Not Another Failure Experience Please!
By Taylor Stoehr (profile)

Over the years in the Dorchester Court Men's Program, we've made many adjustments in the structure of the course and our own expectations, but we started with one fundamental premise that we've tried to hold to - that our program, Changing Lives Through Literature, whether or not it actually changes any lives, should not change them for the worse. It might, for instance, be good for a probationer to learn self-discipline through meeting the requirements of a study program that made reasonable and worthy demands on him, but not at the expense of others who failed to meet those demands. We had resolved that the course should not be another failure experience for anyone, not even those who couldn't or wouldn't do the work, for good reasons or bad.

This is not so hard; it's a matter of asking the right questions and setting up assignments that could be understood and attempted by all the students in a class, whatever their levels of capability, with each one challenged at his or her best. The aim must be to demystify the whole realm of literacy. All their lives our students have been told they are incompetent readers and writers, and this tends to make them so. But the incompetence is superficial in most cases. Their speech skills are usually more than adequate and often superb. In fact, their failure in school has protected them from certain kinds of glibness and beating about the bush.

The important thing is not to set standards and hold people to them, but to be of genuine use to students at their level of achievement. The crucial lesson involves communication of an attitude toward ideas and experience, rather than pushing any predetermined level of knowledge or expertise. This means taking into account the ideals and aspirations as well as the intelligence of our students. And it also means a growing awareness that language, aesthetic taste, and practical ethics are not simply inherited from the culture you are raised in but are continually being created, negotiated, and revised in the public realm, wherever groups of people come together to use or question or affirm their attitudes and beliefs. The primary forum for such cultural work, which includes the setting and changing of standards, has become the modern classroom, just as it once was the marketplace, or the church, or the town-meeting, or even the theater when theater was still a public service in ancient and medieval times. Whether or not the classroom is best suited to such cultural creation, it is the actual institution that has taken the place of these other formal settings in all industrialized countries and, especially, in the United States.

To repeat then, it seems to us that all the students we teach have the right to success in this kind of classroom, not just an opportunity to learn, but the active exercise of language, taste, and ethics, and to find their own individual powers and ideals in relation to a growing sense of how others speak and judge and evaluate - in short, both discovering and making standards. Failure means being left out of the most important aspects of civic life. We want to establish classrooms in which no one will be left out.