All children, not just those in affluent schools, deserve the academic gains and solace that come with silence. It’s up to adults to provide that for them.
Children, and not just those in affluent and private schools, deserve the academic gains and solace that comes with silence. It’s up to adults to provide that for them.
I ’ve taught in an affluent private school, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in my state, and a blue-collar public school. I’ve taught students whose parents are college professors and others whose family members have been murdered while in jail.
What strikes me most about the differences among these schools and their respective populations is not the facilities (we had drafty windows at private schools) or the quality of materials (we had dusty textbooks, too) or the skill of teachers (there are excellent teachers and duds across every system) but rather the environment in the building — in particular, the noise. Students in the affluent school could expect an orderly, safe, non-chaotic environment — punctuated with clamor, yes, but also moments of absolute silence; meanwhile, students in urban education had no such privilege.
In a conversation with one student, he spoke to me about the constant noise in his life. His classes were loud. The bus was loud. He went home to an overcrowded house. No one had their own room, and the walls were thin. Parents were shouting, and his younger brothers and sisters were crying. Another sibling played video games loudly in the adjacent room well into the night. How could he focus on a worksheet for homework let alone parse Elizabethan English, write an essay, or enjoy the solace of fiction on his own?
And it’s emotional noise too. At one school, three students hid in a hallway and jumped a third near the end of the day. Two held their victim back while the third beat her bloody. The threat of disruption or even outright violence causes a constant background noise that leaves everyone distracted. There’s rarely, if ever, a moment of calm.
Compare this constant cacophony to an affluent school. Children move swiftly and quietly through the hallway — at least during class. Kids can expect areas and moments of silence to focus on the more rigorous aspects of their work. Where classroom discussion or group work occurs, the noise level maintains a productive din without distractions from the hallway or elsewhere.
Regarding the students, the difference between them wasn’t a matter of general intelligence. One child in my urban school just this week paraphrased passages from the Declaration of Independence with ease. At my Catholic school, one kid still forgot to capitalize his i’s. Nor is it a matter of motivation. The majority of kids who walk through the doors of my urban school are eager to learn. But they’re left frustrated when they can’t hear their teacher over the sound of students engaged in a belching competition.
Rather, the difference was largely one of their environment — both at home and in school. It is common parlance in education to hear that “learning is noisy.” And indeed, at times, it is. But not all noise is equal. My urban schools were pervaded with an ever present, ever loud background noise. Periods of silence, essential companions of even healthy noise, were absent.
To learn, humans need an orderly, at times silent, environment. The reason for this connects to our working memory, our area of conscious thought through which new knowledge passes into our long-term memory. Importantly, this doorway through which new knowledge enters our brain can process only a few things at a time. A demanding academic task can quickly overload our working memory. Throw in even just a few disruptions and our ability to focus quickly disintegrates, the doorway clogs, and nothing enters.
Forbes’s education columnist, Natalie Wexler, astutely summarized the problem: “Humans are hard-wired to pay attention to unexpected sounds, especially speech and social interactions.” Understandably then, even low-level background noise impairs learning.
But silence benefits students beyond just academic learning. It also helps decrease the emotional noise. In a study on the effect of music on anxiety, researchers stumbled on an interesting insight: Participants in the study exhibited “the greatest evidence of relaxation” during planned moments of silence between songs. Other research confirms that chronically noisy environments both heighten blood pressure and stymie learning. We all know the solace that comes from even a few minutes to ourselves. Some students never have this privilege. If schools can provide it, it would not only improve their mental health but also inadvertently improve their learning, too, as students spend fewer chunks of their working memory on anxiety, anger, fear, or other heightened emotions
Students crave ordered silence. At times, they bristle at my imposition of silent work time. But several have snuck out of class and come to my room because they could no longer sit through another cacophonous hour, watch another student cuss out a teacher, hear another crude joke across the room, or try to take notes once more while unable to hear their teacher. Others who complained about my strict rules during the year have thanked me in private for creating moments of respite from their otherwise chaotic days.
There are certainly other differences between these schools. Children from two-parent households filled the affluent private school. In a sense, many of the families at my private school paid money not for the privilege of better teachers, better buildings, or better materials. Rather, they paid for the privilege of the environment that comes with their child attending a school full of children from two-parent households — and all the cultural norms, behavioral patterns, vocabulary and linguistic patterns, and privileges with which that comes.
What’s more, children who couldn’t fit these social norms rarely attend affluent schools. In private schools, the cost of tuition acted as a prohibitive barrier, and the high cost of homes in suburban neighborhoods has the same effect, pricing out most chaotic families who might want their children to attend public schools in these areas. Affluent schools, public or private, rarely have to expel or suspend students because those whose behavior would warrant such a consequence never attend in the first place.
But policy-makers have been trying to fix the family for generations, and it’s still splintering. Similarly, no matter how perfect our systems, instructional quality, or educational policies, students will act out. Schools cannot fix all social ills, especially when those social ills are as multifaceted as familial decline. Schools can, however, influence the literal and emotional noise volume within their own walls.
To begin, alas, not all students function well within traditional classroom environments. Especially after middle school — when they’ve mastered the basics of literacy and numeracy and developed a cursory understanding of science and history — a handful of students might be better served taking on apprenticeships, attending alternative schools, or entering the workforce early. Students with severe behavioral problems, whatever the cause, would likely benefit from alternative settings. And of equal importance, if such students are disrupting the learning of their peers, urban schools need the power to usher them elsewhere.
Similarly, without the need to impose strict order on all students, schools can create spaces within their buildings with a zero-tolerance policy for noise — libraries, hallways, perhaps a classroom set apart for a study room. All children are welcome in the building but not all need to be welcome, at all times, in every space of the building.
Finally, teachers with the support of administrators simply need the will to work moments of silence into the school day. The classroom is something of a technical innovation, a highly efficient means through which society can impart new knowledge to the next generation. As with all technologies, though, it is also unnatural. Asking children to learn in rooms with 30 others requires asking them to act against their natural inclinations. Understandably, many no-excuse charter schools, such as Success Academy, have highly structured routines — from how they sit to how they hand out papers — bolstered with rigid systems of consequences and rewards to keep their classrooms running efficiently and in an orderly way.
Unfortunately, for children from so-called discordant families, the quality of the family environment is almost certainly the most important influence on a child’s education environment. Policy solutions that help in this area exist, but they are almost by necessity imprecise, controversial, and difficult to implement. The school environment is the second-most important influence on a child’s educational environment, and unlike the family, policy solutions to help here are precise and much easier to implement, though still controversial. Even so, our children, and not just the ones in our affluent and private schools, deserve the academic gains and solace that come with silence, and it’s up to adults to provide that for them.