Once Upon a Time…in American Education
01/03/12 05:23 PM
Once upon a time, most schools had multigrade classrooms and kids of different ages helped each other and the teacher. And the teacher was an extension of schooling that occurred at home. And character and mentoring was taught as a lifestyle, because it was natural and sensible. And the building was a place of necessity mostly for socialization rather than a prison.
Then a tidal wave of kids showed up, unannounced, in 1949, when the baby boom hit school age, and kindergarten was born out of necessity. And, again out of necessity, kids were segregated into single aged classrooms to keep things organized. And mentoring didn’t seem so important, but competition did. And, out of necessity (or was it convenience?), we catered to the mediocre and left the most needy and the most gifted to fend for themselves because it seemed like the democratic thing to do.
And once you can measure something, by God you’d better measure it. And if you’ve got the data, you’d better normalize it, which is another way of saying standardize it, which is another way of saying govern it. And if teachers are now running kinder-factories, shouldn’t they have the same collective powers as other factory workers, and the same job security, and don’t bother us with performance when we’re talking about workers’ rights here.
And schools became institutions where commodities are made and measured and boxed up according to grade and size and shipped, and don’t ever stop us to look at what’s best for the commodity, and don’t tell us its not a commodity because we’ve got more coming and we can’t stop and neither can they, just to get it right.
And somewhere along the way education as we once knew it stopped. As did mentoring, and recognizing the educational value of homes, and cherishing the emotional needs of little people, who didn’t sign up for this and sure as hell aren’t to blame for our shortchanging them.
And education stopped being the main thing. The industry did, the textbooks, the teacher’s unions, the politicians, the budget….
And to preserve these status quos, we started getting “efficient”, cutting nutrition, programs, arts, sports, socializing skills, home support, anything that didn’t have a lobbyist to protect it. We retained every nut and bolt in the education-industry “car”, but we entirely forgot that the point of it all was that our kids might know where to drive it!
But somewhere along the way, a spark survived, a lingering idea that there was beauty in a child’s mind. An idea that maybe Einstein was right in observing that, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” And maybe after years of worsening failure, maybe we have finally dared to consider that maybe the politicians and the regulators and the lobbyists, and the unions and the lawyers might not know best.
Maybe, just maybe, the kids do, and the teachers who do care, of which there are still many, and the moms and dads, and the artists, and the athletes who still love athletics for athletics. Maybe, just maybe, it is no accident that home-schooling when done well knocks the socks off of most public education. Maybe it is not enough to preserve the nuts and bolts of education and forget about what the nuts and bolts are for, especially when stripping the institutional experience of any social nurturing leaves only a shell that is emotionally and too often physically dangerous.
So we’ve cut arts and music and athletics and everything that is enriching and made the institutions into factories churning out a culturally vacuous product. To preserve what we are used to, the disastrous status quo, we’ve left home schooling and other educational models as often daunting but none-the-less necessary alternatives.
Maybe the solution is right in front of us. George Orwell was right when he noted that, “sometimes it requires all of our effort to see what is right in front of us.” Or maybe the system is just as corrupt as it seems. Maybe getting back to home-centered schooling is the answer. It seems to work the best anyway. Maybe the teachers need to get back to being extensions of life-learning rather than its replacement. It was like that before this disastrous experiment started in the fifties with the industrialization of education. And now we have the Internet, which has proven itself as a powerful enabler of home education. Maybe we need to support and develop this, which can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost current practices. School buildings can use this model too, to give kids a safe place to go and access focused self-paced, teacher-assisted education if both parents have to work.
Maybe the real value of the institutions isn’t rote education at all, but rather the very arts and athletics and music and other social interactions that have been banished. Teach “the basics” on line in the home or in safe environments for those students who need them. Make them self-paced and therefore multi-yeared experiences where students can get back to helping each other. Students of different ages and abilities who are doing the same work but maybe have differing skills and maturity levels that they can share. Above all, make the institutions into cultural centers that don’t banish the arts and athletics but rather specialize in them. They should be places where culture and society can again be celebrated, practiced, and taught using the skills that students can demonstrate that they have mastered on their own. It would be cheaper. It would utilize the immense educational resources and communications capabilities of the web. It would emulate the learning metaphors that kids have already adopted on their own. And it would dismantle the violent and emotionally and physically dangerous cauldrons that have become our public schools in so very many instances.
