There's a much linked too piece in a 2003 issue of Harpers by John Taylor Gatto, winner of the New York City Teacher of the Year Award (1990), titled "Against School" which is making it's way around the blogosphere (emphasis mine):
In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
I had encountered this piece before a while ago on The Memory Hole, in an article titled "The Education System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile". It's tempting to view the deficiencies of our educational system as a govermental-corporate conspiracy, but it's far more likely that the structure and shortcomings are reflective of the times and culture of their development rather than the orchestrations of shadowy mystery men, and more importantly, are simply and extension of the reductionistic methodology that has dominated human existence since the Enlightenment. If we can boild anything down to it's component parts, and study, act on, or modify those parts, than we can reassemble them and perfect the completed mechanism.
When we try to assign blame for the output of our schools, there's no shortage of targets. Lazy students, absent fathers, neglectful parents, political correctness, the gay agenda, Republicans, Democrats, immigration, taxes that are too high, taxes that are too low, the bell curve, trashcan medical diagnosis, greedy senior citizens, greedy unions, greedy taxpayers, the textbook manufacturers, and pop culture. Nevermind the fact that we penalize intellectuals and celebrate bimbos and jocks. But I digress…
We look at education using the same reductionistic philosophies that Hook, Newton, and Franklin would use when working on a Scientific Proof, coupled with the mass production techniques and statistical controls employed by Henry Ford, Edward Demming, or Frederick Taylor. Reduce the subject down to it's most observable form, and then seek to measure or improve upon it's component parts. Is this compatible with our understanding of the world, and how it's changed in the last half-millenium? Can we continue our understanding of the world past the cellular to the nano- and molecular level, or is it time to start examining the holistic viewpoint and the relationships that underpin our world?
What are the Problems?
- Creativity
- Antiseptic Culture
- No New Frontiers and Intellectual Apathy
- Specialization
- Purposelessness
- The Acceptance of Presented Facts as Truths
What are the Solutions?
- Risk
- Cultural Immersion and Transfer
- Exploration and Natural Inquisitiveness
- Generalization
- The Search for Meaning
- Always asking Questions
More to come…
When we look back at the world prior to compulsory and institutionalized education, we find that only the wealthy had the luxury of education. This provided a comfortable rift between the haves-and have-nots; this rift in many ways still defines our culture. It is would separates the classes - lower and upper - as well as the anamoly of the twentieth century, the middle class. A continuation of the road we're on, in concert with a plethora of other factors, will do nothing more than relagate the middle class to an exhibit at the Smithsonian as a relic of what once was.
It's similarly tempting to look at the alternatives. For starters, we need to realize that college is not a birthright. Not everyone should or should be able to go to college. If anyone and everyone goes to college, than the "special" status of the hard work to earn a degree is cheapened. Similarly, the credential inflation found in the professional world, where employers are seeking college degrees for retail and lower level management work are also a waste of skill and resources. If someone has a degree, they should be using their education to do society improving work, not ensuring that the Slurpee machine is working correctly.
We also spend far too little time appreciating the skill and hard work of tradespeople, who similarly have found their livelihoods in doubt. If college isn't for everyone, shouldn't those with either natural or learned skills of craftsmanship also have a place in society? Should not our world be able to accomodate them and make best use of thier contributions?
And what of private and religious schools? Why are they sometimes more successful? Is it because of the values or morals that are taught and reinforced? Or is it simply that the parent who sends their child to these schools is likely the product of similar education, and furthermore, their own monetary contribution for tuition in addition to their portion of taxes slated for education causes them to be "invested" in their child's education, and therefore more involved. (People may be tempted that the decrease in smoking comes from the increase in educational awareness - I hypothesize that the increase in the price of cigarettes made the cost of the addiction no longer worth it. So people toughed it up and quit. Basically, it's all about the money).
And then there's homeschooling. It would be ridiculously easy to highlight how much homeschooling plays into the problems I addressed earlier and offers near-nothing to the solutions. But rather than a broadside attack on homeschooling and the attendant religious undertones, the most compelling argument against homeschooling, aside from concerns of a lack of socialization, is how likely is it that the parent will know what is truly important? Is the product of homeschooling a carbon copy of the parent doing the instructions? And doesn't that inevitably magnify thier own weaknesses, biases, and shortcomings?
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