It’s time to move beyond the dehumanizing school systems of the past 200 years.
Overall, schools and the quality of education in this country must change and improve in significant ways.
According to a recent Girl Scouts of America survey, only one-third of the students said their teachers cared for them.
What’s more, it’s obvious that our main purpose in public education is not the moral one of developing caring people, but instead a relentless and rather hapless pursuit of academic improvement.
As a result, there seems to be widespread agreement among parents, students, educators, the media, and the public at large that the quality and results of education in our schools are disappointing.
Many children are said to graduate without minimal competence in reading, writing and mathematics, not to mention knowledge of more esoteric subjects such as geography, history, science, and art.
The search is on, meanwhile, for scapegoats and magical solutions.
Parents and educators blame one another.
Together they blame administrators, school boards, inadequate budgets and facilities, inappropriate student-teacher ratios, inadequate instructional methods, poor discipline, and the like.
—
Unfortunately, the alleged failure of our schools and the frustration of parents, students and teachers will not be overcome in a real sense through the changes proposed in teaching methods, school budgets and control mechanisms.
While marginal improvements are certainly attainable here and there from such measures, effective prevention of school failure and significant improvements in education seem to depend largely on fundamental changes in prevailing social values and in the social, economic, and political institutions in which our schools are embedded.
Another paradoxical feature of our schooling is that the system is successful while failing individual students on a massive scale.
Meanwhile, the overt objective of schooling seemingly is to prepare successive generations of students for the total array of tasks and positions they must take on as adults in the real world.
Such has been the goal of schooling throughout history.
What has changed over time is the form and content of the teaching, training, and lessons but not public education’s underlying, universal mission—namely to keep youth out of the workplace until they reach adulthood and to provide jobs for our nation’s largest workforce.
If then, we wish to understand the workings of our schools, and to evaluate their failures and “hidden successes,” we need to examine the context of adult life in our society.
To evaluate the results of schooling in terms of abstract educational theories and standards or in terms of achievement of the individual students—as educators, parents, and the public tend to do—misses the point: how should we prepare children for adulthood?
Such evaluations also are unfair to schools and teachers, who are being blamed for failures beyond their control, failures that are inevitable in the prevailing culture of our national community.
—
Schools today should be transformed into centers of study in which all students have ample opportunity to explore and develop their innate capacities.
These rich capacities will be in high demand in the years ahead—when a transformed way of life and organization of work will make use of everyone’s creative, intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities across the global market.
Schools, therefore, should build largely on the innate motivation and inquisitiveness of children.
Ideally, in years to come, education will become non-authoritarian, non-competitive and supportive in agreement with the principles practiced more than 2,500 years ago by Socrates, and advanced and practiced throughout history by humanistic philosophers and educators.
Hence, education would not be paralyzed as it is under current conditions by contradictions between explicit and hidden goals.
To overcome the prevailing, tragic failure of our existing system of schooling requires philosophical and political efforts aimed at creating a broad movement for radical social transformation.
Nothing less will do.
Once the logic of this proposition is in place, we no longer will have to waste time and efforts on the futile search for technical “fixes” for our failing schools and failing youth.
Instead, we will be able to concentrate our minds and energy on advancing the academic process toward genuine individual achievement.
Meanwhile, it seems that we are meeting the needs of our students, arbitrarily, fortuitously, or by some happy mishap.
—
Top o’ the morning!