Schools Aren't the Problem
This started as a comment over at troubleinchina's LJ, in response to a comment referring to the theory that the point of school is to get kids off the street, and the other theory I run into a lot: that schools exist to teach children to conform and make everyone the same, like the children on the planet in A Wrinkle in Time who are all exactly the same, bouncing their balls in unison, and are never sad, but never really happy either. My thinking seeped out all over the place, so I moved my comment here.
As someone who is not a teacher, but who is related to a lot of teachers, rooms with a proto-teacher, and works with teachers and administrators a lot, I'm always up for a discussion of the "point of schools." Of course, as someone who attended school, I am fabulously equipped to opine on the subject of schools and education.
Let me say here that my experiences with the educational system, in publicly-funded Catholic elementary schools and a private all-girls' high school, ran the gamut from imperfect but mostly surviveable to kind of fun, really. I didn't have the kind of ghastly experiences that many of my friends have had. And when things got rough at school, I had the kind of family that could and would confront teachers, principals, and school administrators, or sometimes just let me stay home. I was bored, a lot, and in elementary school in particular, I was picked on, but I got by. So that's where I'm coming from, experientially.
In my optimistic moments, I say that public education is an idea that is under constant negotiation, and that embodies and reflects the ideologies of the society in which it exists. Remembering that one function of a system is to perpetuate itself, any discussion of "the purpose of schools" must indeed take into account that educational systems also 1) work to perpetuate themselves, and 2) function as one of the tools by which broader social and ideological systems* perpetuate themselves. But I don't think that means that the entire point of schools as they exist is either self-perpetuation or perpetuation of some eeevil repressive system that aims only to turn bright, carefree students into good little sheep. Many educators (teachers, administrators, educational assistants, etc.) don't actually see their job crushing the spirits of students, but as giving students the tools they need "succeed" and/or to make choices that are in their own best interest. How we define "success" and the student's "best interest" is another of those ongoing negotiations that hold a mirror to society.
If you're a person who thinks that it's in people's long-term best interest to learn to conform (to "be realistic," to "avoid getting in trouble," etc.), you're going to encourage that in schools, and require schools to enforce conformity. Often you will talk about "standards." When you think of schools, you think of orderly classroom of quiet students all doing the same thing at the same time, learning a set curriculum and all being evaluated by the same standards. The contents of that set curriculum, in your ideal school system will also reflect your values: all educated people should read Shakespeare, maybe; or maybe everyone should be able to do calculus (or both!)
If you're someone who believes it's in people's long-term best interest to push their own limitations and find their own way, you're going to champion student-centered individual learning, and (assuming you believe in public education at all) push for schools that allow and encourage students to approach learning individually and in a self-directed fashion. Your ideal school may have classrooms characterized by the busy hum of purposeful work, with students participating in a variety of activities that engage their interest and allow them to work to their strengths. You see teachers as facilitators of student learning, rather than content delivery modules. You may believe that each student's learning should be assessed based on that student's progress, and that every student's should be working to reach individual learning goals. Your ideal curriculum reflects your values, too: students should be encouraged to develop critical thinking skills and be exposed to a broad range of cultural influences and ideas. Along the way, they will learn how to learn, so that if they discover a lack of knowledge about calculus or Shakespeare is holding them back, they'll know what to do about that.
I think, as a society, we might be able to come up with less expensive means of keeping teenagers off the street, if that were the only reason, or even the main reason, for having schools. Granted, our current government seems to hold the mistaken idea that if you force unwilling teenagers to attend school, they will miraculously be able to hold down jobs that afford them a living wage after they leave school and will therefore not become Burdens to the System. This is stupid, and results in classroom situations where teachers do act as some combination of nanny and prison warden; most teachers I know see this situation as one that prevents them from doing their real jobs.
Both visions, if implemented, reflect and promote the values of the society that implements them.
Within the classroom, there's also constant negotiation between the needs of individual students and what the teacher perceives to be the needs of the classroom. This already potentially fraught negotiation is further complexified by whatever external limitations and obligations have been imposed on the teacher, in the form of curriculum, class size, etc.
Most teachers of my acquaintance would love to have the time and resources to devote themselves to being facilitators of students' individual educational explorations, but must balance their own desires and students' individual needs and desires against the requirements imposed by external forces (curriculum, administrators, parents) and the limitations of the system (class size, funding, access to facilities, potential for liability). It's really difficult to work individually with each student in a class of 36, in which you have to keep each student under your eye all day, and ensure that at the end of the year all of the students can meet curriculum expectations.**
To be sure, one of the reasons for publicly funded mandatory education (and I wish I could find the report on the history of public education in Canada that confirmed this for me) is to ensure a population whose members meet a certain number of core competencies and whose people share a certain cultural currency. This is not intrinsically a bad thing, depending on who defines the core competencies and the cultural currency.
It's not a bad thing to want everyone to be able to do what they need to do in order to get through their days, reach their goals, learn what they need to know. It's not a bad thing for all members of a society to speak a common language, to share some common cultural references, and to know what that society's expectations are. I, personally, don't even think it's a bad thing to want everyone, to the extent of their ability, to have a basic understanding of how their government is supposed to work, what it's doing in their name, and how things got that way.† I think it's a good idea for people to have some understanding of how scientific discoveries are made and how we determine and test what we know about the world. I think it's a really good idea for people to be able to read and write in the standard language of communication for their culture, and to have access to the prestige dialects of that culture, not because prestige dialects are inherently superior to vernaculars, but because they may be necessary in order for people to have access to certain jobs and services.
And I think that's what schools are for: for giving kids more passports and letters of introduction for their invisible backpacks. If kids decide not to use those passports and letters, that's up to them. Better to have something and choose not to use it than not to have it at all. I also think they're for helping people learn how to learn. If, in the process of doing this, kids learn a certain number of facts, acquire another language, develop some skills, and read some books, that's all to the better.
I think it's important that we have schools because I don't actually trust parents to do this, and I think that ensuring that all kids have access to the tools they need to expand their access to meaningful choice is important-more important than parents' ideology, more important than anyone's religions-in fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's what education,‡ in any form, is for. I think that society benefits when as many people as possible have access to choice and have the ability to use their skills and talents in a meaningful way.
Back when I was on the farm, I came into contact with some Mexican Mennonite families. These families were Mennonite families that had fled Canada when their children were young, because they found the Canadian education system too repressive, in that, in Canada, education must take place in either English or French. They wanted to use Pennsylvania Dutch as the language of instruction. So they took their kids to Mexico, and taught them in Pennsylvania Dutch, until the kids were old enough not to be required to attend school in Canada.
When I met the family, the two teenaged girls could barely speak English or Spanish. Their primary language was a language that only Mennonite and Amish people speak. They had never read books that were not Bible stories. If the family needed money, their father found them a job on the farm where he worked, and he did all the communicating for the family. Their brother spoke a bit more English and Spanish, but he hadn't read any books, either. Their mother spoke only Pennsylvania Dutch.
So what, precisely, can these girls do with their lives? Even if they want to do something other than be good little Mennonite wives, their access to choice is pretty limited-they can't leave the community, because nobody speaks their language. They can't get medical care without an interpreter. If their father or husband is abusive, they don't have access to the information that would direct them to people who could help them. They don't have access to the wider world of news, entertainment, science, art, literature. They can't participate meaningfully in the broader community. They both wanted to get married, because that was the only choice they could see for themselves.
If you don't have any options, you don't have access to meaningful choice.
For all their faults, public schools do better for kids than their parents did for these girls.
Do schools, teachers, and school systems suck? Sometimes, yes, they do, egregiously. Do some kids get overlooked? Yes, especially those kids whose needs and abilities fall outside the spectrum of what is considered standard. Does the Canadian curriculum currently reflect a certain amount of self-congratulatory Canadian mythology and ignore those features of society that don't mesh with the mythos? Sadly, yes.
But I don't think that schools exist in order to suck, ignore facts of Canadian history, or force kids to conform to developmental and educational norms. I think the suckage and conformity arise from the fact that schools are for whatever society is for, and, frankly, some parts of society are rife with suckage and conformity. As people who mostly don't suck ,and who see problems with conformity, it's up to us to ensure that schools reflect our values, and to give schools, teachers, and administrators the tools to do well not only by our kids, but by all kids who will have their access to choice broadened.
If we don't want our educational systems to reflect suckage, we have to give them something better to reflect.
* Patriarchy, capitalism, classism, imperialism, the white male hegemony, etc., but also the rule of law, empiricism, feminism, anti-racism, and social-democracy.
** To say nothing of the political difficulties of implementing student-centered learning in publicly funded schools: people who think that rows of desks were good enough in their days, goddsdammit, would flip right out. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that, left to their own devices, a lot of people would necessarily acquire good learning habits, if doing so looks like work to them.
† Yes, I'm aware that it's pretty much impossible to teach this stuff without ideological bias. I'm aware that right now, our approach to history is pretty self-congratulatory and leaves out the dreadful parts of How We Got Here. I think this is wrong and that we're doing students a disservice and perpetuating injustice by doing so. I don't think the problem is wanting students to have a basic understanding of Canadian history.
‡ Actually, I think expanding everyone's access to meaningful choice is part of what most social institutions are for.
As someone who is not a teacher, but who is related to a lot of teachers, rooms with a proto-teacher, and works with teachers and administrators a lot, I'm always up for a discussion of the "point of schools." Of course, as someone who attended school, I am fabulously equipped to opine on the subject of schools and education.
Let me say here that my experiences with the educational system, in publicly-funded Catholic elementary schools and a private all-girls' high school, ran the gamut from imperfect but mostly surviveable to kind of fun, really. I didn't have the kind of ghastly experiences that many of my friends have had. And when things got rough at school, I had the kind of family that could and would confront teachers, principals, and school administrators, or sometimes just let me stay home. I was bored, a lot, and in elementary school in particular, I was picked on, but I got by. So that's where I'm coming from, experientially.
In my optimistic moments, I say that public education is an idea that is under constant negotiation, and that embodies and reflects the ideologies of the society in which it exists. Remembering that one function of a system is to perpetuate itself, any discussion of "the purpose of schools" must indeed take into account that educational systems also 1) work to perpetuate themselves, and 2) function as one of the tools by which broader social and ideological systems* perpetuate themselves. But I don't think that means that the entire point of schools as they exist is either self-perpetuation or perpetuation of some eeevil repressive system that aims only to turn bright, carefree students into good little sheep. Many educators (teachers, administrators, educational assistants, etc.) don't actually see their job crushing the spirits of students, but as giving students the tools they need "succeed" and/or to make choices that are in their own best interest. How we define "success" and the student's "best interest" is another of those ongoing negotiations that hold a mirror to society.
If you're a person who thinks that it's in people's long-term best interest to learn to conform (to "be realistic," to "avoid getting in trouble," etc.), you're going to encourage that in schools, and require schools to enforce conformity. Often you will talk about "standards." When you think of schools, you think of orderly classroom of quiet students all doing the same thing at the same time, learning a set curriculum and all being evaluated by the same standards. The contents of that set curriculum, in your ideal school system will also reflect your values: all educated people should read Shakespeare, maybe; or maybe everyone should be able to do calculus (or both!)
If you're someone who believes it's in people's long-term best interest to push their own limitations and find their own way, you're going to champion student-centered individual learning, and (assuming you believe in public education at all) push for schools that allow and encourage students to approach learning individually and in a self-directed fashion. Your ideal school may have classrooms characterized by the busy hum of purposeful work, with students participating in a variety of activities that engage their interest and allow them to work to their strengths. You see teachers as facilitators of student learning, rather than content delivery modules. You may believe that each student's learning should be assessed based on that student's progress, and that every student's should be working to reach individual learning goals. Your ideal curriculum reflects your values, too: students should be encouraged to develop critical thinking skills and be exposed to a broad range of cultural influences and ideas. Along the way, they will learn how to learn, so that if they discover a lack of knowledge about calculus or Shakespeare is holding them back, they'll know what to do about that.
I think, as a society, we might be able to come up with less expensive means of keeping teenagers off the street, if that were the only reason, or even the main reason, for having schools. Granted, our current government seems to hold the mistaken idea that if you force unwilling teenagers to attend school, they will miraculously be able to hold down jobs that afford them a living wage after they leave school and will therefore not become Burdens to the System. This is stupid, and results in classroom situations where teachers do act as some combination of nanny and prison warden; most teachers I know see this situation as one that prevents them from doing their real jobs.
Both visions, if implemented, reflect and promote the values of the society that implements them.
Within the classroom, there's also constant negotiation between the needs of individual students and what the teacher perceives to be the needs of the classroom. This already potentially fraught negotiation is further complexified by whatever external limitations and obligations have been imposed on the teacher, in the form of curriculum, class size, etc.
Most teachers of my acquaintance would love to have the time and resources to devote themselves to being facilitators of students' individual educational explorations, but must balance their own desires and students' individual needs and desires against the requirements imposed by external forces (curriculum, administrators, parents) and the limitations of the system (class size, funding, access to facilities, potential for liability). It's really difficult to work individually with each student in a class of 36, in which you have to keep each student under your eye all day, and ensure that at the end of the year all of the students can meet curriculum expectations.**
To be sure, one of the reasons for publicly funded mandatory education (and I wish I could find the report on the history of public education in Canada that confirmed this for me) is to ensure a population whose members meet a certain number of core competencies and whose people share a certain cultural currency. This is not intrinsically a bad thing, depending on who defines the core competencies and the cultural currency.
It's not a bad thing to want everyone to be able to do what they need to do in order to get through their days, reach their goals, learn what they need to know. It's not a bad thing for all members of a society to speak a common language, to share some common cultural references, and to know what that society's expectations are. I, personally, don't even think it's a bad thing to want everyone, to the extent of their ability, to have a basic understanding of how their government is supposed to work, what it's doing in their name, and how things got that way.† I think it's a good idea for people to have some understanding of how scientific discoveries are made and how we determine and test what we know about the world. I think it's a really good idea for people to be able to read and write in the standard language of communication for their culture, and to have access to the prestige dialects of that culture, not because prestige dialects are inherently superior to vernaculars, but because they may be necessary in order for people to have access to certain jobs and services.
And I think that's what schools are for: for giving kids more passports and letters of introduction for their invisible backpacks. If kids decide not to use those passports and letters, that's up to them. Better to have something and choose not to use it than not to have it at all. I also think they're for helping people learn how to learn. If, in the process of doing this, kids learn a certain number of facts, acquire another language, develop some skills, and read some books, that's all to the better.
I think it's important that we have schools because I don't actually trust parents to do this, and I think that ensuring that all kids have access to the tools they need to expand their access to meaningful choice is important-more important than parents' ideology, more important than anyone's religions-in fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's what education,‡ in any form, is for. I think that society benefits when as many people as possible have access to choice and have the ability to use their skills and talents in a meaningful way.
Back when I was on the farm, I came into contact with some Mexican Mennonite families. These families were Mennonite families that had fled Canada when their children were young, because they found the Canadian education system too repressive, in that, in Canada, education must take place in either English or French. They wanted to use Pennsylvania Dutch as the language of instruction. So they took their kids to Mexico, and taught them in Pennsylvania Dutch, until the kids were old enough not to be required to attend school in Canada.
When I met the family, the two teenaged girls could barely speak English or Spanish. Their primary language was a language that only Mennonite and Amish people speak. They had never read books that were not Bible stories. If the family needed money, their father found them a job on the farm where he worked, and he did all the communicating for the family. Their brother spoke a bit more English and Spanish, but he hadn't read any books, either. Their mother spoke only Pennsylvania Dutch.
So what, precisely, can these girls do with their lives? Even if they want to do something other than be good little Mennonite wives, their access to choice is pretty limited-they can't leave the community, because nobody speaks their language. They can't get medical care without an interpreter. If their father or husband is abusive, they don't have access to the information that would direct them to people who could help them. They don't have access to the wider world of news, entertainment, science, art, literature. They can't participate meaningfully in the broader community. They both wanted to get married, because that was the only choice they could see for themselves.
If you don't have any options, you don't have access to meaningful choice.
For all their faults, public schools do better for kids than their parents did for these girls.
Do schools, teachers, and school systems suck? Sometimes, yes, they do, egregiously. Do some kids get overlooked? Yes, especially those kids whose needs and abilities fall outside the spectrum of what is considered standard. Does the Canadian curriculum currently reflect a certain amount of self-congratulatory Canadian mythology and ignore those features of society that don't mesh with the mythos? Sadly, yes.
But I don't think that schools exist in order to suck, ignore facts of Canadian history, or force kids to conform to developmental and educational norms. I think the suckage and conformity arise from the fact that schools are for whatever society is for, and, frankly, some parts of society are rife with suckage and conformity. As people who mostly don't suck ,and who see problems with conformity, it's up to us to ensure that schools reflect our values, and to give schools, teachers, and administrators the tools to do well not only by our kids, but by all kids who will have their access to choice broadened.
If we don't want our educational systems to reflect suckage, we have to give them something better to reflect.
* Patriarchy, capitalism, classism, imperialism, the white male hegemony, etc., but also the rule of law, empiricism, feminism, anti-racism, and social-democracy.
** To say nothing of the political difficulties of implementing student-centered learning in publicly funded schools: people who think that rows of desks were good enough in their days, goddsdammit, would flip right out. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that, left to their own devices, a lot of people would necessarily acquire good learning habits, if doing so looks like work to them.
† Yes, I'm aware that it's pretty much impossible to teach this stuff without ideological bias. I'm aware that right now, our approach to history is pretty self-congratulatory and leaves out the dreadful parts of How We Got Here. I think this is wrong and that we're doing students a disservice and perpetuating injustice by doing so. I don't think the problem is wanting students to have a basic understanding of Canadian history.
‡ Actually, I think expanding everyone's access to meaningful choice is part of what most social institutions are for.