During the last school year Roberto, a bright-eyed first-grader, kept a journal of his thoughts and activities at the John Greenleaf Whittier School in Pilsen. At first the journal contained only pictures, but gradually words crept in. In midwinter Roberto* drew a picture of himself holding a tomato with the caption, “I have a tamao.” On May 21 he made this entry: “I sended a leter to my grandma becus she livs in Mexsical so i road her a leter. I put in it a sticker and a leter.”
“In progressive education the kid is the worker and the teacher is the guide,” says Bill Ayers, the 60s radical who’s now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an apostle of progressivism. In contrast, the model of the traditional classroom has the teacher as the worker, giving information to or eliciting responses from the child.
The Whittier neighborhood has always been a way station for immigrants–Irish, then Italian, then Polish. Now the families are predominantly Mexican and poor; last spring only 16 kids at Whittier failed to qualify for federally subsidized free lunches. Many of the families are transient; principal Irene DaMota reports that 30 percent of the kids who start in September are gone by June. Many of the kids come from single-parent families. Some come from homes where drugs are used. Some are physically abused. At last report the average Whittier sixth-grader performed a tad below national norms in math and was more than a year behind in reading.
The children filter into Finkel’s classroom and take their seats at desks pushed together to make tables that accommodate five or six, rather than at desks in traditional rows. “Is everybody here?” asks Finkel.
On the walls in the front of the room are words beginning with the letters A, B, and so on. Below them, on bright yellow paper, is a list of compound words: pineapple, babysitter, grasshopper. There are also drawings and writing samples–ruminations on evaporation and on the thickness of a tree trunk, as well as a letter written by all the kids on May 12 detailing how John got a haircut: “Good morning room 101! This morning we saw a new boy in our line. Who could he be? He has red hair. It must be John!–with a new hair style.”
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Dawn straggles in. “Put your stuff away, honey,” says Finkel, and Dawn stows her belongings in the coat closet outside the room. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Finkel helps Sonia with a big book. One section pictures a flying man named Don winging over a crane at a construction site. “Where’s the crane?” Finkel asks Sonia, who can’t find the piece of equipment. “It’s the big thing, honey,” Finkel tells her. Then Finkel moves to the easel, where kids are using fat pens to write the word “caught” on construction paper.
Finkel, the kids, and a dozen parents rode a bus to the Dunes, had a picnic in the woods, and played Frisbee and baseball. Then they hung a pinata from a tree, broke it open, and shared the candy inside. They followed a boardwalk through a swamp, where they saw nests, frogs, herons, and water snakes. They climbed up the dunes, then ran and rolled back down.
