The world we created at Hamilton High

Abstract

EACHING HAS NEVER BEEN easy.Individuals of extraordinary talent have been crushed in the schoolroom.D. H. Lawrence, who taught seventh and eighth graders, found that school was " mean and miserable-and I hate conflict.I was never born to command ... .Think of a quivering greyhound sent to mind a herd of pigs and you see my teaching."No doubt Lawrence left teaching for some of the same reasons that teachers have always quit.The stresses associated with teaching reside in the task: to establish the minimum order necessary so that education may take place, to gain the trust of pupils, to motivate and engage the students with the subject in ways that ensure that they will learn.The teacher's voice is seldom heard in contemporary debates about educational reform , and the ethos of the public school-its collective psychology-is only vaguely understood .Early in this decade, I undertook a study to understand what shapes the ethos of a school.In the initial stage of the research, my colleagues and I visited 33 public and private schools.Later we conducted year-long observations in five schools, and in the end I focused on a single school , renamed here Hamilton High-a racially, ethnically, and economically integrated school, located in a mid-sized Northeastern city.Hamilton High had been born amid the selfconfident spirit of pre-Sputnik America, and underwent a series of fundamental changes in later decades.It served as a microcosm to