Educational Success: Stories of Innovation from the Utne Library

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It’s not just the media that’s focused on the downfall of kids today. Sociologists share a similarly negative myopia. Peter Benson, the president of the Search Institute, argues for a different approach that puts the emphasis on promoting positive youth development (pdf). In Sockeye, Benson talked to Jay Hutchins about how to create environments where young people don’t just get by but thrive:

A focus on optimal development should begin with seeing each life as precious and filled with potential. It recognizes that all citizens have responsibility and capacity to nurture this potential. It calls for schools and communities to know each of its young so well that it can nurture and benefit from each child’s spark. It recognizes that governmental policy requires deep transformation, moving from a preoccupation with preventing problems to a proactive investment in promoting human potential.

There are many paths to education reform: community activism, statehouse action, individual lobbying, and nationwide legislation. John Taylor Gatto, writing in the July/August issue of Designer/Builder (article not available online), throws his weight behind a different tack: outright protest. Outlining what he calls the Bartleby Project—after Herman Melville’s scrivener who rejects mundane copying assignments with the simple mantra “I would prefer not to”—Gatto calls on young people to steadfastly refuse to take anymore of the standardized tests that have turned schools into testing centers instead of places of education.

That may, at first, sound like the pleadings of a fanciful radical. But consider a couple of incidents earlier this year. In May, South Bronx 8th-graders refused to take a practice exam for a statewide social studies test. “We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” 13-year-old Tatiana Nelson told the New York Daily News. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.” In Chicago, students didn’t balk at exams but they did skip class and truck over by the bus load to try to register at the infamously posh New Trier Township High School (of Breakfast Club fame) and another North Shore school. The idea was to highlight the drastic funding disparities between the largely black schools in Chicago and the predominately white schools in the suburbs.

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