Dr. Ernest Boyer - Speech
Dr. Boyer's 1995 Speech

This week The Carnegie Foundation released a major new report called The Basic School: A Community for Learning, which focuses on elementary education. While preparing this report, researchers at the Foundation visited literally dozens of elementary schools from coast to coast. We were in hundreds of classrooms, and I was profoundly impressed, time and time again, by the eagerness of students, by the dedication of teachers, and by the commitment of the principals. Teachers and principals are performing heroic acts every single day, succeeding often under enormously difficult conditions, and at the conclusion of our study I became convinced that most school critics could not survive one week in the schools and the classrooms they so vigorously condemn.

I also concluded that the last thing we need in American education is another report that goes on the shelf. The last thing we need is another "pilot project." The last thing we need is another novel innovation that promises excellence by the year 2000. What we really need is to take the school reform movement back to the beginning, to the first years of formal learning, to the elementary school, which is by any measure transcendently the most important. We need to go into every classroom, where teachers meet with students, because that's where excellence in education begins and ends. Above all, it's time to stop looking for quick fixes and promising panaceas and begin to put into place the tried-and-true practices that really work.

After reading the literature, consulting with experts, and surveying thousands of principals, teachers, students, and parents in twelve countries around the world, we concluded that there are, in fact, four priorities, as simple as that sounds, four qualities of elementary education that are the essential building blocks to achieve excellence for all.

I. COMMUNITY
We say in the new Carnegie report that building a true community of learning is the first and most essential ingredient of an effective school. We found, in our study, that it is simply impossible to achieve educational excellence at a school where purposes are blurred, where teachers and students fail to communicate thoughtfully with each other, and where parents are uninvolved in the education of their children. Community is, without question, the glue that holds an effective school together, as Alicia Thomas at Jackson-Keller School in San Antonio, Texas, told us.

But community doesn't just happen. By community, we mean something far more than a sentimental slogan or a message to be sent home to parents at the beginning of the year. What we really are talking about is the culture of the school, the way people relate to one another, their attitudes and values. We concluded that to achieve community a school must have six essential qualities. In order to achieve community, the school must be a purposeful place, with a clear and vital mission. The school must be a communicative place, where people speak and listen with care to each other. The school must be a just place, where everyone is treated fairly. The school must be a disciplined place, where clearly defined rules of conduct are established. The school must be a caring place, where students feel secure. And, finally, the school, to be a community, must be a celebrative place, with ceremonies and other times when everyone in the school comes together.

And to create this spirit of community we conclude that the Basic School also should be small enough to assure that every student will be known by name. During my days as Commissioner I'd often visit large, overcrowded schools, where only the good and bad students were known. And I'd conclude that many students dropped out simply because no one noticed that they had in fact, "dropped in."

For the community we envision to come alive, teachers must have time to work together ideally once a week, with the principal as lead teacher, who guides the institution more by inspiration than by directive. Lillian Brinkley, principal at the Willard Model School in Norfolk, Virginia, captured the spirit of the principal's role when she said, "I believe that leadership is the ability to inspire others. I don't ask teachers to do anything I wouldn't do."

I found it enormously significant in our national survey that nearly 70 percent of the elementary school teachers in this country rate the performance of the principal of their school "excellent" or "good." I want to congratulate all of you not only for staying in the trenches, responding to the questions of the community, getting caught in the crossfire of ideological debates, but also for being able to give a steady hand and inspiration to the teachers who meet with children every single day. That's a great accomplishment for which you should be appreciated, not criticized, by the public.

I'm suggesting then, that a school community begins with teachers, and with the principal acting as lead teacher. But in the Basic School, the circle of community quickly extends outward to include the parents, who are, after all, the child's first and most essential teachers. We hear a lot of talk these days about how the schools have failed, and, certainly, education can improve. And yet, the longer it goes, the more I've become convinced it's not the school that has failed, it's the partnership that's failed. Today, schools are being asked to do what homes and communities and religious institutions have not been able to accomplish. And if they fail anywhere along the line, we condemn them for not meeting our high-minded expectations. Yet thirty years of research reveal that it's simply impossible to have an island of educational excellence in a sea of community indifference. If we hope to achieve quality in the nation's schools, parents simply must become actively involved, not in running schools, but helping in the education of their own children.

Sam Sava, the distinguished leader of this Association, said it best when he said that children absorb as many unspoken lessons about love and work in their homes as they do the spoken lessons of the classroom. And Secretary Riley echoed this same conviction when he said, "The American family is the rock on which a solid education can and must be built."

Simply put, in the Basic School, building community is the first and most essential goal, with teachers and the principal and parents engaged in common cause on behalf of children.

II. CURRICULUM
Beyond building community, the second building block of the Basic School is a curriculum with coherence, which begins with proficiency in language. Language is, without question, central to all learning. Our sophisticated use of symbols distinguishes us from all other forms of life, the porpoise and the bumblebee notwithstanding, and connects us to each other.

Consider the miracle of this very moment. I stand here vibrating my vocal folds, and molecules go scurrying in your direction, they hit your tympanic membrane, and symbols go up your eighth cranial nerve, and there's a response deep in your cerebrum that, I trust, approximates the images in mine. But do you realize the audacity of this very act? This assumption that somehow we're intellectually and evocatively connected?

Children encounter language even before birth. My wife, Kay, who is a certified nurse-midwife and has delivered many babies, including seven of her own grandchildren, convinces me that language begins in utero, as the unborn infant monitors the mother's voice, and then following birth language exponentially explodes. By the time a child marches off to school, she or he knows at least three thousand words and is able to use them in powerfully penetrating ways, not only to show affection but as weapons of assault.

So the task of the elementary school is not to teach children language. The task is to build on the symbol system that's God-given and already well in place. Lewis Thomas, the great essayist, captured the spirit of the Basic School when he said childhood is for language. And in the Basic School, every student is expected to read with comprehension, write with clarity, and effectively speak and listen. But I should hurriedly add that, in the Basic School language is defined broadly to include not just words, but mathematics, as well as the universal symbol system of the arts.

The arts are not a "frill" in the Basic School. The arts speak a majestic language that words cannot convey, and once again, young children know this language very well. They respond to rhythm, to music, to dance and to color, even before they can articulate words. For several years, I taught children who were deaf. I was always struck by the frustration of a child unable to reach out with words and speak and listen to others. Some of the children would lash out and hit others. But the same children engaged in the arts were an altogether different sight. When they put paint on paper, or followed the rhythm of music through the vibrations of their fingers, or began to weave, or worked with clay, you could see a transformation as they began to express visually the feelings and emotions deep inside them. They were using the arts as a language, as a symbol system, to convey what they could not express with words, and the arts became the symbol system of preference for these children.

Several years ago, when the world-renowned physicist Victor Weisskopf was asked, "What gives you hope in troubled times," he replied, "Mozart and quantum mechanics." And I was intrigued the other day when I read an interview with the latest Westinghouse Science Talent Search winner, a fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Aleksandr Khazanov. Asked why he stays awake late at night doing mathematics equations, Khazanov didn't say, "Well, I'm intellectually engaged with the formulas." He said, mathematics makes beautiful ideas, beautiful proofs. For him, there was beauty in the symbol system of mathematics.

Where do words and numbers and the arts begin and end? It's a symbol system that's coherent. Mathematics is beautiful. Equations can be aesthetically pleasing. In the Basic School all students become proficient not only in the symbol system we call words, but also in numbers and in the arts.

Beyond proficiency in language, all students in the Basic School also study a solid general education curriculum with coherence. During our study, we found that often the elementary school curriculum is disturbingly disconnected. Teachers make countless lesson plans, but often with no pattern or broader design that would give students a greater perspective. Children complete the isolated units, they move relentlessly from one grade level to the next, but what they fail to gain is a more coherent view of knowledge and a more integrated, more authentic view of life.

We observed that children come to school in kindergarten filled with curiosity. They're endlessly asking questions. They keep asking why. But somewhere around grade four they stop asking why, and begin to ask, "Will we have this on the test?" And those two questions tell more about the nature of the inquiry than any other observation to be made. "Why?" is a curiosity question. "Will we have this on the test?" is a conformity question, conformity to the system. Mortimer Adler asked on one occasion, "What happens between the nursery and college to turn the flow of questions off?" One thing that happens is a curriculum in which students study the pieces but never see the patterns. We're gearing them up for the SATs and for the academic disciplines that faculties have imposed on kindergarten, when we should be integrating in the college what kindergartners are always asking.

We propose, then, in the Basic School, a new curriculum, one that is coherent. Specifically, we suggest that all of the traditional academic subjects from science, to history, to civics, to literature might all be fitted within eight integrative themes that we believe cover the territory of knowledge, but provide integration, too. And these eight integrative themes are based on the universal human experiences we all share. Is it possible that all people have eight common experiences'? While we recognize human diversity, I think we must urgently start teaching students about human community as well.

In the Basic School we suggest that these eight themes, which we call "core commonalities," include: the life cycle, the use of symbols, membership in groups, a sense of time and space, a response to the aesthetic, producing and consuming, connections to nature, and living with purpose. Every subject could find a home within these themes, so that knowledge would relate not so much to the academic disciplines as to students' lives. At The Carnegie Foundation, we are developing a curriculum framework within each of these eight commonalities, as well as sample lesson plans, which might be used by schools. Also, teachers in schools across the country are working on new curriculum materials and lesson plans using the commonalities, which spiral upward through grade five or six.

The Milford School District in Delaware recently announced that it was going to introduce the human commonalities curriculum from kindergarten through grade twelve. And Kae Keister, who is the principal at the Banneker School in Delaware, is working along with her teachers on units of study for the core commonalities, as are other principals across the country. Summer institutes are also being planned. Principals and superintendents are saying that this curriculum will not only help students discover the disciplines, but will help the schools meet state standards, too.

Simply stated, the thematic approach to the curriculum, which spirals upward vertically, not only gives students a core of essential knowledge, it also helps them discover connections across the disciplines and helps them understand, as well, how what they learn in the classroom relates to life.

More than fifty years ago, Mark Van Doren wrote, "The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity." Van Doren concluded by saying, "The student who can begin early in life to see things as connected has begun the life of learning." And I'm suggesting that discovering the connections is what the Basic School is all about.

Before leaving the curriculum, I should stress the point that the Basic School is committed to assessment. High academic standards, achievement standards, and benchmarks will be set, for both literacy and general knowledge. We're now working with ACT, the distinguished assessment organization in Iowa City, to develop the best, most appropriate ways to measure the progress of each student. James Agee wrote, "With every child who is born, under no matter what circumstance, the potentiality of the human race is born again." And in the Basic School, the goal of assessment is to affirm and expand the potential of every child, not restrict it.

III. CLIMATE
Beyond building community, and beyond offering a curriculum with coherence, an effective school provides a climate for learning that is both active and creative, not passive and restrictive. Several years ago, I walked unannounced into a fifth-grade classroom in New Haven. I observed thirty children crowded around the teacher's desk, and my first impulse was to hurry down the hall and report the crisis to the central office. But I paused and discovered that what I was observing was not a crisis, it was a magic moment. The children had just finished reading Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, and they were debating vigorously whether little Oliver could make it in their own home town. And they concluded that while he was able to survive in far-off London, he never would have made it in New Haven, a much tougher city. They had discovered how great literature relates to the reality of life.

The simple truth is that excellence in education is that magic moment between curious students and an inspired teacher. But for teachers to succeed, we need smaller classes, especially in the primary grades, where young children often need one-on-one attention.

I have been startled by people who say that class size doesn't matter. Indeed, some people in high positions in education have reached that conclusion. I have to think that they have not spent five minutes with more than three children in the last thirty years. I'm a grandfather. Occasionally I'll take four or five grandchildren off to a fast food spot, and I come home a basket case. And this has nothing to do with preparing them for the SATs. All the evidence shows that the best learning occurs in the primary grades when the class enrollment is no more than seventeen. And yet our data show that on average the elementary school classrooms across the country enroll twenty-six. When we surveyed kindergarten teachers several years ago, we found that in one state the average kindergarten class size is forty-one. And then we have the audacity to talk about being world-class in math and science.

The Basic School should work toward smaller classes in the primary grades. All of the evidence supports it.

The Basic School would have, as well, flexible class scheduling throughout the day, so that the clock would be adjusted to the lessons, and not the other way around. We also recommend that students be grouped in a variety of ways. We reject the old graded versus nongraded debate. That's an either-or approach that doesn't work. We suggest at least five different grouping patterns in the school, and the children would move flexibly from one to the other, through the day and the week. We suggest homeroom grouping, for a sense of family; mixed-age grouping, for cooperative learning; focused grouping, for concentrated study and coaching; individual grouping, for independent study; and all-school grouping, for community building. The point is that in the Basic School, the grouping pattern fits the purpose.

And we also recommend in the Basic School grouping across the generations. Children learn from older people, and we must recognize the need within our isolated institutions for intergenerational connections.

Several years ago it occurred to me that one of the most important people in my own life was my Grandfather Boyer, who lived to be one hundred. At the age of forty, Grandpa Boyer moved his little family from a pleasant residential neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio, into the slum area, as it was called in those days. He lived in that community for forty years, running a city mission to help the poor. There were no social agencies in those days. As I watched my grandfather work with people who were impoverished, I began to understand that to be truly human, one must serve. And I learned from him, not so much from the words he spoke as from the deeds he performed, lessons I could not have learned in school. We cannot deny our children the lessons of intergenerational connections.

Margaret Mead said that the strength of a culture is sustained as three generations vitally interact. And yet I think it's not unfair to say we're building in this country a kind of horizontal culture, in which each age group is separated from the others. Infants are in nurseries, and toddlers in day care. Children in school are organized consistently by age. Young people go off to college and spend four years isolated on campus. Older adults are spending more and more time in the workplace, away from their families for up to ten hours every day, according to recent research. And elder people are living all alone, in retirement villages.

My own parents chose to live in a retirement village for several years, but their village had a day care center, and every day about forty three- and four-year olds would come in. Each child had an adopted grandparent, and intergenerational connections were made every day. When you see this connection, you realize that young people need to observe the difficulty and courage of growing older, and elder people need the inspiration of the very young. These are lessons that cannot be taught in an isolated school.

We recommend, in the Basic School, that there be grandteacher programs in the school, and other ways of bringing the old and young together. We must find, in this country, a way to resolve the emerging political conflict between children and older people. We must find institutional arrangements that build bridges across the generations. At the David Cox Elementary School in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the children have developed a relationship with the retired people in the village just down the road. The Basic School, then, helps to build connections between the generations.

The climate of the Basic School also is established, of course, with basic resources, from building blocks to books, and includes, as well, the new technology that can connect children in classrooms to networks of knowledge all around the world. And we also urge that every Basic School have health and counseling services for children who are in need.

One of the saddest parts of our study was the frequency with which principals and teachers told us about children who are neglected and abused. One Friday afternoon, we talked to a group of tired teachers at an elementary school in a Midwest city, and the conversation turned immediately to troubled children. One veteran fourth-grade teacher said, "I've taught for many years, and I've never seen children hurting as frequently as they are today." And then she added, rather poignantly, "I know that I'm supposed to teach the basics, but how can I neglect these children who are troubled and abused?"

Several years ago at The Carnegie Foundation we surveyed five thousand fifth- and eighth-graders, and 36 percent said they go home every afternoon to an empty house. Sixty percent said they wished they could spend more time with their mothers and fathers. Two thirds said they wished they had more things to do. And 30 percent said that their family never sits down together to eat a meal.

I believe that America is losing sight of its children. In decisions made every day, we are putting them at the very bottom of the agenda. And while people endlessly criticize the schools, I've concluded that the school is probably the least imperiled institution in our culture. The family is a more imperiled institution. The health care system is in deeper trouble than the school. The judicial system is in greater crisis than the school, and I am still wondering what SAT score we should give to Congress.

What I'm suggesting is that we are focusing on the wrong issue. The schools are becoming the solution to everyone else's problem. In many neighborhoods, the school is, in fact, the only institution that is still working. I have gone into neighborhoods where it looked like a bombed-out area. The branch library had closed and was boarded up. There wasn't a health care clinic within five miles. Churches had moved to the suburbs. And guess what? Good old P.S. 104 was still open every single day. And then we have the gall to say that it's the school that's failed.

We struggled, in our report, with these issues. I do not think that schools can solve every social and economic problem. On the other hand, they cannot ignore children who are hungry, neglected, and abused. We sought to find, in the Basic School report, a middle ground. We propose that every school should have at least a health and counseling professional to handle the basic physical and emotional needs of children. But we strongly urge that the school take the lead in trying to build a partnership with other social agencies in the neighborhood, to deal with problems that are more acute and to help rebuild the sense of community, not just within the school itself, but within the neighborhood as well. All to save the children.

Children are, after all, our most precious resource. And if we as a nation cannot commit ourselves to help the coming generation, if local communities cannot work collectively on behalf of children, then I do wonder what will bring this country back together. And I must confess that as we were completing our study, one of the deepest convictions that I had was that it's time to try to rebuild in this country what I call a "public love of children."

IV.  CHARACTER
Thus far, I have considered three of the four priorities for the Basic School. Bringing people together to build community, bringing the curriculum together to achieve coherence, and bringing resources together to enrich learning. The fourth building block of the Basic School we call a commitment to character. It relates the lessons of the classroom to the ethical and moral lives of students. Will everything we propose for the Basic School achieve change for children that will help them learn to live ethical, upright lives?

There was a time when the focus of public education was on the whole child: Body, mind, and spirit. Values taught at home were reinforced at school. In 1837, Horace Mann, the father of the common school, insisted that public schools should help students develop reason and conscience. And the highest and noblest goal of education, Mann said, pertains to our moral character. Schools, he said, should teach virtue before knowledge.

Today, not only has this commitment to teach values before knowledge dramatically declined, but we now feel uncomfortable even talking about such matters. It's all right these days to talk about high academic standards, but it's not all right to talk about ethical standards.

I believe that knowledge unguided by an ethical and moral compass is more dangerous than ignorance itself. The British philosopher George Steiner described the challenge. He said, "We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." And then Steiner asked a fundamental question educators eventually must ask: "What grows up inside literate civilization that seems to prepare it for barbarism?" What grows up, of course, is information without knowledge, knowledge without wisdom, competence with conscience.

The harsh truth is that America's children are growing up in a world that glorifies violence and sexual degradation. They are bombarded with examples of evil actions. And the so-called "children's time" on Saturday morning TV brings our children twenty-six acts of violence every single hour. And then some people have the audacity to suggest that the nation's schools are undermining the morals of our children.

The poet Vachel Lindsay wrote: "It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, / Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, / Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, / Not that they die but that they die like sheep." We see so many children today unguided and uninspired, even put down, before they've discovered who they are, or fully understand what they might become. The tragedy then is not death. Children must discover that the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined, with convictions undeclared, and with service unfulfilled.

The fourth priority of the Basic School we call, unapologetically, a commitment to character. And we propose seven core virtues which we believe are appropriate for every school and for every student. Specifically, we suggest that every elementary school commit itself to teach, by word and deed, such old-fashioned virtues as integrity, respect for others, responsibility, compassion, self-discipline, perseverance, and giving to others through an act of service. And these virtues are not just intended for our children. They are intended for ourselves. These are virtues which represent the essence of an educated person, and our work is to come together to model these for children. We must not send conflicting signals to our children, telling them how to behave while we ourselves violate the code of conduct of a civilized society.

Ultimately, children need to learn that to be truly human, one must serve others. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ". . .[E]verybody can be great because everybody can serve."

And I do believe the children of this country are ready to be inspired by a larger vision. Shortly before his death, a Jewish leader, Abraham Joshua Hershel, was asked what message he had for young people and he replied, "Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can-everyone-do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments." "And above all," he said, "let them remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art."

In the end, the Basic School is committed to building lives as if they were works of art. And this is accomplished as the Basic School becomes a community with a clear and vital mission; as it has a curriculum with coherence; as it has a climate for creative learning; as it makes a commitment, ultimately, to build character, not just within children, but within the community as well.

Let me underscore one absolutely essential point. Every single proposal that we make in the Basic School is going on somewhere in schools across this country. This is not a top-down report. It's a bubble-up report. It's an attempt to summarize the best practices that we saw in schools all across this country. What we're proposing is that the best practices all be brought together in what we've called the Basic School, which is not a new institution, but an idea. With this idea we affirm the essentials of effective education while keeping the belief that every single school should still follow its own way and should develop its own distinctive mission.

We are now creating in Princeton an arrangement for developing what might be called a national conversation about the Basic School. We've already set up a special telephone line at the Foundation, and working with Sam Sava and NAESP, we have developed a Basic School computer connection to America On-Line. I invite every principal who would be inclined to join us in this informal Basic School Network to exchange ideas and information. The goal is not to achieve uniformity, but to stir creativity through the brilliant examples that you have already established in schools all across the country. Our goal is to support the nation's elementary schools and the principals, who are working so selflessly on behalf of children.

I would like to close with what my grandfather would have called a benediction. On a very personal level, I should like to say that I am most grateful to God for the help I felt in completing this report during a time of illness. My concern now is not to have another Carnegie report discussed by the critics or even by those who praise it, but rather to continue to stir ideas that might help children, especially the least advantaged.

Marion Wright Edelman sent me a copy of a prayer, and it occurred to me that, with a bit of paraphrasing, this might be an appropriate way to end my remarks.

Dear Lord,
We pray for children who like to be tickled,
Who sneak Popsicles before dinner,
And can never find their shoes.

And we pray also for children
Who can't run down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
Who never get dessert,
Who don't have any rooms to clean up,
Whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser.

Dear Lord, we pray for children
Who spend all of their allowances before Tuesday,
Who throw tantrums in the grocery store,
Who pick at their food,
Who squirm in church and temple,
And who scream into the phone.

And we pray also for children,
Whose nightmares come in the light of day,
Who rarely see a doctor,
Who never see a dentist,
Who go to bed hungry,
And who cry themselves to sleep.

Finally, we pray for those we smother with love,
And we pray especially for those
Who will grab the hand of anybody
Kind enough to hold it.

The Basic School, in the end, is not about buildings and budgets. It's about building a better world for children.