Education: The Case for Permissipline

At the traditional school I came from, you just sat at a desk copying from a book and all that junk. It was a big game to see if you could chew bubble gum all day and sometimes stick it on your nose without the teacher noticing. Here you learn responsibility.

So says Mary Beth Brill, an unabashed eighth-grader in the "new town" of Columbia, Md. Yet the Wilde Lake Middle School (grades 6 through 8), which she now attends, looks at first like a model of irresponsibility. It lacks neat classrooms, desks in rows, hands raised before speaking. Many of its 750 students sprawl in conversational clusters on the carpeted floors. They spend most of their time jumbled into three vast rooms called "pods" that hold 250 kids apiece. Since the pods are really one-room schoolhouses, Wilde Lake sounds like a hive of teen-agers doing their homework with the radio blaring. Skeptical parents sometimes call it the Wilde Lake "Muddle" School.

In fact, the lack of old standards has enabled—and forced—the teachers to create new and demanding ones. Most teachers spend three hours a night planning the next day's work. Their goal is to give each child a special program aimed at goading him to learn by himself. Such efforts are increasing, not only in private "free" schools (TIME, April 26), but in nearly 500 public schools across the U.S. The Wilde Lake school, which ends its second year this week, is a prime example of how drastic changes can be carried out in moderate ways that minimize both confusion and unconscious retreats to rigidity.

Working in teams, Wilde Lake's teachers split the curriculum into small parts that each child can master largely at his own pace. Assignments for one pod's recent interdisciplinary unit on "exploring the universe" were posted on bulletin boards around the walls. In the area devoted to science, the cards told the pupils to read any six out of seven mimeographed essays about telescopes and constellations and then answer sheets of questions about them. Students working in "language arts" analyzed a Ray Bradbury science-fiction story.

Air of Freedom. Groups of children are allowed to work together, teaching and subtly competing with one another. Older children are sometimes assigned to help younger ones. Each pod's six teachers (one for every 41 kids) are free to cruise from child to child, prodding, checking the finished work, combatting the gloom or gossip that often derails preadolescent concentration.

The air of freedom neatly defines away what Principal Charles L. Jones calls "the garbage discipline problems —kids with feet in the aisle or getting up to sharpen pencils." But self-discipline is another matter. To encourage it, the teachers try to steer a middle course. They refuse to insist on the old obedience, which often prevents kids from learning the consequences of their own choices. Even so, the teachers also shun the pure permissiveness that says if a child is allowed to goof off long enough, he will decide for himself that work is more satisfying. The resulting hybrid might be called "permissipline."