The Core Knowledge Blog

Before we can do our jobs as educators, students must see what’s going on in our schools and classrooms as a means to some viable end. That many do not is the powerful subtext of Lynn H. Fox’s essay (“Getting students out of the halls and into the classrooms”) in Maryland’s gazette.net. A tip of the hat to Joanne Jacobs for pointing out this gem.

A high school teacher, Fox finds the story of contemporary education in a single moment — a choice his student makes between “classroom cuture” and “hallway culture” as class begins one morning. “So much depends on the choice David, and every other American student, will make. In or out? Classroom or hallway?”

Hallways, Fox observes, are “the meeting and greeting ground where young people play out popular fantasies of violence, sexuality, and, especially, consumerism. The hallway rules are easy, the rewards immediate, and the rituals provide culturally approved media roles young people have been fed since birth.” By comparison classrooms “for most of our school’s young people, are places of crushing boredom.” David — predictably, inevitably — chooses the hallway.

What Fox knows that we need to come to terms with is that delayed gratification, the essential valuable proposition of education, is a heroic choice in a world that seldom reinforces it. It’s a brilliant, powerful essay that deserves a wide audience.