photos by Gokhan Sonay

The Ideal School

The Ideal School
Some Incidental Notes on the Problem

by Win Wenger, Ph.D.

Throughout the past century, schools have not been willing to accommodate change and meaningful reform. This is partly due to lack of incentive. Bureaucratic structures are not well noted for being results-oriented. Any change represents also change in power relationships, by definition. Those currently at advantage in power relationships can be understandably less than enthusiastic about such changes. There is little in the incentive structure of bureaucracies to offset that factor. The powerful have strong incentive to cling to the status quo.Widespread dissatisfaction with the results — and the costs — of schooling, all levels public and private, has placed strong pressure on schools to improve. Throughout modern times, however, this has merely resulted in widely ballyhooed “reforms” which were window-dressing only and changed nothing substantial, even though each of those window-dressing “reforms” was hailed at the time as the salvation of education.These conditions are not expected to change in the near future, except for the worse — as public support erodes and schools begin to break down. We can expect no substantive new reforms to succeed, though a few more window-dressing reforms, each hailed as the salvation, might cycle through before the end.

When sufficient outside pressure is brought, schools do change. Witness the effect of technology giving rise to distance learning though this, in turn, could be made far more effective. Once distance learning is made more effective, existing schools will face severe Darwinian-type pressures, in addition to their self-inflicted difficulties.

Or, we can turn some effort toward creating alternative educational programs and schools, alternatives which model a far better way of educating. One may create the examples to which people can turn. With live alternative examples visibly in place, when the sudden startling collapse of American public education comes, people can jump to the alternative models instead of panicking and making matters worse.

Let us sample some of the options from among the various proposed alternative educational models —

Improve existing systems

1. Improvements in input to the learner
   1. Intellectual improvement —
      • Jerome S. Bruner’s “Spiral Curriculum” and the integration of knowledge. See our summer school proposal.
      • General systems theory as a “Rosetta Stone of Knowledge.”
      • Sequencing issues, e.g., the Waldorf schools of Rudolph Steiner (see also “Models of Human Development, below).” Specifically, the issue of matching style and content of instruction to specified stages of human development and functioning.
   2. “Wholistic” improvements to the learner —
      • Summerhill didn’t produce any leaders — did its program eliminate drive?
      • Attempts to emulate Walden Two have run into serious psychological problems.
   3. Specific curriculum goal reforms —
      • Schools and proposed schools based upon environmental learning.
      • Schools and proposed schools for peace, for social reform, for other specific social aims.
      • Religious and “new age” and/or revealed knowledge schools and proposals.
2. Improvements in the learner
   1. Models of Human Development — enhance learner’s ability to learn and to get value from the learning.
   2. Modern, Project Renaissance, methods for improving learner ability.
   3. Special disciplines, especially physically-based, such as oriental Martial Arts.
   4. Proposals for wielding incentives to higher performance.
3. Improvements in Method
   1. “Learn by doing” (John Dewey) and feedback (Montessori, O.K. Moore, S. Ramon y Cajal, Marion Diamond).
   2. Learn by output from the learner — Socratic Method.
   3. Learn by observing sensitive-to-data inner imagery (Einsteinian Discovery Method).
   4. Learn by observing “strays” and “sidebands” of awareness.
   5. Bodies of specific techniques, such as Georgi Lozanov’s Suggestopedia or Luis Machado’s Emotopedia.
   6. Cooperative and team-learning systems.
   7. Technology-assisted instruction, including AV aids and computers.
   8. The solution to all school problems is to go over entirely to phonic reading — or — The solution to all school problems is to go over entirely to “look-say” reading methods. (This is “the Hundred Years’ War” in American education.)
   9. Aiming instruction to individual learning styles and to Gardner’s various multiple intelligences, not only educational levels. These differentiated needs are all too real, but can any teacher, much less teachers generally, serve them by present didactic methods?
4. Improvements in delivery
   1. Various mixes of human and technology-based instruction.
   2. Automated learning systems.
   3. Are schools really the best delivery system for education in the first place? What are all the possible alternatives we can think of? Which of them might be interesting?
   4. The Home Schooling Movement
        Pros and cons
      • conditions in the schools
      • uncontrolled conditions at home
      • compared costs for the results gotten
      • intellectual advantages of the students
      • social development issues
      • moral development issues
      • safety and security
      • citizenship issues
      • costs to parents, including opportunity costs

       Possible ways to facilitate

      • Possible ways to collaborate between schools and home-schools, to the learner’s benefit.
      • Are there ways everyone can come out ahead on this?

What level school?

1. The younger the child, the greater lifetime difference the intervention will make.
2. For historical reasons, Project Renaissance methods are presently best developed for older children and adults, though their principles apply at all levels. Some existing methods would have to be interpolated and adjusted for use with younger students.
3. Graduate schools have the advantage as regards the convenience of having your alumni graduates reporting back immediately from science, the professions, and commerce into which they recently graduated.
4. If the new school is a university, it can serve all other levels of education by building “lab schools” at those other levels. It also makes sense for a university-based lab school system to test out more than one model for whatever level, even though no university lab schools to date appear to have done that, only rarely testing even specific methods or techniques side by side. Multi-model testing would be a basic feature of the lab schools created by the proposed Renaissance University, itself a proposed alternative model new school.

Strategies for getting an ideal school going …(subject of a later article)

Alternative Models

1. Discover your own system and/or method and/or basis for an alternative model school. Set up specifically for this purpose is the procedure that is posted on a self-taught basis for Toolbuildering. To succeed in inventing your own powerful basis for an improved way of educating, training, or childraising, let yourself be surprised by the experience you find there in “Toolbuilder.”
2. Select which model(s) you want, and the strategies for bringing them into being.

This has been a partial listing of various proposed ideal educational models, some of them desirable/workable/do-able and some of them perhaps not so. The need of a preferred ideal alternative model school is highlighted by the continued self-inflicted difficulties of the present school system, which are not expected to change for the better.This writer’s strong preference is for the proposed Renaissance University, whose preliminary draft prospectus is cited, but other models are also possible and desirable. An even stronger preference would be for existing schools to examine and test out some of the many various Project Renaissance methods, saving us the arduous labor of creating schools, but thus far that has not happened.

We also seek allies and partners — preferably with their own strong clear vision of an ideal school — together with whom we can co-create something much better for our children than the existing schools. And we need to create something much better for ourselves as well, not only for our children, in a changing world economy where the average American adult has to change careers every few years, learning a new field or profession.Distance Learning

1. The main change needed to make distance learning far more effective, is
   1. to require several students together at each terminal, and
   2. to cue them to “buzz-group” prior to answering on the chief points of the lesson — points which have been made into questions.

   Students need to interact with each other for all the same reasons as they need to interact with lesson context, only more so and face-to-face. Keyboard and screen are too narrow a context — interaction with fellow students broadens that context greatly, rendering much easier the transfer of learning from initial context to other situations. Motivation is also a key factor, in an industry where the rate of drop-out exceeds 90%.

2. Some various of these are on display, in self-taught form, throughout much of this website.
3. Can, however, most teachers — or even any teacher — really do that? On the other hand, with Socratic drawing-forth, each student comes from his or her own strengths, reinforces these and builds around them, with no special effort required on the teacher’s part. Thus, modern Socratic Method is a much easier answer to this consideration.

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the 2004 annual conference of Project Renaissance, Double Festival XIII, Pasadena, Maryland.

Deborah Domanski

“Domanski may be the best Cherubino we’ve seen,” wrote Tulsa World Opera Critic James D. Watts after Deborah Domanski debuted in Le Nozze de Figaro with the Tulsa Opera in April of 2006. Watts praises Deborah’s ability to “deliver vocally” and adds, “She perfectly captures the spirit of a hormone-crazed young fellow so in love with love he can’t do anything right.”  Deborah Domanski brings an extraordinary combination of scintillating musicality and captivating stage-presence to all her roles, including the title role of L’Enfant in L’Enfant et les Sortileges, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Nancy in Albert Herring, Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Minerva in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Miss Jessel in Turn of the Screw, Sally Follett in the New York premier of A Death in the Family by William Mayer, and Aphrodite in the world premier of Paris and Eonone by Philip Hageman.

At Pittsburgh Opera, Deborah has performed the role of Nireno in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Flora in La Traviata, Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro (student matinée), Siebel in Faust (student matinée), and has been responsible for the roles of Rosina, Cesare, and Mercedes. During the 2002-2003 season, Deborah made her Los Angeles Philharmonic debut under Maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen as the Alto Soloist in Mozart’s Requiem.  Among other soloist concert engagements, she has performed with the Laredo Symphony as alto soloist in Beethoven’s 9th, the Greenwich Choral Society’s performance of Rossini’s Petit Messe Solenelle, and with The Juilliard Choral Union in Vivaldi’s Gloria in Alice Tully Hall.  As a Young Artist in the Juilliard Opera Center she was a participant in the prestigious 2002 Juilliard Vocal Arts Honors Recital in Alice Tully Hall. As the 2002 competition winner at the Music Academy of the West, Miss Domanski became the Marilyn Horne Foundation Awardee and was presented in recital, national radio and World Wide Web broadcast in October 2002.

In January 2005, Deborah made her Weill Concert Hall debut as part of the Foundation’s The Song Continues… recital series at Carnegie Hall. She maintains her position as a roster recitalist with the Horne Foundation, and presents recitals and education programs around the country. During the summers of 1999 and 2000, she won the Leopoldskron Competition in Salzburg and was featured in subsequent public recitals in Salzburg, Austria. Other competition titles include Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition Great Lakes Region 3rd Place Winner – 2005. Miss Domanski’s education consists of a Bachelor of Music, Cum Laude, from Chapman University in California, a Master of Music from Manhattan School of Music, and an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School. After completing two years with the Pittsburgh Opera’s Young Artist Program, Deborah spent the summer of 2005 with the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program, where her responsibilities included covering for Susan Graham in the role of Cecilio in Mozart’s Lucio Silla.  She returned to Santa Fe Opera this summer where she performed the role of Mercedes in Carmen.

Have performed:
Mercedes	Carmen	Bizet
Miss Jessel	Turn of the Screw	Britten
Nancy	Albert Herring	Britten
Cherubino	Le Nozze di Figaro	Mozart
Zerlina	Don Giovanni	Mozart
Flora	La Traviata	Verdi
Rosina	Il Barbiere di Siviglia	Rossini
Nireno	Giulio Cesare	Handel
Minerva	Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria	Monteverdi
L’Enfant	L’Enfant et les Sortileges	Ravel
Roles that suit:
Miranda	The Tempest	Ades
Lady w/ Hatbox	Postcard from Morocco	Argento
Romeo	I Capuleti e I Montecchi	Bellini
*Beatrice	Beatrice et Benedict	Berlioz
*Dinah	Trouble in Tahiti	Bernstein
*Carmen	Carmen	Bizet
Hermia	Midsummer Night’s Dream	Britten
*Erika	Vanessa	Barber
Lazuli	L’Etoile	Chabrier
Melisande/Genevieve	Pelleas et Melisande	Debussy
Smeton	Anna Bolena	Donizetti
Inez	Maria Padilla	Donizetti
Nerone/Poppea	Agrippina	Handel
Ruggiero	Alcina	Handel
*Sesto	Giulio Cesare	Handel
Serse	Serse	Handel
Hansel	Hansel and Gretel	Humperdinck
Iphienie	Iphienie en Tauride	Gluck
Orfeo	Orfeo ed Euridice	Gluck
*Siebel	Faust	Gounod
*Stefano	Romeo et Juillette	Gounod
Beppe	L’Amico Fritz	Mascagni
Cendrillion/Prince Charmant	Cendrillion	Massenet
Penelope/Melanto	Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria	Monteverdi
La Musica/Euridice	Orfeo	Monteverdi
Poppea/Ottavia	L’Incoronazione di Poppea	Monteverdi
*Dorabella	Cosi fan tutti	Mozart
*Idamante	Idomeneo	Mozart
*Annio/Sesto	La Clemenza di Tito	Mozart
*Cecilio	Lucio Silla	Mozart
Don Ramiro	La Finta giardiniera	Mozart
Sifare/Farnace	Mitridate	Mozart
*2nd Lady	Die Zauberflote	Mozart
Varvara	Katya Kabanova	Janacek
Fox	Cunning Little Vixen	Janacek
Helene	La Belle Helene	Offenbach
Nicklauss	Les Contes D’Hoffmann	Offenbach
*La Perichole	La Perichole	Offenbach
Public Opinion	Orpheus in the Underworld	Offenbach
*Gitana	El Gato Montez (Zarzuela)	Penella
Ariodante	Ariodante	Handel
Radamisto	Radamisto	Handel
Rinaldo	Rinaldo	Handel
Serse	Serse	Handel
Charlotte	Werther	Massenet
Secretary	The Consul	Menotti
Dido	Dido and Aeneas	Purcell
*Komponist	Ariadne auf Naxos	Strauss
*Octavian	Der Rosenkavalier	Strauss
*Orlofsky	Die Fledermaus	Strauss
*Olga	Eugene Onegin	Tchaikovsky
*Mignon	Mignon	Thomas
Tebaldo	Don Carlo	Verdi