I had a disturbing exchange the other day with a middle school guidance counselor. She’d telephoned to get more information about a girl who attended the seventh grade in my school last year.

It shouldn’t have been so surprising, really. At the start of every school year I usually receive at least one similar call, when my former students show up at their new schools without the requisite transcript—grades, test scores, boilerplate teacher comments, etc. Instead they arrive with a letter detailing their strengths and weaknesses, and their accomplishments here, and their beleaguered guidance counselors don’t know what to do with them.

But this time I almost lost my cool.

It probably didn’t help that I had just finished reading a long excerpt in Harpers from Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Because the student in question happens to be African American. Tanisha is an articulate, highly intelligent young woman who is eager to learn and succeed. At issue was the math level she should be placed in—remedial, “school level,” or honors. Yes, Virginia, the tracking system is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

Tanisha’s counselor was hesitant to put her in an honors class without hard evidence that she could do the work.

“I need numbers!” the counselor pleaded with me.

“As I explained to you in my letter, we don’t operate with numbers. And as I also explained, Tanisha is competent and up to grade level in math.”

“So you’re telling me she’s ready to do advanced work?”

I changed course for a moment and this is where the trouble began. “Have you asked Tanisha? Does she want to be challenged?”

“Ask the student what she wants? Why would I do that?” Her brain seemed on the verge of a brown out.

“Because a child’s attitude toward learning means everything,” I replied, trying very hard not to shout into the mouthpiece. “If Tanisha chooses to tackle honors math, then I can assure you she will study hard and be able to keep up with the rest of the class.”

It felt pointless to continue. We were speaking different languages and both of us were getting mad. I decided to back off so that the counselor wouldn’t take reprisals against Tanisha.

“Listen, I’m sorry to be so abrupt with you,” I said in a gentler tone. “It’s our last day here to prepare for the arrival of the students and I’m feeling pretty frazzled.”

This opened up the space for her to do the same.

“Yeah, I am too. I have 200 kids to place before Tuesday.”

She told me that she would, in fact, check with Tanisha about the math class and thanked me for my time. I was relieved to end on a cordial note.

However, the exchange raised two fundamental issues in education: race and choice. As Kozol so graphically demonstrates in his aforementioned new book, schooling in America has once again become an entirely apartheid institution. Integrated urban schools are a thing of the past, and the horrid conditions under which African American children are forced to learn are reminiscent of the Deep South prior to the civil rights movement. Moreover, it isn’t just the ruined physical state of the buildings that is so shocking, but also the dumbed down, robotic quality of the curriculum and the teaching methods employed in them. Kozol is right. Shame on us all.

The school Tanisha is now attending still happens to be racially diverse, but a separate but “equal” clause remains in effect regardless. Overwhelmingly it is the white kids who get funneled into the honors classes, while the others are dumped out at the bottom of the ladder. Very few ever make it above the first rung. It is a not so subtle prelude to the scene at Albany’s single, centralized high school, where there is an almost total absence of children of color in the Advanced Placement classes and where the minority dropout rate is at one and the same time an embarrassment and a closely kept secret.

And then there is the matter of choice. In this instance, what psychologist Wendy Grolnick calls the “receptacle model” of education is color blind. The receptacle model views all children as empty vessels to be filled up with information. Whether or not children choose to ingest the information or how they feel about what they are learning is beside the point.

Apparently the guidance counselor with whom I spoke isn’t aware of the research that shows the vital role intentionality plays in the learning process. She probably hasn’t seen the recent and not so recent studies documenting the fact that when a child makes an internal, intentional choice to learn something, the depth and breadth of the learning will be far greater than when the motivation comes from the outside. Her training must not have included exposure to the work of contemporary and quite mainstream psychologists like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. The crux of their Self-Determination Theory, which they have been developing over the past thirty years, is that children are born with an innate propensity to explore their internal and external surroundings in an attempt to understand and master them. It’s not something we teach them; rather it is their nature.

Deci and Ryan call this inner drive to learn intrinsic motivation, meaning that the impetus to do it comes from within and is not separate from the activity itself. It is the spontaneous inclination towards seeking out novelty and challenge, toward honing and extending one’s capacities. Allowing children the free choice to pursue their interests without interference is essential to intrinsic motivation, or to use Deci and Ryan’s terminology, we can only exercise our intrinsic motivation when we experience our actions as self-determined. Extrinsic rewards undermine it. So do threats, bribes, deadlines, directives, and imposed goals.

Perhaps if I had been in a better frame of mind when she called, I could have helped that guidance counselor understand that this is why it is so important to ask her students what and how much they want to learn. Maybe next time.

[click here to contact Chris]