SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

A Radical Alternative School

The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente profiles this radical school in her column today.  What is this revolutionary school doing?  It is teaching using traditional methods practically banned in most schools.  Heavens, Direct instruction!  The Howlett Academy teaches kids that the school’s founder, Jan Howlett,  calles NBT:  Never Been Taught. 

“The Howlett Academy, housed inside a plain red building in Toronto’s Annex, offers a radical alternative to the public-school approach. Its teaching methods are heavily discouraged in today’s public schools. It stresses penmanship and spelling, accuracy and focus. Every mistake in every essay is corrected - in red ink. The school’s three Rs are resilience, rigour and repetition.

Not all the kids here are like Paul. Some arrive with straight As. “My daughter was getting great grades,” one mother told me, “but she wasn’t learning anything.” When she expressed concern about her daughter’s growing indifference to school, she was told not to worry.

I watched as a teacher took her students through a quick vocabulary and spelling drill. “Threadbare,” they spelled aloud in unison. “This would be a no-no with the board of education,” said Ms. Howlett. “It’s called direct instruction.” In the age of “child-centred” education, direct instruction is thought to stifle children’s inherent creativity. They’re supposed to discover math and spelling, not memorize the times tables.”

She suggests that perhaps the public education system consider more alternative schools that offer tried and true methods:

“The public system pays lip service to educational diversity. It has schools that focus on sports or arts, schools for gay and lesbian students, schools for students who want to protest against global capitalism. What it doesn’t have is any schools like the Howlett Academy. That would be too radical.”

Consider that in Alberta, Calgary’s Foundations for the Future Charter School (profiled in SQE’s charter school DVD in a previous post), with its traditional curriculum and effective teaching practices has a waiting list of thousands, maybe the time for revolution has come. 

(Note:  For those of you who can’t find a Foundations or Howlett type of school where you live, there is always our Stairway to Reading and Stairway to Math for the time being.)