This summer I helped teach an undergraduate course as part of an intensive orientation program for new students. We met four days a week, cramming a whole semester into five weeks. On Day 3, I was sitting at a seminar table with a few early arrivals, reviewing my materials before class started, when a student half-raised his hand to get my attention and said, “Can I go to the bathroom?” I looked up at the clock; class didn’t start for five minutes. “Of course,” I said. “It’s right down the hall.” And then I added, with a smile: “You can go to the bathroom whenever you need to, by the way, even after class starts. You don’t have to ask me for permission.”
A similar thing happened at the end of class that day. We had finished everything I had planned with 10 minutes left on the clock.
“OK,” I said. “We’re done. You get an early lunch today.”
The students began packing up, and I did the same. I stood to leave and realized that they had not moved from their seats. They had their backpacks locked and loaded, and were all watching me, or looking at their phones and pretending to not watch me. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Can we leave?” one of them asked tentatively. “Of course,” I said. “Class is over.” They all immediately filed out.
The two incidents illustrate the power of “schoolishness,” a concept that Susan Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, analyzes in her new book: Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, published this year from Cornell University Press. I have been following Blum’s work ever since I read her 2009 book on plagiarism. She has been an aggressive critic of traditional structures in higher education, especially in her 2016 book, I Love Learning; I Hate School: An Anthropology of College.
Schoolishness, in Blum’s work, represents all of the ways in which education systems prioritize compliance and constraint over learning. A schoolish student has mastered the art of giving teachers, and the institution, exactly what they want. Schoolishness, for example, inculcates behaviors like not leaving your seat during the sacred hour of class — a lesson my students had clearly absorbed from their high-school education. A schoolish institution prioritizes and rewards strict adherence to the standards of the teacher, the institution, and the educational system as a whole.
But every student knows that those standards vary — from teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom, campus to campus. Because I have spent 30 years living with Crohn’s disease, I allow students to leave the room and use the bathroom anytime they want. But I know well, as do the students, that some teachers want them seated and focused throughout the class period, even though the instructor might not say so explicitly. A disapproving glance or a docked point or two in a participation grade may say it all.
Students who thrive academically have typically mastered the art of schoolishness. They develop the savvy to recognize the slippery nature of schoolish standards, and conform to the teacher’s expectations as they move from class to class. “Schoolishness,” Blum argues, “teaches the game of school. Someone made up rules, which vary all the time. ... In classes, the points come from figuring out the specific version of the game that the teacher in that specific class has set up.”
The inconsistency extends well beyond minor classroom protocols and into the most significant features of learning. Arbitrary rules in the game(s) of school might shape grading systems, assignments and tests, and expectations for classroom engagement. (Blum has become one of the standard-bearers of “ungrading,” the alternative grading movement.)
Her background as an anthropologist gives some extra punch to her latest critique, as she seeks to “make schoolishness strange” to the reader. School doesn’t have to look like it does in the United States in the 21st century, she argues. It has existed, and still exists, in different forms in other places and times. Formal schools represent an anomaly in human history, she writes. Not only have humans not always learned like this; we mostly didn’t learn like this for a very long time.
I have some criticisms of Blum’s wide application of schoolishness to every aspect of institutional learning — more on that in a moment. But her thorough analysis of the concept heightened my awareness of schoolishness in my own course design and classroom practice. It also opened my eyes to the manifestations of schoolishness in the physical structures of learning, and the ways in which both faculty members and students move in those spaces.
The course I was co-teaching this summer was “The Art and Science of Learning,” so I added a chapter from Blum’s book to the syllabus to see how the students would react to her arguments. Because I am fortunate to teach on the same campus as Blum, I asked her if she would visit the course and lead us on a quick tour of some classrooms, with the concept of schoolishness in mind. We began in a seminar room, and then sat down together in a lecture hall where we asked students to don their critical lenses and share what they were seeing.
They pointed to the tiered rows of desks, all directed to the authority figure at the front of the room; the omnipresence of the artificial lights, with natural light blocked by closed window shades; the dominance of the presentation screen and the blackboard as the places where knowledge would be displayed. We asked a student to stand at the front of the room and play professor, while we moved the other students to the front rows, where they were quick to note how that made it easier for the instructor to monitor their behavior. I noted to myself, perhaps for the first time, how the door was situated at the back of the room, allowing a professor to note who arrived late, left early, or took an unauthorized break midclass.
The students might have also noticed the contrasting expectations that Blum and I had for how they took part in this activity. I have been a longtime advocate for invitational participation, which means that I will ask students who have not yet commented to join the conversation. By contrast, Blum allowed students to participate when they were ready, waiting patiently through their silences. At one point, as I was issuing an invitation to a quiet undergraduate, Blum gave me a good-natured shush to allow that student additional time for reflection.
But it was a friendly shush between colleagues, because we are, in fact, friendly colleagues. We meet every month or two to discuss our writing projects and our longstanding disagreements about education. What follows, then, will come as no surprise to her: While I find the concept of schoolishness an enlightening one that can inform our discourse about higher education, her perception of its sinister penetration into every aspect of learning overreaches the mark.
I write these words on the day before my wife starts the school year as a third-grade teacher. One of her first lessons is on the different voice levels students must use in the classroom, as in: Level 1 is no talking, Level 2 means low talking or whispering, Level 3 means normal conversation; Level 4 is outdoor voice. One could hardly envision a more schoolish lesson, with its emphasis on compliance to an arbitrary standard — unless you have been charged with helping young children learn to read or do mathematics in a building crowded with small and noisy humans. Some children will need a Level 1 environment to learn. Heck, I still need Level 1 around me when I am reading. Schoolishness in this third-grade classroom serves the deeper purpose of learning for most students.
Almost all of the examples I have presented here could be interpreted either as schoolishness for the sake of it or as strategies designed to support the learning of all students. For example, perhaps a professor believes — as I do — that the first five minutes of class are prime opportunities for learning, and builds each class period from the foundation of some activity that students complete in those precious initial minutes. A student who shows up 10 minutes late for every class period will not only miss the activity itself, but also have a diminished experience of the entire class period. Would it be schoolish for the professor to feel frustration at that behavior? And to convey that to the student — or even, when the behavior persists, to have it affect their participation grade?
Two observers witnessing a faculty member’s behavior in that context might come to contrasting yet equally valid conclusions:
- That’s a schoolish professor focused on timekeeping.
- Or, that’s a teacher dedicated to creating a carefully designed learning experience for students.
My criticism of Blum’s theory of schoolishness, in the end, comes down to a difference between interpretive frameworks. In my discipline (English literature), we would label Blum’s approach as the hermeneutics of suspicion. She trains a suspicious eye on dominant educational policies and practices, assuming she will discover unhealthy schoolishness there. She usually finds it, and the rest of us benefit from her keen insight. Longtime practitioners in a field can easily fall into the trap of interpreting the “normal” as the “natural.” Blum’s schoolishness theory reminds instructors: Don’t rest easy, take nothing for granted, and test alternatives.
But as a longtime practitioner in this field, and with all gratitude to insightful critics, I would argue that the schoolish parts of our teaching practices sometimes serve very good purposes.
Critics of writing pedagogy, for example, lament the dominance of the five-paragraph essay, which has no authentic counterpart in the world beyond the classroom. That very specific schoolish assignment will never help anyone land the big sale, to be sure, but it can give developing writers an opportunity to practice the art of building a paragraph with a topic sentence and a manageable amount of evidence. Likewise, critics of schoolishness have trained their sights especially on extrinsic motivators like grades or other rewards for student learning or performance, and yet such motivators can have special appeal to some students, or form part of a careful mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in a college course.
In short, while schoolish practices may not be natural, sometimes they are necessary and even fruitful. We saw plenty of evidence of that during and after the pandemic, as too much flexibility left many students unmoored and lacking the skills they needed to structure their academic lives successfully. Structured practices can serve the needs of many students, even if — and sometimes because — they require students to comply to arbitrary standards, learn to adjust themselves to varied teachers and courses, and develop the art of succeeding in an ever-shifting environment.
Perhaps those are not the first lessons we should prioritize in every classroom, but they are, indeed, lessons that can produce graduates with skills that will help them to develop and thrive in an ever-shifting workplace.
Whether you embrace the skeptical viewpoint embodied in the work of Susan Blum, or the counter perspective I have articulated here, you will find plentiful insight in her new book. Defenders of traditional schooling might find themselves throwing up their hands in frustration on some pages. But that might be the best reason for faculty members to keep reminding ourselves that thoughtless, knee-jerk schoolishness can undermine the positive effects of our teaching.
