Open Education and the American School

The author, an elementary school principal, describes his own experiences in an urban open school program that fell far short of its goals despite ample funding and the enthusiastic participation of a group of young teachers committed to the approach. After reviewing assumptions about learning and knowledge and about the role of the teacher in the open school, he presents a case study based on his own experience. He concludes that the open educators were in large part at fault in the failure of the school because they tried to impose their own ideas about education on a quite different culture; also, they did not give parents enough time to accept the premises of open education. The central message of the case study is that the forms, the intensity, and the extent of resistance to change of public schools in the direction of open education are educational constants. Most parents' concepts of quality education are along the lines of the traditional, rigorous, transmission-of-knowledge model. They want the schools to help their child succeed (get a job, or get into a good college). They prefer not to risk that goal for an experiment in open education. An annotated bibliography is included.