The Case for Permissipline

At the traditional school I came from, you just sat at a desk copying from a book and all that junk. It was a big game to see if you could chew bubble gum all day and sometimes stick it on your nose without the teacher noticing. Here you learn responsibility.

So says Mary Beth Brill, an unabashed eighth-grader in the "new town" of Columbia, Md. Yet the Wilde Lake Middle School (grades 6 through 8), which she now attends, looks at first like a model of irresponsibility. It lacks neat classrooms, desks in rows, hands raised before speaking. Many of its 750 students sprawl in conversational clusters on the carpeted floors. They spend most of their time jumbled into three vast rooms called "pods" that hold 250 kids apiece. Since the pods are really one-room schoolhouses, Wilde Lake sounds like a hive of teen-agers doing their homework with the radio blaring. Skeptical parents sometimes call it the Wilde Lake "Muddle" School.

In fact, the lack of old standards has enabled--and forced--the teachers to create new and demanding ones. Most teachers spend three hours a night planning the next day's work. Their goal is to give each child a special program aimed at goading him to learn by himself. Such efforts are increasing, not only in private "free" schools (TIME, April 26), but in nearly 500 public schools across the U.S. The Wilde Lake school, which ends its second year this week, is a prime example of how drastic changes can be carried out in moderate ways that minimize both confusion and unconscious retreats to rigidity.

Working in teams, Wilde Lake's teachers split the curriculum into small parts that each child can master largely at his own pace. Assignments for one pod's recent interdisciplinary unit on "exploring the universe" were posted on bulletin boards around the walls. In the area devoted to science, the cards told the pupils to read any six out of seven mimeographed essays about telescopes and constellations and then answer sheets of questions about them. Students working in "language arts" analyzed a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story.

Air of Freedom. Groups of children are allowed to work together, teaching and subtly competing with one another. Older children are sometimes assigned to help younger ones. Each pod's six teachers (one for every 41 kids) are free to cruise from child to child, prodding, checking the finished work, combatting the gloom or gossip that often derails preadolescent concentration.

The air of freedom neatly defines away what Principal Charles L. Jones calls "the garbage discipline problems --kids with feet in the aisle or getting up to sharpen pencils." But self-discipline is another matter. To encourage it, the teachers try to steer a middle course. They refuse to insist on the old obedience, which often prevents kids from learning the consequences of their own choices. Even so, the teachers also shun the pure permissiveness that says if a child is allowed to goof off long enough, he will decide for himself that work is more satisfying. The resulting hybrid might be called "permissipline."

Escape Hatch. Lazy or hostile students are asked a tough question: "If you don't want to do this, what do you want to do, and why?" One shy girl has blossomed because she was allowed to hand in most of her written work in the form of deft cartoons. Though self-motivated kids can design their own independent study projects, no one can spend the entire year on one subject. All units have time limits; most include tests. Students who stray from their pods without an explanation get old-fashioned detention after school. Says Principal Jones, a pragmatic convert to informal teaching after 15 years in formal Maryland schools: "We need to control some of the kids who can't stand the 360-degree escape hatch."

Last fall, several earnest students petitioned Jones to close the hatch and abandon the new ways. Says self-aware Eighth-Grader Pam Kerby: "I'm one of the lazy ones, and here I don't push myself." But even Pam has just completed a demanding report on Latin America, and most of the students are ending the year with an air of steady purpose. Last week several groups seated on the floor kept on working right through one of the school's two daily bells (for lunch and dismissal). Finally one girl remarked, "The bell rang, I think."

Coping with Change. Thriving on making choices, 75% of the students have done some form of independent study. When one pod offered week-long "mini-courses," a 13-year-old boy who had been in trouble with the police chose film making. He then directed 15 other children in a zany sequence of trick photographic effects. Elated at his success, he has stopped playing hooky and begun doing serious work. For a paper on Russian political attitudes, another boy has just finished reading piles of newspapers, Doctor Zhivago, and the Communist Manifesto. Last month a group of girls got credit for organizing 30 Wilde Lake students to spend five days as tutors at a nearby elementary school.

The eighth-graders who graduated last year have gone on to a traditional high school with no worse traits than an unnerving habit of demanding reasons for what their teachers make them do. For anxious parents, standardized tests provide the most encouraging results of all. During each of the past two years, Wilde Lake's students have outscored those in all of the county's other middle schools.

Beyond test results, schools like Wilde Lake aim to redefine what a modern school should teach. In the year 2000, Wilde Lake's current students will be in their early 40s and surely just as much in need of the ability to cope with rapid change as of antique knowledge memorized in school. Many parents find this hard to accept. Alarmed that her child was short on traditional dates and facts, one mother recently complained that Wilde Lake kids do not know what year The Star-Spangled Banner was written.* "That's true," replied a teacher, "but they know how to look it up."

*1814.

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