The St. John’s Program and its impact
As we near our 50th reunion, there’s a certain amount of retrospection about our college years and their impact. The Son points to a short note in the current issue of the New Yorker from a St. John’s alumnus, who writes of his own discovery of the program and how it affected him.
His focus is on his reading, and perhaps—broadly defined—that is the focus of the program. But I see it somewhat differently. We were asked to write a brief note about our own encounter with the program, and shortly before I read the piece in the New Yorker, I had written the following:
When I was a student at St. John’s, the program changed me in ways that I began to understand better when I became, for a time, director of admissions and had to explain the program—its goals, means, and methods—to prospective students. (I learned from that, and now I regularly try to explain the things I am working to understand: as we learned at St. John’s, good questions lead to greater understanding, and interactive explanation is a rich source of good questions.)
We gain skills through their exercise. In the St. John’s program we exercised the skills of reading, study, questioning, listening, speaking, teaching (demonstrating math theorems, for example), translating, writing, and performing experiments. Through active exercise we acquired, practiced, and improved our skills in the liberal arts.
The works we studied required those skills—indeed, they required more skill than we had, but that was what drove the learning: our skills improved the harder they were worked, and those books demand much from us, then and now. And it is that demand that makes them so enormously rewarding.
Those demands would have been overwhelming without the guidance we got from our tutors and the help of our fellow students. Sometimes someone would help us by explaining something to us, sometimes the help would be in listening to (and questioning) our own explanations.
We were immersed in a sea of learning and change, and in that time we formed a foundation for our later life and learning.
What a wonderful place it sounds. The life-long learner that you have become, Mike, which shows in the interests and activities you pursue now, is definitely a reflection of those experiences, I would say. You were lucky to attend such a place. I personally think of important and relevant learning as “making your own meaning”, which is undoubtedly the most meaningful(!) kind of learning, which you are obviously using in spades now. Immersion in a subject (and not just through books), and all the meaning-making activities which go along with that (questioning on both sides, discussion, experimentation with different ideas/materials/viewpoints, comparisons, metaphor, and explanation or teaching others to make the ideas yours) are the stuff which we hope all schools could encourage and facilitate at any age level. But when you throw things like standardized testing and very restrictive mandated curricula into the mix, such aforementioned opportunities become seen as unnecessary liberties which cannot be controlled or measured. I was lucky enough to work in a school and district which encouraged teachers to try and set up meaningful learning and assessment practices and we had some wonderful experiences at the elementary level. The ideas of “leading from behind” and “following the learner’s lead” are part of that and it obviously works at St. John’s!
Wendy
13 June 2011 at 8:21 am
Interesting: “following the learner’s lead” seems very much what the discussion-based tutorials and seminars were aimed at. True, the tutor did ask the opening question, but then the students pretty much took over, with the tutor acting as coach/referee, making sure that quiet members are heard when they wish to speak, that assertive members do not dominate every discussion, that questions are truly examined and answered, and the like.
It seems ironic that I subsequently spent a big chunk of my career working in organizations that developed, published, and scored standardized tests.
LeisureGuy
13 June 2011 at 8:31 am
VERY ironic, indeed!! And, incidentally, where is the place in standardized testing for “interactive explanation” or reflection, which is (IMHO) one of the best ways to learn and make your own meaning from an experience?
Wendy
13 June 2011 at 9:35 am
Well, I don’t think standardized testing has much room for interactive explanation or reflection—or, indeed, for cooking or fine recipes. The purpose of standardized testing is not even directed at interactive explanation and not much at reflection. Rather it is to provide some coarse measures of mastery of material and concepts. For example, a standardized test in arithmetic is intended to provide a spread of student accomplishment—so that the student who is least capable of the part of arithmetic being tested gets at least some correct, but even the best are not quite able to answer all the items. More important, though, is the standardized aspect: being able to compare the overall performance of two classes or two schools or two districts, separated perhaps in time as well as in space (last year’s student accomplishment versus this years). Pre- and post-testing also allows a measure of improvement.
But I’m sure that you understand the goals and purposes of standardized testing. You know that during the test is not a time for teaching. You know that schools and districts must respond to questions about how well they’re doing at teaching their students, and must provide some sort of evidence of accomplishment. In some districts, parents have simply trusted that the schools will do their jobs well, and it turns out that some do and some don’t. So people want to know.
There were few tests at St. John’s, but the situation there is not what it is in a typical school: we had 10-12 students in a class with a tutor, or 18-20 in a seminar with two tutors. The entire college was small—when I was there as a student, around 285 students total. This creates quite a different educational environment than the typical public school.
Do I believe that students would be better taught in small interactive classes with excellent materials and teachers? Of course I do. Do I believe that the public will fund education to do the job properly? In no way will they do that.
LeisureGuy
13 June 2011 at 9:47 am