What is a Multiage Classroom?
Since 1848 when Horace Mann imposed his graded classroom system based on the chronological ages of his pupils at the Quincey Grammar School in Boston we have been brainwashed into believing that to be the best way to group children's learning experiences in classrooms. The real truth of that flawed supposition is obvious every day in such classrooms around the world, in every school just down the road. More likely in the school you attended, or your children now attend.
"That's the way we do school, always have, always will."
That is completely opposite to how children, all children, progress on their learning adventure. In real life they are never segregated into age alone based grouping for every parent well knows that the way their children develop is entirely different from child to child. Why should that end when they are ready to attend formal schooling? Every parent knows the way their first child developed is quite different to the way of the second, or of the third and so on. In a family the elder child is also the trainer, the tutor, the educator we might say of the younger siblings, and the youngers quite often have plenty to teacher their elder siblings. Even identical twins are only alike in their physical appearances, their brains and their beings can be wide apart.
John Dewey recognised the folly of age based learning in the late eighteen hundreds and the Progressive Movement was born, much to the ire of the established Great Schools in the USA and Britain. Australia took little notice. At the cease of hostilities following the end of World War Two resources for education were terrible short, especially in Britain, and a new movement was born, Family Grouping, where children were taught in non-graded groupings, often under the tutelage of several teachers, even at the same time. They called it team teaching. This was mainly confined to Primary Schools as the secondary schools, especially the Great Schools, held the age graded and subject only line for prestigious reasons, if nothing more.
The Multiage Movement, a blend of Dewey’s Progressive philosophy and non-graded classroom with multiple age ranges slowly seeped into main stream learning in western countries and developed the title of "Multiage Classrooms." At one stage in our schooling history we even had Multiage Associations where committed teachers gathered and shared their learning experiences. My lifelong friend Terry Ball created MAAQ, our Multi Age Association of Queensland with a quarterly magazine, “Free to Learn” for all the world to read. Collaboration and sharing were a feature of the movement, even internationally as I became involved in. School architecture followed the trend and accommodated team teaching in bright and airy double teaching spaces with withdrawal rooms and extensive outdoor courtyards, even nooks for bean bags to read in. Kids and their teachers were seen to be having "Too much fun learning" so it had to stop, suddenly. Our politicians backed by spurious research and a mighty and powerful bureaucracy became committed to the edicts of Thatcher, Reagan and Howard and the Global Education Reform Movement, the GERM, swept the floor of child based education in favour of system based education to best suit the Great Schools and the elite who saw their control of education threatened, though ever so slightly.
So it was now complete, all of those extensively established open learning spaces boarded up into single cell age-based classrooms so that a prescribed curriculum could be delivered by acquiescent staff, once highly professional and dedicated teachers, and monitored daily, even hourly, on whether the children under their tutelage were learning well enough to do well in the "NAPLAN Nightmare" to prove the massive injustice to our nation's education system was warranted, with the MySchool website as proof, Parent Choice being the intended end result.
Of course after thirty years of this massive blunder you might say the chooks have come home to roost. Schools have never been in such a mess on every front we might look, and the social unrest grows daily.
Maybe the Great Experiment has had some benefits as the Great Schools have grown at an ever increasing rate, as also has Home Schooling, Flexi-schooling and most alarmingly No-schooling, or Detachment, though that is hardly a benefit! It would seem logical when forty percent of young learners are left behind, or otherwise hindered, that problems across all of society might follow.
Is the time ready to Re-Form our nation's education system with a proven child-based system where their teachers are properly trained and valued as professionals, not deliverers of an antiquated curriculum still looking backward to the Industrial Revolution era? When will those who have created the mess take some responsibility? Probably not in my lifetime, nor yours, but we should continue to tell them so.
Let us take a journey into a Multiage Classroom and see what a difference it makes to how children learn and how teachers teach. Hold your breath and be surprised. Learning to Learn is not unlike Learning to Swim, but it's a lot more fun.
