Running head: PHILOSOPHY AND CURRICULUM ORIENTATION
Influences on My Philosophical View and Curriculum Orientation
An Educational Administration Autobiography of
Jeffrey B. Romanczuk
Sevier County School System
I was raised with eight brothers and sisters by parents who both graduated high school in the 1940s, when the typical graduation rate was about half of the +80% it is today. They stayed married and living together for fifty-five years (also unusual for these days), until my dad died in 2003. All of us went to parochial schools for twelve years and five of the nine have degrees beyond the bachelors now.
For the four who didn’t go to college, the purely academic curriculum of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was good grounding in the basics: how to set up and solve math operations problems, how to write, read, and think. Social development during the school day happened outside of class time and was minimal. Feeding, clothing, and rearing us were left to my parents. When a child got in trouble at school, he felt the same kind of trouble at home.
First grade (1965-1966) was tuition-free. With second grade a fee was instituted ($15 a semester per child, I think, with some package deals for larger families). When I taught at a Catholic high school (1982-1984), the tuition broke the $1000 per year mark. I mention the money because it made a difference for many of my neighbors. All of my peers on the street started at St Hugh (grades 1 to 8), but I was the only one to finish there. In a not so unrelated follow-up, I was the only one to go on to college though most of my friends from the neighborhood did graduate from one of the “public” high schools in Philadelphia, or get graduate equivalency diplomas later. This at least partially explains my irrational support for vouchers (if not charter schools) despite neither having much to offer special education students. Vouchers would have been a huge help to my parents. From my early days, the biggest impact on my educational philosophy was how highly my parents valued education, especially in contrast to many of the other parents in the neighborhood.
This early upbringing is most likely responsible for the primacy of the perennialist in me now, and for essentialism being a closely held second educational philosophy. The curriculum that counts—the one that is appropriate for the schools to teach— is one students are not going to get elsewhere: Learning the four basic math operations (without a calculator) and being able to read for comprehension, also beginning to write (and the grammatical connections this entails) is important for the elementary grades. For high school students, learning to think independently is key. This can be done by student-centered approaches but doesn’t have to be. The open-endedness of perennialism’s Socratic method stresses the importance of student opinions. Even the cultural literacy that the essentialists push for is not all based on the teacher separating the essential from the piffle for them. Somewhere along the way, the students’ own understanding of the attributes will let them decide for themselves.
However, there is a whole other curriculum that is more appropriate for the family and neighborhood friends to teach. Everything on the social side, from table manners to engaging in conversation, can be and is reinforced incidentally at school, but heaven help us if we have to make how to eat like a civilized human and the appropriate way to approach and address people part of the core curriculum. No matter how vital learning to use “please” and “thank you” are, this isn’t any school’s mission. (Okay, maybe boarding schools’.)
We don’t need formal Drug Abuse Resistance Education either. The drug culture itself is a pretty good advertisement for this, as soon as kids lose their “it can’t happen to me” shields of invincibility. My cousin died at twenty years old of a heroin overdose in 1973, two days before she was to testify against suppliers in her neighborhood. What could school teach me about drug abuse that Judy’s death didn’t?
The same with sex education. What kid’s own curiosity isn’t going to make him self taught in this area? I learned about sex the same way I learned how to dance. Fumbling toward knowledge with adolescent girlfriends seemed more reasonable than a formal curricular approach. Okay, it was just more fun. If I learned anything along the way, it was a side benefit.
What troubles me in all this is that the prescribed school curriculum of my chosen educational philosophy does not address the lowest functioning students. The Paideia philosophy seems more suited to this than its methods are. Yes, we should all arrive at earning a living, being a good citizen, and continuing to learn, but the Socratic method isn’t going to work in combined developmental classes. The coaching, “active learning,” and “didactic instruction” that Paideia also emphasize (see http://hometown.aol.com/paideiapgi/page/) should get at this, though.
Special education cemented my belief that all instruction is one to one. I have held this view since my student teaching days in the early 1980s. I am not saying that all instruction has to be tutor to individual student. Fortunately, individual instruction isn't necessary for individual learning to occur. In the introduction to The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, Hirsch (1999) points out the paradox apparently borne out in several studies that “individual students get more effective tutorial attention. . .and seem to make more progress when there is greater emphasis on the whole class and less on individual tutorials” (p. 11). But when special education chose me, one of its appealing features was that individual instruction is codified. I would sooner leave educational administration than leave special education. An idea in the back of my mind that I cannot seem to shake, especially when the communication breakdowns are making me wistful, is that I would love to go back to a combined developmental classroom and “just” teach. Realistically, administration always finds me and there will be no going back.