Bird Droppings September 18, 2025

Should children be left behind, or do we need a supply of energy drinks in the teachers’ lounge?

“I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing, he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of nature. Nature loves analogies but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parents. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion: – Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature? I answer, – Respect the child, and respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue – but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, one of my heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke about his idea of education, and fortunately for me, he wrote it down. Over the last twenty years, I have been directly involved in an educational program, Foxfire, which is based on John Dewey’s ideas on education. I was talking last Friday, just before lunch, with a fellow teacher and a local representative from PAGE, the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, about education of all things. We discussed the idea of teaching top-down, as we in Georgia are being directed to do with the new national common core standards. Here is where we are going, and now, how do we get there? That is more of a real question than why you did not get where you are supposed to be.

This first statement is what Emerson and Dewey were talking about. As we talked, I mentioned Foxfire and how it was, in effect, how good teachers teach without even knowing. Really, it is not something new and outlandish; it is just putting a name on good teaching habits and providing a framework of ten core practices to work with.

Coincidently, my friend who was involved in the discussion had retrieved some old Foxfire books from the discarded book cart. Periodically, our media center discards old and tattered books for teachers to get their first crack at before throwing them out. It seems that I have built a library of discarded books. My friend had salvaged four old Foxfire books from the cart earlier in the day.

“I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. I believe that the school must represent present life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. I believe that education, which does not occur through forms of life that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden. I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life, should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play, and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.” John Dewey

Learning is not a time-limited, space-limited, and or school-building-limited activity, as many teachers think. It is not tied to a specific curriculum and text. Real learning is alive, ongoing, continuous, actively participatory, and an integral part of societal involvement. As I looked at the Foxfire core practices, it becomes apparent these are good teacher practices, these are good life practices, and this is where learning can truly occur.

1 • From the beginning, learner choice, design, and revision infuse the work teachers and learners do together.

2 • The work teachers and learners do together clearly manifests the attributes of the academic disciplines involved, so those attributes become habits of mind.

3 • The work teachers and students do together enables learners to make connections between the classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond their communities.

4 • The teacher serves as facilitator and collaborator.

5 • Active learning characterizes classroom activities.

6 • The learning process entails imagination and creativity.

7 • Classroom work includes peer teaching, small group work, and teamwork.

8 • The work of the classroom serves audiences beyond the teacher, thereby evoking the best efforts by the learners and providing feedback for improving subsequent performances.

9 • The work teachers and learners do together includes rigorous, ongoing assessment and evaluation.

10 • Reflection, an essential activity, takes place at key points throughout the work.

Foxfire Fund Inc.

What intrigued me from my first involvement with Foxfire was how even the approach to learning our school system is using, which is called Learning Focused Schools, is within these eleven principles. This past summer, in my research, I found that most good and great educational ideas incorporate or parallel these simple practices. Literally, hundreds of good teachers in actual practice helped develop this concept over a long period of time. Emerson and Dewey were thinking along the same lines long before most of us were born. This is not a new fad; it is simply good teaching. It is interesting, and I recall long before I read Dewey or Emerson or anything about Foxfire, which was little more than a mountain word for a glowing fungus on a hillside. I have been in graduate education classes learning from teachers who taught in this manner, and I have watched students learn as they were involved in this approach to education. So why is it so hard to get across to teachers of today? Could it be because it takes more work from the teachers to implement? You will see the word rigorous in Foxfire quite a bit, and it is. But good teaching is rigorous. It is dynamic, not static.

As I finished my dissertation and I am still researching The Foxfire Approach to teaching, I find teachers telling me they prefer to teach in this manner. Still, I am often criticized by peers and the administration for not following curriculum maps and guides. An article in NEA’s weekly newsletter pointed to how so many new teachers are coming into the ranks with little or no true training in education, and often, a point-and-click mentality is all they have. Their bodies fill a space and push kids through. I have met several great teachers who have come through alternative approaches to teacher training, although I did have a minor and a major in education along the way. I just never student taught. Along the way, I switched my major to psychology at the last minute to avoid taking a foreign language, which was required for education majors at Mercer University in 1974.

I would suggest that we need to, instead of creating new curricula, instill more adrenaline in teachers. Perhaps we could install a super energy drink machine outside of each teacher’s classroom and, just before starting class, require every teacher to get a caffeine jolt. Energy can be a very powerful thing in so many ways, especially when it involves a passion for teaching. I have wandered and pondered enough for one day and will get off my soapbox for today, but please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart, and be sure always to give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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