Grammar of Schooling

The grammar of schooling is that assemblage of pedagogical routines and principles that students, teachers, and education researchers tend to agree constitute the process of school-based instruction. Major books and articles on school change and teacher education published over the past decade or two suggest that those practices and structures associated with real school are so firmly entrenched in the imagination and habits of school personnel and parents alike that altering them results in only transient change—or substantive change that is so gradual it is barely noticed.

At once both elusive and a commonplace, the grammar of schooling (also termed real school) includes the routines and the physical arrangements of instructional time and space—or at least those common in North American elementary and secondary schools. The term itself is most closely associated with historian David Tyack, who often wrote of it in the early 1990s. In adapting the word grammar from the study of language, Tyack described the persistence of such structures as the age-graded, self-contained classroom led by a single teacher and the division of academic knowledge into a half-dozen subjects, all of which are taught in blocks of 20 to 50 minutes dependent upon the students' age (that block scheduling—or periods of an hour or more—is relatively uncommon serves largely to support Tyack's point).

Practicing teachers might add other unchanging aspects of classrooms, such as seating charts, the balance between teacher talk and student discussion, and reliance upon textbooks and publisher-provided materials. Though blackboards have yielded to whiteboards (and occasionally electronic projection systems), maps still pull down in front of them, alphabets and inspirational thoughts line classroom walls, alternating with student projects and travel posters. Whether or not cooperative learning has been instituted in schools, the physical arrangement of desks in classrooms did change markedly from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. In today's schools, group learning is encouraged by the clustering of student desks; whether this has been accompanied by an appropriate amount of interactive instruction is likely in the eye of the beholder.

In writing about the grammar of schooling, Tyack analyzed major efforts to alter the structures and practices of real school, a term he used. Some efforts, such as the age-graded classroom and the Carnegie Unit had been established a century before, and may have become commonplaces [Page 416]because they were instituted at a time the basic structure of the U.S. public school was still plastic. Other efforts at systemic change, such as those advocated by John Dewey and others in the early decades of the 20th century—practices such as team teaching, sustained efforts to connect learning inside the school with daily life outside it, theme-based curricula driven by student interests, and individualized assessments, for example—did not become common aspects of real school. Is it because the culture of the school and power relationships within the education establishment are counterproductive, as Seymour Sarason would have it? Or is it because the plethora of tried, but not sustained innovations—multigrade pods and flexible scheduling, for example—simply are not as instructionally efficacious as the graded classroom and the Carnegie Unit? Alternatively, have these innovations not been successful chiefly because they require more intellectual energy than teachers have available?

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