Autonomy in learning and literature

I've been reading a bit more of Punished by Rewards, and I paid particular attention to how a degree of freedom in the classroom improves learning. Everyone learns better when they are interested in the subject, but even when a certain subject has to be learned, it still helps to provide choices and some self-determination along the way. Maybe that seems obvious, but Kohn provides an interesting sampling of actual research in this area (quoting from pp. 222-23):

• When second graders in Pittsburgh were given some choice about their learning, including the chance to decide which tasks they would work on at any given time, they tended to "complete more learning tasks in less time."
• When high school seniors in Minneapolis worked on chemistry problems without clear-cut directions -- that is, with the opportunity to decide for themselves how to find solutions -- they "consistently produced better write-ups of experiments" and remembered the material better than those who had been told exactly what to do. They put in more time than they had to, spending "extra laboratory periods checking results that could have been accepted without extra work." Some of the students initially resisted having to make decisions about how to proceed, but these grumblers later "took great pride in being able to carry through an experiment on their own."
• When preschool-age children in Massachusetts were allowed to select the materials they used for making a collage, their work was judged more creative than the work of children who used exactly the same materials but did not get to choose them.
• When college students in New York had the chance to decide which of several puzzles they wanted to work on, and how to allot their time to each of them, they were a lot more interested in working on such puzzles later than were students who were told what to do.
• When teachers of inner-city black children were trained in a program designed to promote a sense of self-determination, the children in these classes missed less school and scored better on a national test of basic skills than those in conventional classrooms.
• Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students who felt they were given personal responsibility for their studies had "significantly higher self-esteem and perceived academic competence" than children who felt controlled in their classrooms.
• When second graders spent the year in a constructivist math classroom, one where textbooks and rewards were discarded in favor of an emphasis on "intellectual autonomy" -- that is, where children, working in groups, took an active role in figuring out their own solutions to problems and were free to move around the classroom on their own initiative to get the materials they needed -- they developed more sophisticated higher-level reasoning skills without falling behind on basic conceptual tasks.

One of the fascinating findings in the above list was that giving college students a choice of puzzles resulted in them enjoying the puzzles more even at a later date. Maybe being forced to do math in a certain way at a certain time results in kids disliking math even weeks or months later (or forever). As Kohn points out, perceiving oneself to be in control (or feeling helpless) is an enormous psychological factor as well as a predictor of academic learning. According to research Kohn cites, even infants exhibit enjoyment of noisy toys that they control, but fear similar toys which make noise at random. Based on research, giving kids no control would tend to reduce their self-esteem, make them more vulnerable to depression, and just plain make them angry. To have all this associated with academic learning cannot be a good thing.

I had to read Great Expectations at age 13 and I hated it. It was the most dark, grim, depressing, frightening, awful book in existence as far as I was concerned. I remember thinking that only a creepy half-insane man could come up with Miss Havisham and her cobweb-strewn wedding cake. (I didn't read much beyond that, in fact.) To this day, in spite of enjoying other 19th century literature (even Wuthering Heights, which is also nightmarish), I have never completed a Dickens novel. Along similar lines, I read Hamlet in 12th grade and again in college and thought it was okay, then read it one weekend all on my own and loved it. This isn't to say I never enjoyed an assigned work-- I loved Madame Bovary and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but for various reasons I hated the lectures and discussions on these books and still wished I had been able to read them in peace, on my own, rather than for a class. In short, I don't think I would want my children to be assigned to read literary novels, at least until college. If my kids don't (for example) see me reading an Austen novel and get interested, or in some other way pick up one of the literary novels around the house, I plan to say "Here are some shelves full of literature, pick a book to read."

Last spring a friend of mine was asking for literary book recommendations. He was helping to identify some easier-to-read classics for his niece to read over the summer, as his family is quite focused on education and academic success, and his niece would soon be starting high school. My recommendation was not one of the classics, it was anything by P. G. Wodehouse, but particularly the Jeeves/Wooster novels. These make tough reading at first, due to the strange slang, the massive vocabulary, and the more complicated sentence structures. But the key is, they are hysterically funny once you are used to the style of writing. Once you "get" the humor, you're more than willing to slog through the unfamiliar language. For any of you who have kids of high school age (maybe younger, I don't know), you can boost their vocabulary easily if you can get them hooked on Bertie Wooster (a bumbling rich bachelor) and Jeeves (his valet). I'll just end with an excerpt from one of the best of these books, The Code of the Woosters:

I suppose that when two men of iron will live in close association with each other, there are bound to be occasional clashes, and one of these had recently popped up in the Wooster home. Jeeves was trying to get me to go on a Round-The-World cruise, and I would have none of it. But in spite of my firm statements to this effect, scarcely a day passed without him bringing me a sheaf or nosegay of those illustrated folders which the Ho-for-the-open-spaces birds send out in the hope of drumming up custom. His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.