lesson in grammar, outlining, punctuation or other language arts topic and explain the concepts to the class. Each child to prepare a worksheet or game and homework assignment as well. After each presentation, the teacher and other children gave a critical appraisal of the (student teacher’s performance). The criteria were: whether the student spoke clearly, whether the lesion was interesting, whether the student kept control of the class. On an occasion when a child did not maintain control, the teacher said “when you’re up there, you have authority and you have to use it. I’ll back you up”.
The teacher of math and science explained to the observer that she likes the Ess program because, “the children can manipulate variables. They generatehypotheses and device experiments to solve the problem. Then they have to explain what they found.”
The executive Elite School is the only schools were bells do not demarcate the periods of time. The two standard six class teacher were very strict about changing classes on schedule, however, as specific plans for each session had been made. The teachers attempted to keep tight control over the children during lessons and the children were sometimes flippant, boisterous and occasionally rude. However, the children may be brought into line by reminding them that “it’s up to you”. “You must control yourself”. You’re responsible for your work”. You must “set your priorities”. One teacher told a child “you’re the only driver of your car-and only you can regulate your speed.” A new teacher complained to the observer that she had thought “these children” would have more control.
While strict attention to the lesson at hand is required, the teacher makes relatively little attempt to regulate the movement of the children at other times. For example, expect for the kindergartners the children in this school do not have to wait for the bell to ring in the morning; they may go to their classroom when they arrive at school. Class four to class eight often came early to read, to finish work, or to catch up. After the first-two months of school, the upper classes teachers did not line the children up to change classes, or to go to games, and so on, but when the children were ready and quiet, they were told they could go-sometimes without the teachers.
In the classroom, the children could get the materials when they needed them and took what they needed from closets and from the teacher’s desk. They were in charge of the office at lunch-time. During class they did not have to sign out or ask for permission to leave the room very often. The teachers were very polite to the children, and the investigator heard no sarcasm, no nasty remarks, and few direct orders. The teacher never called the children “honey” or “dear”, but always called the names. The teacher was expected to be available before school, and after school, and for the part of their lunch time to provide extra help if needed.
The foregoing analysis of differences in school-work in constricting social class context suggests the following conclusions. The “hidden curriculum” of schoolwork is tacit preparations for relating to the process of production in a particular way. Differing curricular pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices, emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skill in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority and the process of work. School experience, in sample of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class. The difference may not only contribute to the development in children in each social class of certain types of economically significant relationships and not others but would thereby help to reproduce this system of relations in society. In the contribution of the reproduction of unequal social relations lies a theoretical meaning and social consequences of classroom practice.
4. CONSISTENCY, PERSISTENCY AND MEDIOCRITY IN CLASSROOM.
Since the turn of the century, we have seen educational configuration ranging from the one-room little red schoolhouse to the thirty-five plus student classroom complexes in highly institutionalized densely populated, urban environments. We have seen fashionable philosophies of pedagogical practice, including traditional/fixed curricula approaches, progressive/experimental methods open classroom/individualized learning system, inquiry-driven/inductive learning techniques, and the ever-present back-to basics tonic, most recently with a competency-based twist. We have seen all this within a rapidly evolving social context consisting of an industrial revolution, two world wars (and a number of undeclared ones) and an astounding technological revolution only in its infant stage of development.
Yet, what we have seen and what we continue to see in the Kenyan classroom-the process of teaching and learning-appears to be one of the most consistent and persistent phenomena known in social and behavioral sciences. To put it succinctly, the “modus operandi” of the typical classroom is still didactics, practice and little else.
Historically, this observation can be verified by wading through the literature on classroom processes. For example, in ground breaking four years study of secondary classrooms in early 1990s, Stevens(1912) generated statics in terms the teacher talk percentages, types of questioning, and classroom interactional configurations . She remarks. “The fact that one history teacher attempts to realize his educational aims through the process of “hearing” the textbooks, day after day, is unfortunate, but pardonable; that history,science,mathematics,foreign language and English teachers, collectively are following in the same groove is a matter of theorists and practitioners to reckon with (p 16)
Assuming that those didactic patterns are old news to astute observers of the educational scenes, what, then, are the purpose of another article discussing thesefindings? First, it is important to document empirically this pedagogical trend up to the 2000s. Hopefully, complacency has not yet prevented us from still being shocked-perhaps even shocked into action-when we see, once again, what goes on in schools and classroom in Kenya.
Second, it is important to begin the next steps namely, to raise some serious questions regarding the ways we educate students-questions which arise from a substantial body of empirical data. This discussion will be clearly value based, growing out of the belief that the mastery of basic skill should not net be only goal of the teaching-learningprocess. Developing the capabilities of self-reflection, creativity, interpersonalcommunication and social and political analysis, for example, should be equally important. From this perspective, I have used the term “mediocrity” in the tittle of this chapter to convey the narrowness of what goes on in classrooms in light of what could (and ought to) happens. My hope is that this chapter will stimulate continued critical inquiry by both researchers and practitioners into the phenomena we call teaching and learning.
4.1 SAMPLE, PROCEDURE AND OBSERVATIONAL SYSTEM
A study of schooling was based on the assumption that improving schools requires knowing what is happening in and around them. We focused on collecting contextual data on common places such as teaching practices,contents,physical environment, resources,use of time ,communication, decision making, goals and the implicit(or “hidden”) curriculum. These data were obtained from multiple sources (teacher, students, administrators observers and parents) in hierarchy of contextual domains (the individual or personal domains the class or instructional domains, the school or institutional domains, and the schooling or society domain)
Including the data base are observations of several elementary and secondary schools. Classes in each elementary school were randomly sampled at each class standard; in secondary schools, classes were randomly sampled to represent each of all the major subject areas. All the schools primary and secondary represent a purpose, nationwide sample with systematic variation in such factors as school size economic status of the community, ethnicity of the student body and geographic characteristics. Although the data base is not suitable for strict statistical generalization to all schools in the country, it is sufficiently representative to serve the rich source for exploratory data analysis and heuristic speculation.
Each class was usually observed by one trained observer on three difference occasions (full day elementary level and full periods at the secondary levels) during the two weeks period devoted to the observational phase of the study. These data were accumulated into single observational phase of the study. These data were accumulated into a single observational protocol for each classroom. Aggregating the results for each class serves to increase the validity of the data by increasing generalizability of the observations over time. Inter observation reliability as assessed for sub sample of the classes and found to be generally adequate.
The observational system was quite complex and has been more comprehensively described elsewhere. Briefly the system was modified version of that development at the Stanford research institute by Stallings and her associates for the evaluation of project monitoring’s and evaluations. For the present study, there were four modifications. It was generalized for use at both primary and secondary schoollevels, variables were separated out by course content, variables were separate out by class context-instructions, behavior control, routines and reminder labeled “social” and (4) and daily summary section was included in each observation.
The data presented in this article come from four major sections of this modified system: physical environment inventory (PEI), dailysummary (DS), Classroom snapshot (CS) andfive-minuteinteraction (FMI). The PEI is designed to record the architectural arrangement of the classroom, seating and grouping patterns, furnishings, materials and equipment. The DS provides an overview of the space and materials available as well as the decision-making processes of the students and teachers.
The CS and FMI sections are considerably more complicated. The classroom snapshot provides information about what each adult (usually the teacher) and students in the classroom is doing, the size of the student groups (if any) and the nature of the activities in progress at a given moment. These data can be transformed into percentages which represent the likelihood of finding students, at any given time, involved in designated activities, with or without the teacher, in one or more grouping configurations.
The five-minute interactions portion of the observation record is more continuous accounting of how time is spent in the classroom, which focuses on the teacher and the interactions process between teacher and students. These data yield estimates of percentage of class time various teacher-student interactional configurations occur-that is who (teacher or students) is doing what (questioning, lecturing, correcting, responding and so forth) to whom (teacher or student) how (for example, verbally, nonverbally, with positive effect, with guidance) and in what context (instruction behavior control, routines, or social). Twelve FMI and CS.records at the secondary level and seventeen FMI and CS records at the elementary level were accumulated in the observation protocol for each classroom.
4.1.1PHYSICAL ENVIROMENT AND DAILY SUMMARY DATA
From the PEI data, we find that approximately 95 percent of the classrooms observed are self-contained, with capacity for forty to sixty-five students. Eighty percent or more of the secondary classes have no adjacent, useable space, over 70 percent of the elementary classroom can be similarly described seating typically consists of a combination of fixed and moveable desks. Eighty percent of the junior Secondary classes have no learning centers, compared with 60 percent of the elementary classes. Two –thirds of the elementary classes appear to have some alteration of their physical environment such as plants, area rugs and unusual bulletin board displays. At the secondary level, over half of the junior high and two-thirds of the senior high classes have little or no such elaboration of the basic four-wall classroom environment.
In the daily summary, only the variables relating to locus of decision making had sufficient inter-observer reliability for further analysis. Nearly 100 percent of the elementary classes are entirely teacher-dominated. Moreover, the junior and senior high school classes are highly teacher-dominated, averaging nearly 90 percent and 80 percent, respectively
4.1.2 FIVE-MINUTE INTERACTION DATA
At both elementary and secondary levels, approximately 75 percent of class time is instructional, while mostly of the remaining time is spent on routines such as preparations for instruction, roll-taking and clean up. For example, the typical secondary class period averaged 57 minutes in length in which roughly 43 minutes are spent on instruction, 12minutes on routines and the remaining 3 minutes on discipline, control and miscellaneous social interactions. Nearly 70 per cent of the total class time involves verbal interaction or “talk” mostly in the instructional context. Particular interesting is the ratio of teacher student talk .Approximately half of the verbal interaction time is devoted to teacher talk; mostly to either individual students or to the entire class less than a fifth of the time involves student talk. Teacher, therefore, “out-talk” students by ratio of nearly six to one.
If 70 percent of the class-time involves teacher-student verbal interaction, how is the remaining time spent? Since our observation system was designed to focus on teachers, we can only account for their remaining time. Approximately 20 percent of their time is equally divided between working alone (usually at their desks) and monitoring and observing students. The remaining 10percent of the the average teacher’s time spent on such activities as moving around the classroom and responding non-verbally to the students.
Scanning the array of teacher-to- student interactions. We found that barely 5 percent of the instructional time is spent on direct questioning-questioning which anticipates a specific response like” yes”, “no” “Kenyatta” or “1963” less than 1 percent of the time is devoted to open question which call for more cognitive or effective responses. As noted above, corrective feedback is rarely observed, particularly at the secondary level. Providing correctives feedback in combination with additional information designed to help students understand and correct their mistakes is almost non-existent. In fact, reinforcement of any kind is rarely noticed, whether in the form of specific task-related acknowledgement and praiseor general support and encouragement moreover, less than percentage of time students are observed initiating interaction with the teacher.
In contrast to teacher-student interactions the array of students-to-teacher interactions reveals that the model interaction is one of the students responding to the teacher. This occurs roughly 15 percent and ten percent of the time at elementary and secondary levels, respectively. None of the remaining student-to-teacher interaction categories accounts for more than 5 percent of the class time. In summary, the modal classroom patterns consist of (1) the teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class or to a single student, asking direct, factual question or monitoring student ;( 2) the students ostensibly listening to the teacher or responding to teacher-initiated interaction.
What kind of visible effect is present during these teacher-student interactions? Our data suggest little or none. Interactions defined as noticeable positive would include comments like” love the subject,” “You did a good job” “wow”, and such behavior as shared laughter and over enthusiasm. Noticeable negative interaction would include, “That’s a stupid thing to do”. “Go sit in the corner,” crying, or yelling. According to the definations, less than 3 percent of the classroom time can be characterized as either positive or negative, regardless of the level of schooling. In other words, the effect present over 95 percent of the time can best be described as neutral.

4.1.3 SNAPSHOT DATA
The data from this aspect of the observation system both support and augment the foregoing results. Each snapshot “locates” all individuals present in the classroom at a given moment. This accomplished by the simultaneous consideration of three facets: (1) the activities in process (such as preparing for instruction, lecturing, discussion, or nontask behavior) (2) the directorship of the activity (teaching working with the students, students working independently) and (3) the grouping configuration (a single student, small, medium, or large groups, total class). When the data are aggregated and converted to percentages, they represented the likelihood of the students being found in each configuration. As such, these values are not as easily interpretable as the five-minute interaction percentages since they do not represent a continuous accounting of the classroom time. They can be most useful, however, for making relative comparisons. That is, the magnitudes of the actual percentages themselves are less interesting than the contrast they suggest between the modal classroom configurations and those involving relatively few students.
When the results for the activity facet are summarized across the directorship and grouping facets, the activities involving the most students alternated between working on written assignmentsand being lectured to depending on the schooling level. The mean percentages of the student involved involved in the explain lecture activity range from just 20 percent of the elementary level to just over 25 percent at the secondary level. Conversely, working on written assignments steadily decreases from nearly 30 percent at the elementary level to 15 percent at the secondary level. Routine activities either preparatory to the following instruction also involves a relatively large number of the students. In fact, the likely hood of students involvement in non-instructional activities increases from over 15 percent in elementary classes to over 70 percent at the secondary level. The other secondary school activity which account for a relatively high proportions of the student involvement (roughly 15 percent) is the practice of psychomotor skills, primarily in arts, vocational and physical education classes. Thus, it is evident from the data that most students can be found in more “traditional” and “passive” learning activities, whether these involve practicing psychomotor skills in physical education class or, its analogue, working on written assignments in English classes. The likelihood of students participating in other activities such as discussion, simulation, role playing and demonstration is less than 8 percent. And these are activities which are ordinarily viewed as less traditional and more enriching, as well as more demanding, since students participate more actively in their own learning process.
These findings are echoed in the over all results for directorship and grouping facts of the snapshot data. According to the directorship data, are directed by the students, regardless of the grade, are directed by the teacher. Over 33 percent of the students were found working independently, usually on the same assignments, and only 10 percent less are ever found working cooperatively on an assignment. According to the grouping configuration data, nearly 67 percent of the elementary students and 75 percent of the secondary students works as a total; class. Less than 5 percent are found working individually and less than 10 percent are found working in small group configurations.
Finally, taking all three facts into account illuminates the finding even further. The modal three-fact configuration is clearly that of the teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class. Students working individually independently on written assignments on large groups, or as a total class, are the second most typical configuration. Ranking third is the configuration of the teacher and total class involved in general routines, such as clean ups or preparation.
4.1.4 THE GENERAL VIEWS
Having focused or research in which achievement outcomes are the sine qua non for judging effective teaching practices the foregoing perspective may convey the impression that schooling is undimensional in purpose-that the raison d’etre of school is to provide instruction in basic skills of required subject matter. We might label this solid academic grouping as the intellectual function of schooling. But ,in fact, school fulfill a host of other functions, ranging from delivering glorified daycare services to provided a forum for the solution of societal problems such as behavior change, food security and self sustainance.Sustainance and other hosts of problems facing our society in general.
A through delineation of the functions of schooling would require explicit definitions within a historical and philosophical framework. It will suffice here simply to use term “function” generically with appropriate modifiers. For example, advertised goals in curriculum guides, perceptions of what goes on in schools, and proclamations of what ought to go on could be classified, respectively, as the stated, apparent and ideal functions of schooling. The discussion will focus on the apparent and ideal functions of schooling as the people who are involved in schooling-teachers, parents and students-see them.
For this purpose, it is useful to summarize additional data form Astudy of schooling. We asked several teachers, parents and students what they thought to be the single most emphasized function of their school and also, which function should be the most emphasized. Respondents were provided four alternatives choices representing the stated function categories found in virtually all formal curriculum document at the state, county and school levels. These categories are intellectual development(as defined above); personal development, (building self-confidence,creativity,ability to think independently and self displine); Social development (helping student learn to get along with other students and adults, preparing them for social and civic responsibility, preparing and developing their awareness and appreciation of our own and other cultures) and vocational development (preparing student for employment developing skills necessary for getting a job, developing skills necessary for getting a job, developing an awareness of career choices and alternatives)
The important contrast here is between what teacher parents and students see as the apparent and ideal functions of schooling and what can be inferred from our observational data as the apparent functions of schooling. Making these inferences is a speculative process which the reader can engage in as well as i. Further, it is easier to make these inferences when they are grounded in empirical studies based upon commonly accepted student outcome criteria, such as achievement test scores. Thus, it is easier to make inferences regarding the intellectual function of schooling in light of the research on teaching which was discussed in the previous section. But we do not have commonly accepted student outcome criteria in the personal, social and vocational functions. Nor do we have research which sorts out the more promising instructional strategies to achieve these outcomes. In; fact, nearly all the research on teaching practices has focused on what 50 percent or more of the teachers, parents and students in our sample do not see as the primary function of schools-namely, intellectual development.
Nevertheless, the inconsistencies between what people want and what goes on in classrooms suggest a host of questions and reflections:
1. Do we want an educated, informed and participating citizenry? If so, how does this square with the time spent on social studies at the elementary school (about 5 percent of a school day), or the time spent in active discussion, simulation and role play in secondary school social studies classes (9 percent of a class period?) Are we looking at the roots of the kind of national apathy that sends leader to the State House with an overwhelming majority vote from an underwhelming minority of eligible voting public?
2. Do we want philosophers in the literal meaning of the word-people who value continuing their education beyond school, who might even enjoy learning and who can identify their educational needs as they arise? If so, how does this squire with the degree of positive affect, encouragement, praise and guidance students experience in classroom(less than 3 percent of classroom time?) if children are not encouraged to learn, what will people do with increasing amounts of free time as technology escalates in exponential proportions?
3. Do we want people who can intellectually contribute to society or benefit from what society have to offer? Are the independent and creative thinking valuable assets for solving pressing societal problems? If so, how does this square with the number of opportunities for decision making offered to students (About 5,10 and 20 percent in elementary, junior and senior high respectively) and the extent of innovative teaching practices requiring the active involvement of learners(approximately 8 percent?)
The point is this; the record of classroom experience presented in the data is very much out.of.sync with the wishes of both the providers and recipients of education.
The final irony, of course is that is systematically de-emphasizing the social, personal and vocational functions of schooling, we are communicating subtle messages to students. Consider again the modal classroom picture presented here: a lot of teacher talk and a lot of student listening, unless students are responding to teacher’s questions or working on written assignment almost invariably closed and factual questions: little collective feedback and no guidance and predominantly total class instructional configurations around traditional activities-all in a virtually affectless environment. It is but a short inferential leap to suggest that we are implicitly teaching dependence upon authority, linear thinking, social apathy, passive involvement and hands-off learning. The so called “hidden” curriculum is disturbingly apparent.
It would be a grave mistake to interpret what I have reported and commented upon as an indictment of teachers and schools. There are exceptional schools and teacher quite a typical of the aggregated profiles presented here. But fundamental and pervasive changes cannot occur without reconstructing societal values and priorities with sufficient organization and endowment, school can become more viable hosts for teacher-learner activities and teacher can become more effective when trained properly, treated as professionals and rewarded appropriately.
The purpose of this article, however, has been to raise questions about what goes on in classroom grounded in comprehensive, empirical inquiry-not to provide answers. We have seen that schools have charged little since we and those before us were there. What have changed and what continues to change are economic, social and political realities of the society in which we live. School and the people who care about them must be responsive to these changes. As Toffler (1974) has noted:
Education--------is not just something that happens in the head. It involves
Our senses, our hormonal defences, our total biochemistry. Nor does it occur
Solely within the individual. Education springs from the interplay between
The individual and a changing eniviroment.The movement to heighten
Future-consciousness in education, therefore must be seen as one step
Toward a deep restructuring of the links between schools, colleges,
University and the communities that surround them (p 13)
I suspect “future shock” has been upon us for some time. If we don’t unplug ourselves from the “mediocrity” of our educational circuitry, we will never achieve a working correspondence between what we see in classroom and what we want for our children.
5 THE MODERN CURRICULUM IN OUR SCHOOLS
One hears more frequently now the suggestion that low social economic community schools serving predominantly poor families children out to have a curriculum different from that of other schools. The suggestion is at least in part a response to renewed cries from other quarters for a common curriculum for the slum youth is that these students are so unique in their goals, life styles and orientations toward schools that what they learn in school ought to be unique too. The suggestions stems from what I believe is a perfectly appropriate believe that schools should recognize and respond to individual and group differences among student rather than present a single, monolithic curriculum that is oblivious to the diversity among students. It is important, however, that educators strive for both the goal of individualization in education and another goal equal importance namely, equal access to knowledge. Pursuing individualism at the expense of equal access to knowledge can result in diversified curricula that, whether intentionally or fortuitously maintain existingsocial, political and economic arrangements. The questions before educators considering a special curriculum for the slums and informal settlements student are these. Given the allocating functions of school would not separate slums and informal settlement curriculum cool these students into a lower rank? Given further, the disproportionate number of poor in the slums schools, would it not perpetuate current inequalities?
Is it less “undemocratic” to create a special curriculum for slum students which accept tacitly both the existing status hierarchy and the allocating functions of school and then proceeds matter-of-fancy with the cooling of these youth into their respective places? Now that equal access to schools has become more of a logistical problem than an ideological one, educators must turn with what Maxine Greene calls “wide awakens” to the problem of equalaccess to knowledge within schools. This is not mere logistical problem; it is ideological and political as any. The recognition of the aspiration and denial dilemma faced by this democratic society and the coding out function currently performed by schools will open the issue of status allocation to public debate. This is not going to be an easy debate, but surely it deserves a public forum.
5.1 AUTHENTIC OPTIONS
Does this sound familiar? There are explanations for each piece of the enormously complicated comprehensive high school ironically; one reason for the complexity is to accommodate “individual differences”- to make various curricular paths (however age graded and compartmentalized) available for students to match with their likely destinations in life. The school decides the worthy options to be available for all students and then counsels each one (usually advisors who carry loads of 100 to 300 students to this) to take what appears to be most sensible path. Each path is carefully demarcated and usually age graded.
Something for everybody is the ideal of our 8.4.4 system of education. But options are different from personalization, from taking each young person where he or she is and imaginatively using that understanding. Personalization requires knowing each young person well, perhaps, just from early days in daycare. If we can achieve that goal, then flexible options among programs make sense. However, options offered without knowing the students well are not authentic option at all.
We all understand this poignantly when we fall ill. If our physician does not know our condition well, how can he or she prescribe a proper treatment? By the same token, if our counselor does not know our minds and dispositions well, how can he or she prescribe a likely regimen?
Facing up to the rigidities of high school is fiercely difficult work. It is not that most educators do not know what “whole school change”, especially at the secondary level; is compellingly needed. It is because everything important in a school affects everything else that may be important. When one tries to refashion one part of a school, most other unravels. As a result, most reform efforts avoid that prospect and settle for tinkering often very imaginatively, at the margins- a revised course here, an alternative program there, great jobs and professional development.
However, such tinkering never gets to the heart of the matter, especially if the goal is to know each student well and to use that knowledge in shaping and directioning that young person’s education.
5.2REALISTIC STUDENT LOADS
I cannot teach students well if I do not know them well. Each of my adolescent students is in the midst of a growth spurt and the struggle for independence that characterizes every person’s route from childhood to adulthood. Each is a complex and evolving human being. Eachlearns in somewhat different way: there are discrete “styles” and “intelligences”.
How many young people can I know and serve well at once? Assume that I meet with my students in groups each day, this absorbing the majority of my school-time hours. How many minutes a week, either sandwiched amid regular obligations into the school day or spent after school and at home, do I need to read and comment on each student’s work and periodically, to meet with him or her one-on-one? What would happen if I, on average, set aside 10minutes a week for each student for this personal attention? That works out to an hour a week for every six students. If I have 120 students, that’s 20 hours. Impossible!
If I have 50 students, that’s a bit more than eight hours a week. Let’s say that I, on average, see each student and his or her work every other week. That brings the loaddown to between four and five hours a week, assigning an hour (in snippets of time, at school or at home) each day to “personalization”. Given my other obligation, that is a stretch, but, if I am reasonably experienced, an acceptable one.
But, I think, that is impossible! I then look at the number of students in my (typical) high school for each full-time equivalent professional staff person. It is 14:1.Given that ratio, I conclude, 50:1 for each teacher is possible, at leastarithmetically. However, every one at school is now working flat out. Something has to give. The only recourse is to simply the school; to narrow its options, streamline its routines, and increase the number, authority and responsibility of classroom teachers. But won’t these narrowed options decrease the possibility of personalization? They will only if we do not define personalization as access to a set of free-standing separate programs.
A choice clearly emerges. Personalization can be a student’s choice among variety of special programs, but that forces must teachers to carry load in excess of 100 students. Or, personalization can start with loads half that size in school where we can accommodate adaptations to individual needs within a simple, common program.
5.3 LEADERSHIP TO PERSONALIZE LEARNING
A school or school system that resolutely accept the lively but annoyingdiversity among its students must break away from many deeply ingrained notions about the keeping of school, from One Best curriculum to One Best Test to One Best Schedule. Something for more complex and more fluid must take their places. Schools must adapt to the legitimate differences among students, these adaptation will themselves be in constant flux.
Idiosyncrasy is an obvious fact: Those of us who are parents of at least two children and who thereby see daily the variety of energies and enthusiasms emerging from the same gene pool and kitchen table are keenly aware of that. But accommodating these realities within a school system designed to be universal in its routines is intellectually very demanding and politically very dangerous work.
Some will find the complications of ‘personalization so unsetting as to be far-fetched. Nothing can come of it, they will say. But today something is coming of it, most usually in small school at the edges of big systems or in autonomous small-school- within-big school buildings. Nothing that I have suggested is not being tried somewhere. And where the trying has gone on long enough, the results are beginning to show where it counts-on what is happening to the graduates of school that have ‘personalized’.
Those of us who are struggling with personalization will be first to say that the work is as difficult as it is unfamiliar and that the trade-offs necessary to get the time to do the job well are nerve-racking. At its heart ‘personalization’ implies a profoundly different way of defining formal education. What is here is not the delivery of standard instructional services. Rather, it is the insistent coaxing out each child on his or her best term of profoundly important intellectual habits and tool for enriching a democratic society, habits and tools that provides each child individual with the substance and skills to survive well in a rapidly changing culture and economy.
It can be done. It is being done, however against the traditional grain.
6.0. INTELLIGENCE, CLASSIFICATION AND HUMAN DIVERSITY
In most teacher education courses, discussion about intelligence test uses center on technical features of intelligence testing. Statistical problems of reliability and validity are better left to courses on testing and measurement and psychological foundations. Offer a different perspective here. As in the other chapters, matters of social justice and fairness are foremost in my considerations.
The concepts of intelligence are far from fixed. Difference concepts of intelligence are tied to different theories of structure of mind and how it functions. Some emphasize the genetic determinants of intelligence, other emphasize cognitivedevelopment, while still other see the mind as information–processing system much like a computer. Since the early twentieth century the most common approach to the study of intelligence has been the psychometric approach. It was the intelligence test and the center feature of student classification. When the degree of intelligence of a person is referred to today, it is most often In terms of number on a scale. Even if the reference is not to a specific number, it is to larger categories such as ‘above average’ or ‘below average’.
The intelligence test developed alongside and was linked to genetic conception of intelligence. More than any other theoretical conception of intelligence. More than any other theoretical conception of intelligence, the generic explanation has led to intense debates over the fairness of its use. For this reason, it is important to look at the ways intelligence and genetics have been linked together historically and in debates and among educators.
6.1A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The concepts of intelligence that emerged in the early twentieth alongside the development of intelligence testing had two competing standards of references: hereditarian and behavioral. The division has tended to dominate our thinking about intelligence for the past two-thirds of a century.
Much of the early work on IQ testing was carried out in an attempt to improve the classification and instruction of ‘mentally defective’ children. It was motivated by the practical concerns of diagnosing and ‘placing’ the feebleminded and ill behaved. According to Binet and Simon, the purpose of the intelligence scale was “to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who was brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded”.
Binet and Simon recognized that ‘special’ children did not profit much from ordinary schools, but they were also concerned that special schools for these children were not doing their job. They hope, moreover, that teachers in special schools would be attentive to the economic and occupational prospects for those’ special’.
The central question in this regard, as Binet and Simon viewed it, was “what becomes of the defectives on learning school, and what percentage [have been placed] in situations with a suitable salary?” “To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well,” said Binet, “are the essential activities of intelligence” It should be remembered, however, that the context for studying intelligence was the school itself. Thus, the standard of reference was progress in school. Binet’s conclusions about the relationship between intelligence and scholastic level were not startling but nonetheless helped to lay the groundwork for the use of IQ as predictor of academic success.Binet reported a “remarkable correlation” between level of intelligence and scholastic achievement.
As an institution for mass education the school demanded techniques that would help manage large number of people. It was not surprising, then, that educators enthusiastically welcome the Alpha and Beta mass-produced intelligence tests used by the United States Army in 1917. The piloting of the Army intelligence test was done in his fall of 1917 using four cantonments (85000 men including 5000 officers). Their purposes wereclassification, selection for positions and the sorting out of the mentally incompetent. When in 1918 Robert M. Yerkes lectured on results of this testing, he announced that the uses of mental far exceed the original expectations. In additional to sorting out the feebleminded, unstable and incorrigible, the test were useful in identifying those superior intelligence, organizing battalions to achieve “uniform mental strength selecting personnel for further education and providing data enabling each man to “receive instruction suited to his ability to learn.
Yerkes envisioned intelligence testing as a way to rationalize the schooling process. Yerkes’s arguments rested on hopes that the school could be made more efficient by a more systematic and early classification of pupils. It was also justified on grounds of equality of opportunity, he said. Yerkes was aware that early classification by intelligence tests could be construed as democratic, but, he claimed, it was in factly the opposite. It was his position educators were” seriously discriminate against individuals because of our failure to take their characteristics and needs into account”.
6.2 INTELLIGENCE AND HEREDITY
As we proceed with a discussion of intelligence, it should be remembered that debates over the sources of intelligence are often ideological. In other words, the positions people take on the issue are often motivated by social and political view that are much more comprehensive than the issue of intelligence itself. For example, the views of critics of hereditarianism theories of intelligence might be shaped by a particular view of justice that sees hereditarianism as undermining any hope of equal educational opportunity and hence a fair distribution of social and economical rewards. Proponents of hereditarianism might view their position as supportive of a larger educational mission to sort and select talent. These intellectual elite could then be channeled in directions that make it most useful for achieving the social, political and economic goals established by political and corporate leaders. Whatever side of hereditarianism people line up on it is highly likely that their choices will be a reflection of the values and purpose they think are legitimate for society and government.
In the “Mismeasure of man” Stephen Jay Gould reminds us of a commonly misunderstood distinction between the facts of genetic transmission and a hereditary theory of intelligence. Though genetic codes are inherited, they do not necessarily result in predetermined kinds of behavior or limitation. Obvious examples are near-sightedness and far-sightedness which, though inherited, are easily modified. There is in other words, no inevitable outcome of the world’s most intelligent parents but absolutely no motivation or desire to learn. The child would thus in the eyes of others fail to measure up to the intellectual abilities of the parents.
A second source of confusion, could notes, is that between individual heredity and group characteristics intelligence test scales are applied to the individuals of course, and the variations in scores (IQs) show variations among the individuals .To attempt to draw conclusion about the differences among groups on the basis of differences among individuals, however, is extremely risky.
Debates over the heritability of intelligence have been particularly heated because the idea of genetic determination has such profound implications for how economic, social and political systems of a country should be structured. The issues raise by heritability of intelligence are highly changed with ethical consideration.Intelligence tests have become intertwined with ability grouping. This seems to be apparent at the secondary level; however, it also exists at lower levels. According to Jeannie Oakes, “Over the past decades, a growing number of local school systems have began to administer ‘readiness’ test to select some five-year-olds for the academic demands of Kindergarten, others for a less academic prekindergarten class, and still others to stay at home and wait for a year. It can be seen that at the very beginning of a child’s education, in some cases before a child even enters pre-school he or she is subjected to segregation by ability.
One of the questions that the measurement of intelligence and genetics endowment forces us to confront is whether or how much, knowledge about genetic endowment should be used to control the development and employment of a human resources. Though the genetic endowment of an individual is not matter of his or her choice, the use of knowledge about that endowment is its use involves ethical questions.
One might justifiably ask, at this point, “where do we stand?” and “why has there been so much concern over genetic endowment and heritability?” The answer is deceptively simple. We wish to know human diversity may be delt with in a fair and equitable manner. It will not simply apply a technical answer to an ethical issue. It is not difficult to classify people or to devise measurement that will be reliable for doing so. What is difficult is to respect human diversity rather than viewing it as an obstacle to greater technical proficiency in the management of human resources.

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