I was finally able to finish Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity yesterday. (What else was I supposed to do the day after graduating?) That I’d made it so long without encountering this text baffled me, but I’m willing to chalk it up to the right books coming into our lives at the right time.
Toward the end of the book, Postman and Weingartner list a group of proposals “that attempt to change radically the existing school system.”
I should like to learn and teach in a school that honors these proposals. In the case of a few of them, I’ve already done just that.
- Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks.
- Have “English” teachers “teach” Math, Math teachers English, Social Studies teachers Science, Science teachers Art, and so on.
- Transfer all the elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa.
- Require every teacher who thinks he knows his “subject” to write a book on it.
- Dissolve all “subjects,” “courses,” and especially “course requirements.”
- Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, and 15 interrogative.
- Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to.
- Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades.
- Require all teachers to undergo some form of psycho-therapy as part of their in-service training.
- Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public.
- Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know.
- Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly check if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes.
- Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some “field” other than education.
- Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one human being.
- Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper and be hung in the school halls.
- There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, I.Q., makeup, text, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhanced, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material, and administrative necessity.
I’ve not stopped thinking about how much the teachers in schools adopting this list of proposals would learn and how much more effectively they would begin to teach.
What else deserves to be on this list?
Citation: Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta, 1971.