Dennison tells us that the proper concern of the school is not instruction, but the lives of children. He shows how, in his own words, when the conventional routines of a school are abolished (the military discipline, the schedules and rewards, the standardization), what arises is neither a vacuum nor a chaos, but rather a new order, based first on relationships between adults and children, and children and their peers, but based ultimately on such truths of the human condition as these: that the mind does not function separately from the emotions, but thought partakes of feeling and feeling of thought; that there is no such thing as knowledge PER SE, knowledge in a vacuum, but rather all knowledge is possessed and must be expressed by individuals; that the human voices preserved in books belong to the real features of the world, and that children are so powerfully attracted to this world that the very motion of their curiosity comes through to us as a form of love; that an active moral life cannot be evolved except where people are free to express their feelings and act upon the insights of conscience.
That says it all succinctly and elegantly-although Dennison is equally eloquent in his demonstrations and elaborations. If the summary doesn't convince you, all the better-read the book.
Dennison is acutely aware of the differences between philosophical though and "mere intellection," and he includes as evidence a bristling but rather insubstantial critique of Bruner. Some of his points, however, are well worth noting: that educational experts like Bruner (and now Jones) are concerned not so much with the education of the young as with the improvement of the schools, not so much with instructing children as with manipulating them. Much more intriguing in this vein are Dennison's accounts of how "freed" children develop organic and highly structured codes of order and morality; how they come to respect and depend upon caring adults as natural authorities, as elders; and how they exercise "positively curative" effects on one another, and "teach" one another with amazing efficiency. Such accounts destroy a whole host of scientifically documented myths, especially the idea that progress in learning bears a direct relation to methods of instruction and internal relationships of curriculum.
THE First Street School eventually closed down, because Dennison and his colleagues could not sustain their interest in it. He takes his lesson from that too. The Appendix of the book includes extensive advice on how to establish and run a school like First Street. Dennison prefaces this advice with the following statement in the last chapter:
. . . any solution which perpetuates the existing authoritarian bureaucracy is doomed to failure . . . We must transfer authority to where concern already exists . . . Authority must reside in the community . . . And it must be tied, once and for all, to the persons who not only DO care, but will go on caring.
By now the alternatives facing us should be clear. Jones and other experts assume the right to make decisions about everybody's children, and then concoct theories and materials which can't fix even the superficial problems of the public schools. Meanwhile those schools, already the most totalitarian institutions in our society, are systematically destroying the souls of children. Dennison tells us that education must focus not on systems and materials but on the lives of individual children, and that it must be located in the communities that care for these children.
The proper choice is obvious. Breaking the iron grip of the public schools will not be easy, and establishing viable community schools will be very difficult. Adults will have to assume new and burden some responsibilities; communities will have to be founded where there were only neighborhoods before. But the possible gains are enormous. Perhaps, by giving children a chance to live their lives, we can take control of our own.