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Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2025 //
26

The New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article titled “America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?” It was written by staff member Jia Lynn Yang.

I anticipated that the article would be another lament about test scores, of which there have been many recently. But it wasn’t!

Instead, Yang described the explosion of mental health issues among the nation’s children. And she attributed it largely to the unending pressure to compete for ever higher test scores. EXACTLY!

Yang knows that the changes in school are not the only cause of declining mental health. There are many more culprits, including social media and the pressures of contemporary life. And there is also the possibility that children are being misdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. I can’t help but recall a story from 1994 about an elite private school that received a private $2 million grant to screen children for learning disabilities. Overrun by experts, the program “got out of hand.” Nearly half the children were diagnosed with disabilities, and the program was cancelled.

We live in a stressful world. Children are pressured to succeed, to comply, to compete, to win the approval of their peers, to dress the “right” way, to be and do things by which they will be judged by their peers, by their parents, by the world they inhabit. Some children succeed, many don’t.

Schools these days are doing things to children that add to their stress. They have been doing harmful things to children by federal mandate since 2002.

Besieged by expectations, demands, and pressures, many children are breaking. It’s our fault.

She writes:

One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.

A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016.

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance…

The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.

This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.

“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life….”

Other books have echoed this critique. I think offhand of the book by Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle: Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. This is how they summarize their argument:

“Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It’s the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed–skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills–yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.”

There is an organization–Defending the Early Years–that fights for the rights of childhood, that tries to keep academic pressures out of the classrooms of very young children.

But who defends the children in grades 1-12? There are groups of parents in almost every state who oppose the pressures of high-stakes testing, oppose the efforts by tech companies to replace actual experiences with machines and technologies, oppose the interference of politicians to standardize teaching.

One group fights off the tech companies that use personal student data to market their products: The Parent Coalition for Studebt Privacy.

Corporate America now looks to the schools as a source of profit. The schools and students need to be protected from rapacious capitalism, which wants to privatize schools for profit and sell products that monetize instruction.

Yang describes the transformation of the school from the 1980s to the present:

School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.

But as the country’s economy shifted from factories and farms to offices, being a student became a more serious matter. The outcome of your life could depend on it.

During an era of global competition, the country’s leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called “A Nation at Risk.” It warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states’ schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings.

The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush’s signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.

With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.

The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind.

The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.

The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age.

With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade.

Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.

“We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being.

The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.

I think about my own time in the public elementary public schools in Houston. We had recess every day. I don’t think it was a matter of state law. Educators then knew that children needed time to play. It was common sense. Today, parent groups organize to persuade legislatures to mandate recess. If they don’t, parents fear, every minute will be spent preparing for tests and taking tests.

They are right. The so-called “reforms” of the past quarter century–No Child Left Behind, high-stakes testing, competition, Race to the Top, punishing or rewarding teachers for their students’ test scores, closing schools and firing staff because of low test scores, the Common Core standards–have made test scores and standardization the heart of schooling.

In a continuing campaign to raise test scores, there are winners and losers. Typically, the winners are children from affluent families, and the losers are the children of not-affluent families. The winners are celebrated, the losers are stigmatized. The social class divide among children is hardened by these practices.

Worse, the pressure on students has caused an increase in anxiety, depression, and boredom. In response, parents seek diagnoses of autism or some other learning disorder so that their children will get more time or attention.

Some parents blame the public schools for the pressure and competition imposed on them by elected officials. They seek alternatives to the public schools, which are obsessed with standardization, testing, and accountability.

Yang points out:

This discontent helps empower the conservative effort to defund the public school system and let parents pick their own schools, with taxpayers covering the tuition. Each child who no longer seems to fit into the country’s education system — and more often than not they are boys — potentially expands the constituency for these ideas. And trust erodes further in the progressive project of a democracy built on giving everyone a free and equal education.

The Democratic Party is unable or unwilling to see the problems they helped create. The Republican Party is quite happy to see the public search for alternatives like charter schools and vouchers, and it has enabled the movement to have taxpayers foot the bill for private and religious schools.

By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups.

Who made that world? Both political parties. Governors. Legislatures. Think tanks. The wealthiest, who believe their financial success proves their superiority. Editorial boards.

Here is the most significant lesson that our elected officials refuse to learn. Their elaborate schemes for testing and measuring children have hurt children and undermined the joy of learning. They have raised the anxiety level of children while corrupting education itself.

Education is not what gets measured on standardized tests. Education is exploration, investigation, insight, observation, wanting to know more, learning to love learning.

Our politicians, prodded by so-called “reformers,” have managed to pollute education while demoralizing teachers and destroying public commitment to public schools.

Our public schools need to be freed from the failed ideas that hurt children. We need a rebirth of sturdy ideas that

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Education Industry, Education Reform, Extremism, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Joy, Standardized Testing, Students

Jennifer Frey: College Students Are Eager to Engage in the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
22

Jennifer Frey served as Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College. It required students to read deeply in classic tests and to converse vigorously with each other.

More than a quarter of the student body signed up for this rigorous class.

Yet two years after the Honor College opened, it was closed. Its leadrs said that students didn’t want this kind of education, the heavy focus on the liberal arts and the Great Cobversation about the meaning of truth goodness, and beauty. Dean Frey thinks the administrators were wrong.

She wrote in The New York Times.

University students, we’re told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can’t — or just won’t — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by mental healthcrises. They complain that they can’t speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they understand their coursework only as a step toward specific careers.

Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.

Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.

Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university’s new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A representative of the university told The Times that while it had “restructured” the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will “remain the same.”)

The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model.

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An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

At Tulsa, we invited our students to enter “the great conversation” with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves.

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That our students threw themselves into the task of reading and discussing the great works with one another should not shock. When we — students and teachers alike — share wisdom as a common goal, we will want to do the reading, to dispute one another, to exchange ideas and arguments, to propose amendments and to offer our personal insights. Liberal learning occurs in dialogue with those who object to us, who offer a different perspective or experience — who read the same book as we do in a completely different light.

At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called “the virtues of liberal learning.” For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

Categories Class size, Curriculum, Education Reform, Higher Education, Joy

John Merrow: It’s Not Enough to Oppose Trump. What Are We For?

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2025 //
12

John Merrow was the education correspondent for PBS for many years. Now, in retirement, he continues to write and help us think through the existential moments in which we live.

He writes:

More than five million demonstrators in about 2000 communities stepped forward to declare their opposition to Donald Trump, on June 14th. “No Kings Day” was also Trump’s 79th birthday, Flag Day, and the anniversary of the creation of the American army.

So now we know what many of us are against, but the central question remains unanswered: What do we stand FOR? What do we believe in?

Just as FDR called for Four Freedoms, the Democratic party needs to articulate its First Principles.  I suggest three: “The Public Good,” “Individual Rights,” and “Rebuilding America after Trump.” 

 THE PUBLIC GOOD: Democrats must take our nation’s motto, E pluribus unum, seriously, and they must vigorously support the common good.  That means supporting public libraries, public parks, public schools, public transportation, public health, public safety, public broadcasting, and public spaces–almost anything that has the word ‘public’ in it.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: Because the fundamental rights that are guaranteed in our Constitution are often subject to interpretation, debate, and even violent disagreement, Democrats must be clear.  Free speech, freedom of worship, habeas corpus, and other fundamental rights are not up for debate, and nor is a woman’s right to control her own body.  

Health care is a right, and Democrats must make that a reality.  

Conflict is inevitable–think vaccination requirements–and Democrats should come down on the side of the public good.  

Because Americans have a right to safety, Democrats should endorse strong gun control measures that ban assault weapons that have only one purpose–mass killing. 

REBUILDING AMERICA AFTER TRUMP:  The Trump regime was and continues to be a disaster for a majority of Americans and for our standing across the world, but it’s not enough to condemn his greed and narcissism, even if he goes to prison.  Let’s first acknowledge that Trump tapped into serious resentment among millions of Americans, which further divided our already divided country.  

The challenge is to work to bring us together, to make ‘one out of many’ in the always elusive ‘more perfect union.’  The essential first step is to abandon the ‘identity politics’ that Democrats have practiced for too long.  Instead, Democrats must adopt policies that bring us together, beginning with mandatory National Service: 

National Service: Bring back the draft for young men and women to require two years of (paid) National Service, followed by two years of tuition or training credits at an accredited institution.  One may serve in the military, Americorps, the Peace Corps, or other helping organizations.  One may teach or work in distressed communities, or rebuild our national parks, or serve in other approved capacities.  JFK famously said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  Let’s ask BOTH questions.  

Additionally: 1) Urge states to beef up civic education in public schools, teaching real history, asking tough questions.  At the same time, federal education policies should encourage Community schools, because research proves that schools that welcome families are more successful across many measures.

2) Rebuild Our Aging Infrastructure: This is urgent, and it will also create jobs.

3) Adopt fiscal and monetary policies to address our burgeoning national debt. This should include higher taxes on the wealthy, emulating Dwight Eisenhower. 

4) Adopt sensible and realistic immigration policies that welcome newcomers who arrive legally but close our borders to illegal immigration.

5) Rebuilding America also means rebuilding our alliances around the world.  Democrats should support NATO and Ukraine, and rejoin efforts to combat climate change. 

Categories Academic Freedom, Creativity, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Equity, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Guns, Hope, Joy, Justice

Beautiful! Stairwell Singing of “Ave Maria”

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2025 //
6

Happy Easter!

Please open and listen. You will be astonished by these four young men, singing in a stairwell.

The group is called King’s Return.

For many readers, this is a holy day.

Reflect. Rest.

Think about how to take seriously Jesus’s teachings about kindness, mercy, love, compassion. Feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, welcome the stranger.

Categories Art, Creativity, Goodness, Joy

Chris Tomlinson: Jimmy Carter Was a Model for All of Us

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2025 //
6

Chris Tomlinson is a star opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle. His reflections on Jimmy Carter are worth reading. He knew President Carter well.

My first big assignment as a journalist was covering President Jimmy Carter’s 1995 visit to Rwanda, a doomed mission that brought him little acclaim.

Carter didn’t fight disease, promote democracy or negotiate peace to make headlines. He did the work quietly and diligently to make the world a better place. His life was a master class in a leadership style firmly out of fashion but will hopefully return.

I was in my third month as the Associated Press and Voice of America stringer in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. A civil war between an ethno-fascist Hutu government and rebels from the Tutsi minority had culminated in the 1994 genocide that slaughtered 1 million people, most of them Tutsi civilians, in 100 days.

The Tutsi-led rebels drove the Hutu leadership and 1.2 million of their followers into neighboring Zaire, rnow known as Democratic Republic of the Congo. Insurgents from the Zairian refugee camps were still killing 300 people a week in Rwanda more than a year later.

I trailed Carter through Rwanda and the Zairian refugee camps. His Secret Service detail was minimal, yet he moved through these dangerous places with a confidence, kindness and humility that only comes from tremendous inner strength.

He spoke to political leaders, genocide victims, refugees and me with the same courtesy and respect. He knew Mobutu would probably never agree to a peace deal, but unlike most famous people, he didn’t allow the likelihood of failure to stop him from trying.

Carter wanted to negotiate a deal between the new Tutsi-led Rwandan government and Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whose murderous misrule had made him a pariah.

“These leaders know that I’m their last chance to rejoin the international community,” Carter told me while driving to a church where the skeletons of the dead were displayed as a genocide memorial. He laughed and added, “If Jimmy Carter gives up on you, there’s no one else coming.”

Carter met with Mobutu, and he agreed to a summit with the Rwanda foreign minister. Diplomats knew Mobutu had cancer and hoped he might cut a deal to boost his legacy.

Carter’s staff asked me to join the trip to Mobutu’s palace in Gbadolite, Zaire. I watched Mobutu turn the summit into a farce. Eighteen months later, Rwanda overthrew him, installed a new president and forced the refugees home. The old dictator died in exile. Carter kept lobbying for world peace.

I saw the former president many more times over my 11 years in Africa. His foundation, the Carter Center, monitored elections and fought preventable diseases like river blindness, guinea worm and other neglected tropical diseases. Carter’s work saved tens of millions of people from suffering, but he never made a big deal out of it.

No one can accomplish so much without steely determination. Too often, I hear people describe Carter as the weak and bumbling caricature that President Ronald Reagan created to win the 1980 election. Folks should stop confusing courtesy for weakness.

After the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam debacle, Carter, in 1976, offered an alternative to Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency. He practiced what has become known as servant leadership, the theory that a leader’s primary duty is ensuring subordinates have the tools they need to accomplish their mission.

In the Army, my brigade commander instilled servant leadership in me when I joined his staff as a newly minted sergeant in 1986. He explained that junior enlisted members did not serve me because I outranked them; my rank meant I was responsible for their success, and the colonel promised to hold me accountable if they failed.

The term servant leadership is hackneyed, but it captures valuable techniques that have caught on in the business world. It emphasizes listening, empathy, persuasion, stewardship and community building while discouraging egotism and authoritarianism.

The greater good comes first, not any individual.

While president, Carter rejected much of the pomp at the White House. His speeches focused on addressing problems, not promoting himself. Despite attending the U.S. Naval Academy and serving in the nuclear navy, he was never a warrior-king style leader, which American voters tend to favor.

Humility does not do well in the current culture, where conspicuousness is valued. Politicians must constantly self-promote while denigrating their rivals. Compromise is considered a failure, and vulgarity is considered clever.

The strongest people I’ve encountered in the most difficult places don’t puff up their chests. They don’t need others to bow before them. People with inner strength don’t use cruelty to prove their power.

Here’s hoping kindness makes a comeback, courtesy becomes cool, and strength is demonstrated by lifting people up, not knocking them down.

Categories Character, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, History, Joy, Justice

This Boston Teacher Helped Restore Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris!

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2024 //
7

What a great story!

Michael Burry, a woodworking teacher at a private trade school in Boston, had the thrill of working on the restoration of Notre Dame. The Roth Bennett Street School was founded in 1881 to teach immigrants the skills they needed to get gainful employment. Today, it operates as a school to teach hand crafts like violin making, bookbinding, and furniture making.

How did an American earn the great privilege of working on the restoration of Notre Dame? Read on.

Michael Burrey, a teacher at North Bennet Street School, recently worked on the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris. DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF

Billy Baker of The Boston Globe reported:

In 2019, as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was burning, Michael Burrey was 3,000 miles away, in the North End of Boston, watching the television coverage with his students and asking himself a question: What can we do to help?

It’s a thought many people had. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of individual donors would contribute toward the cathedral’s reconstruction. But Burrey was in a unique position — he’s an expert in medieval carpentry who spent 11 years as an interpretive artisan at what was formerly called Plimoth Plantation, and he is currently a teacher at the North Bennet Street School, one of the country’s leading traditional trade schools.

The spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral collapsed as the landmark was engulfed in flames in central Paris on April 15, 2019.AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Soon Burrey would begin a journey that would end with him becoming one of just a handful of American artisans to work on the French team that completed a stunning reconstruction of one of the world’s great cultural artifacts.

“It’s the pinnacle of my career,” Burrey said recently, following the grand reopening of the cathedral on Dec. 8. “I have such great appreciation for being able to be a part of the group effort that demonstrated that the traditional trades that built Notre Dame 800 years ago are still here, still viable and teachable and learnable for people today.”

His work on the project was made possible by Handshouse Studio, a nonprofit based in Norwell that focuses on building large historical objects as educational projects. In the past, the studio has recreated a Revolutionary War-era wooden submarine as well as a 17th century Polish synagogue.

Burrey has been collaborating with Handshouse for a quarter century, and they, too, were looking for ways to help Notre Dame. Thus, the Handshouse Studio Notre Dame Project was born.

The first thing they did, both as an educational exercise and out of a show of solidarity with the French, was build a full-scale model of one of the wooden trusses that supported the roof of Notre Dame. These were the hidden structures inside the massive cathedral where the devastating fire started.

Burrey brought a team of students from his restoration carpentry class at North Bennet Street to Washington, D.C., in 2021. For two weeks they worked with skilled traditional craftsmen from the Timber Framers Guild to build the massive wooden structure, known as Choir Truss #6, working all the way from white oak logs hewed with broad axes to the finished product.

“It was a way for us to say that building something as it was originally made is not only possible but also important,” said Marie Brown, executive director of Handshouse Studios. The original hope, she said, was that they might donate the truss to the French for inclusion in the cathedral. But something else happened, something even cooler.

The build was so successful that the two architects overseeing the reconstruction of Notre Dame, Rémi Fromont and Philippe Villeneuve, traveled to the United States to see the structure. As a result, they invited two American timber framers to join the reconstruction team in France. One invitation went to Michael Burrey. The other went to Jackson Dubois, a Washington state man who is president of the Timber Framers Guild.

For three months in the summer of 2023, Burrey and Dubois joined 18 carpenters from a French company called Asselin working on the wooden components of the Notre Dame spire. They operated out of the medieval town of Thouars in western France, about three hours from Paris, and Burrey worked on the decorative elements of the spire — the quatrefoils, trefoils, railings, and dormers. There were language barriers, Burrey said, but the one thing they had in common was that they all spoke carpentry.

“[Burrey] called me a couple times from France and was telling me about what he was working on, where he was sitting, what he was seeing in this medieval town,” said Claire Fruitman, the provost and interim president of North Bennet Street School.

Burrey (third from left) joined French carpenters for a picture. The French carpenters built the quatrefoils for the nave of Notre Dame cathedral. MICHAEL BURREY

“No one ever wants any sort of heritage to have something go wrong,” she added. “But when it does it’s amazing to say we have people who can fix it and bring it back to life, and the lessons he learned over there are things he’s brought back into the classroom for the next generation of preservationists.”

Burrey, who lives in Plymouth, was not the only local craftsperson to work on the project. Hank Silver, who owns Ironwood Timberworks in Hatfield, worked as lead carpenter for the nave, the central, large space of the cathedral that accommodates the congregation during religious services. Silver declined an interview request, but told Elle Décor that “for someone like me, being able to work on this building, which is the birthplace of this technique, is particularly meaningful. When I look at Notre Dame, I will be able to say, ‘I built that.’”

Burrey, meanwhile, has not been to the cathedral since it reopened, but he said he has marveled at the photos of the completed work.

“There’s nothing but a smile on my face, and a feeling of deep appreciation for being part of a group effort, when I think of everybody coming together to get things back the way they should be,” he said.

Categories Creativity, Goodness, International, Joy

Special Today! Bach’s Christmas Oratorio!

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2024 //
18

You can never have too much music!

Especially on Christmas Day!

Especially when it is Bach!

Categories Art, Joy

Handel’s “Messiah” by a High School Chorus of Silent Monks

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2024 //
4

From South Kitsap High School in Port Orchard, Washington, comes a sensational performance of them”Halleluia Chorus” of Handel’s “Messiah,” performed by silent monks using flashcards. This video has racked up millions of views on Facebook and YouTube.

Categories Art, Joy

Bob Shepherd Explains the History of Santa Claus

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2024 //
17

As always, Merry Christmas to all!

Our dear friend Bob Shepherd gave us this gift of his writing for Christmas. It is overflowing with his wisdom and erudition.

He wrote:

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping and Other Weird and Wonderful Fun Facts about Santa Claus | Bob Shepherd

This is a piece I originally wrote for children. For them, I left out some of the stuff in paragraphs 5, 7, and 12, below. LOL. Sharing this again ’cause. . . . it’s almost Christmas. My little tribute to the Pole-ish peoples.

1 Every year, around Christmas, some newspaper runs a story saying that Santa Claus was invented by the Coca Cola Company. But there’s a problem with those stories. They aren’t true. Back in the 1931, the soft drink company did hire an artist named Haddon Sundblom to create Christmas ads. Those ads pictured a plump, jolly Santa with rosy cheeks, a red suit, and a white beard. The Santa ads were a big hit. Coca Cola created new Santa ads every year until the 1960s. A myth was born that Santa was created by Coca Cola.

2 However, long before the Coca Cola ads, Santa Claus had already appeared in other illustrations wearing a red suit and a beard. For example, Norman Rockwell painted a red-suited, white-bearded Santa for a 1921 magazine cover. That cover appeared ten years earlier than did the first of the Coca Cola Santas. So, Coca Cola didn’t invent Santa. It didn’t even create the image of him that most of us are familiar with. So, if Coke didn’t invent Santa, who did? The answer turns out to be odd and interesting.

3 About 1,800 years ago, people in Southern Europe were already giving gifts at Christmas. They were imitating the gift-giving Magi in the Bible (often referred to as the “three wise men,” though the number is not mentioned in the sole Biblical account, in Matthew. If you haven’t experienced Frankincense essence, btw, treat yourself; it’s wonderful). Some early Church leaders didn’t like this materialistic gift-giving frenzy. They thought that the gift-giving had gotten completely out of control. Lord knows what they would think if they lived today!

4 At the same time, in Northern Europe, there was a myth about the Norse God Odin. People said that every year, in the dead of winter, Odin would ride through the sky on his horse. He would bring gifts and punish the wicked. Odin wore a fur coat and had a big beard. In the same part of Europe, people told stories about little bearded elves, or gnomes, called tomtar. They wore green coats, played tricks on people, and brought presents.

5 About 1,700 years ago, there lived in Turkey a man named Nicholas. He became an important leader, a bishop in the Catholic Church. After Nicholas’s death, the Church made him a saint. This was a very high honor. They also created a holy day, on December 6, to celebrate him. It was called Saint Nicholas’s Day. Many stories were told about Saint Nicholas. Some told about how he protected children. People started telling stories about how Saint Nicholas would come on December 6 to bring presents to nice children and switches or coal to naughty children. In some of these stories, bad boys and girls would be carried away by a monster called the Krampus. (Depictions of the Dutch version of Krampus, Zwarte Piet, aka “Black Pete” or “Black Peter,” have been the subject, recently, of anti-racism demonstrations in the Netherlands). Later on, Saint Nicholas’s Day was moved to December 25, the same day as Christmas.

6 People continued to tell stories about Saint Nicholas bringing presents on Christmas, and in different countries, his name was slightly different. In England he was called Father Christmas. In France he was Pere Noel. In the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas was pronounced Sinterklaas. The old stories about Odin and the tomtar got combined with stories about Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas was imagined as a little elf man who would ride through the air and bring presents. He was often pictured as wearing a fur-lined coat and having a beard. So, Sinterklaas was a little like Saint Nicholas. He was a little like Odin. And he was a little like the elves.

7 When people from Northern Europe came to North America, they brought their ideas about Sinterklaas with them. By 1773, some people had already changed the name to Santa Claus. In 1809, a writer named Washington Irving wrote a book in which he told about a jolly Saint Nicholas. In Irving’s book, Nicholas had a big belly and wore a green coat. In 1821, a poem called “Old Santeclaus” was published in America. The poem pictured him riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Where did the idea of the reindeer come from? Well, in Lapland, reindeer are used to pull sleds called pulks. Lapland is in the far northern part of Europe. The writer was telling a Northern European story and added this detail to it. The elderly, white-bearded Lapp shamans used to harness their reindeer and drive out over the snow to collect Amanita muscaria mushrooms (those red ones with the white dots). They would wear red coats in imitation of their sacred shroom. They would gather the shrooms into bags flung about their shoulders. They couldn’t eat the shrooms directly because they were highly toxic. So, they fed them to the reindeer. Then, they drank the reindeer piss (yes, you heard that right) and tripped and saw visions. Illustrations of the Lapp shamans and their Amanita mushrooms were commonly reproduced on 19th century winter postcards, and all the elements of later Santa iconography are there–the red coats, the white beard, the snow, the sack over the shoulder, the reindeer, and the pipe.

8 Modern ideas about Santa Claus were probably most influenced by a poem called “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” This poem, also known as “The Night before Christmas,” was published in 1823. The poem tells about Santa coming to a house on Christmas Eve. In the poem, a man is awakened by a noise. He runs to the window and looks out. There he sees a little sleigh pulled by “eight tiny reindeer.” The poem even gives names to the reindeer. They are called Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Conner, and Blitzen. The sleigh lands on the roof. Then its “little” driver comes down the chimney. He is jolly and plump and dressed in fur. He has a pack full of toys. And he is said to be an “elf.” When he laughs, his tummy shakes “like a bowl full of jelly.” He fills the children’s stockings and disappears up the chimney again. In drawings made by the illustrator Thomas Nash in the late 1800s, Santa grew taller. He was no longer a little elf but the size of a full-grown man. Nash also gave Santa’s address as the North Pole. Another part of the Santa legend was born.

9 Many streams can run together to make one river. In the same way, many ideas from two thousand years of history ran together to create the story of Santa Claus.

10 In 1897, a little girl named Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to a newspaper in New York. She said, “Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?” A newspaper editor named Frank Church wrote this famous reply:

11 “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. . . . How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance. . . . He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia . . . he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

Copyright 2016. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.

Categories History, Joy

Nancy Flanagan: We Need More Hygge Classrooms

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2024 //
6

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher, writes here about Scandinavian concepts that she admires. She points to the link between happiness and well-being, which we as a nation seem determined to ignore. These days, some people think it’s “woke” to want all children to be well-fed, well-cared for, their basic needs met. I’m willing to take that chance and that label. Call me woke.

She writes:

The ubiquitous FB meme:

In Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then you spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate. The tradition is part of a season called Jolabokafload, the Christmas Book flood, because Iceland, which publishes more books per capita than any other country, sells most of its books between September and November, due to people preparing for the upcoming holiday.

Nobody ever responds: That sounds awful! My family prefers watching our individual TVs!

Generally, commenters reply wistfully, longing for a country where learning is valued and books are ideal gifts, where the dark and cold are counterbalanced by intellectual curiosity and conversation.

Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland, they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded, every print-run is sold. Being a writer in Iceland you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions, they love them or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

Perhaps because I live in a region that gets 135 inches of snow each winter, these cozy, fireside literary chats are enormously appealing to me. As is the Danish concept of hygge:

“The Danish art of contentment, comfort, and connection…a practical way of creating sanctuary in the middle of very real life.”

Hygge (hoo-ga), which has no direct translation into English—surprise!—is many things to many people: Woolen socks. Candles and other gentle light. Board games. Comfortable couches and cozy quilts. Warm drinks.

Although hygge seems to have Scandinavian roots, it’s not exclusively a cold-climate thing, evidently. A rustic cottage on a lake, with its beat-up furniture, mildewed paperbacks from the 1950s and second-hand bathing suits is very hygge, according to Meik Wiking, author of “The Little Book of Hygge” and, not coincidentally, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. The mere fact that there is a Happiness Research Institute, somewhere in the world, makes me—well, happy….

Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to Wiking, Danes are free to become “aware of the decoupling between wealth and wellbeing.”

That decoupling between wealth and wellbeing is well-reflected in this headline: Children Need Homes, Not Charter Schools or Standardized Tests, and Definitely Not Tax Cuts for the Wealthy.

That’s where our intentionality lies in the U.S., where we’re spending our hard-earned tax dollars—canned curricula designed to raise test scores and alternative school governance models, endless expensive tests—when over 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless last year. According to former Senator Orin Hatch, we don’t even have money for poor children’s basic health care. As a nation, we have linked simple human well-being to wealth, and sealed it with the tamper-proof cap of low opportunity.

Categories International, Joy
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