Why Schools Can't Succeed, Part IV - Teaching Tyranny

Most of the great names in the history of American democracy, philosophy and independent thought, not to mention industry, learned to read, compose and calculate in more or less the same way the farmers of De Tocqueville's observation did; any way they could. Lincoln famously taught himself; many more learned by doing in simple country schools, or sunday school, or while being tutored by kids not much more advanced than they. Many of the greatest writers, thinkers, artists and engineers of the Edinburgh Renaissance - Watt, MacAdam, Turner and many more - and their counterparts in America were self-tutored as they worked as apprentices; their achievements are monuments not only to their respective disciplines, but to the history of human achievement and the glory of liberal (small-l) government.

It's ironic that the system that teaches kids about them today is such a complete contradiction.

In the late 1800s, reactionary social theorists in the US began to worry about the number of immigrants in this country. What were these new immigrants teaching each other?

America's schools were a hodgepodge of efforts: little community schools, parochial schools, home schooling, informal tutoring and apprenticeship, and no school at all. The reactionaries were worried - they wanted to make sure the waves of immigrant children were properly indoctrinated into American life. The right place to do this, they figured, was school.

And the looked with admiration on the system Bismark had incorporated in Germany. German state education relied on all the things we regard as the norm in public education today - a strict, uniform, approved curriculum; teachers certified in their knowledge of approved curricula and methods; grade levels, and a set of promotion standards based on objective (if arbitrary) criteria.

Bismark's goal in instituting this system was to ensure that Germany's emerging militocratic society would have the raw human material it needed, sorted out just the way the military and the rest of German society needed them:
It would funnel the top 10% of society down the achievement track; they'd be the doctors, the lawyers, the professionals, academics, and the military's officers. The elite of this elite would be the generals, the presidents, the cabinet ministers and head bureaucrats.

The next 30% would be the foremen, the primary school teachers, the middle management and petty bureaucracy, and the military's noncommissioned officers.

The other 70% would be the labor, the assembly line workers, the farmers, the service sector, and the military's enlisted men.

Each of these slices of society were to be identified early, and provided with education commensurate with their station. The system lives on, to a great extent, in the German "Gymnasium" system, and the Japanese system which copied it; tests like the German "Abitur", given at age 10, determine the child's academic direction for the rest of his or her life.

And this system - which causes so many Americans to shake their heads at the soulless authoritarianism of it all - is the one ours is modeled after. Some of the windowdressing has changed - but at the end of the day, the American system of education is the first cousin of these systems. For while the pre-WWII German and Japanese systems made no bones about their desire to produce well-indoctrinated cannon-fodder and docile labor, the system we copied from Bismark was intended to create "good citizens" less in the sense that Madison and Jefferson and De Tocqueville intended than supplanting immigrant culture as quickly as possible.

But when presented with alternatives to the traditional, ?keep your butt in your seat? model of education, both the left and the right squawk.

?How will they learn what our society needs them to learn?? asks the left. ?How will they learn responsibility?? asks the right.

My question of both sides; how could you design a system that would teach either concept worse than what we have now?

How do you teach learning in a system that violates so many key principles of human cognitive development?

Where?s the responsibility when curricula and the expected results are set up years before the student takes the class? When all actions, reactions and consequences have been scripted out?

How do you teach citizenship to people who are not allowed to practice it in any meaningful way for the first 18 years of their lives?

By throwing more standards at kids? By teaching them less stuff, but more of it? By giving teachers more paperwork?

I've dreamed about solutions for years. I thought how nice it would to homeschool my kids - but I'm not independently wealthy, and the bills don't pay themselves. I've tried to get involve with groups trying to start Sudbury schools in the Twin Cities - but it takes a lot more dedication and time than those groups of frazzled overworked parents could muster, week in and week out.

So I'm trying to teach my kids that there's a huge difference between "Education" and "Schooling". They're not the same - not at all.

I don't know that it's enough. I don't worry much about my daughter; she plays the game well enough. Schools are very friendly places for girls these days. My son, on the other hand, is bored stiff. He's not regurgitating the answers demanded of him on cue. The teachers and staff wrinkle their faces in concern. "He's so bright, and we'd hate to see him not performing up to his potential..."

It's all I can do to contain myself during some meetings. "His potential to what? Absorb information that means nothing to him? Barf answers back to you on cue? The kid knows more about history and current events than any of his classmates - and some of his teachers. *I* taught him long division and multiplication when he was six years old. Why did your "program" allow that to atrophy in school? Why is it labelling a kid who is rocketing ahead of the rest of his class in areas that he cares about, and showing his boredom with the prescribed program, "Below Average?" But no. To the school system, as much as they care about him, the goal is to turn him into another unit of product, manufactured to the accepted quality standards.

I reach the end of this screed no better off than I started it. I have no answers. Talking about most education reform - standards, the cretinous "focus on the three Rs", even privatization - causes my eyes to glaze over. The nearest I can figure, the answer is this; our society needs to re-discover what "education" is. It's not a quantifiable process, like manufacturing Buttoneers. It's teaching children - people - how to find their own level in life, whatever that is. I'd rather that my kids grow up to be dishwashers that find intense, lasting fulfillment writing country music or building fishing shacks or developing grand unification theories in their spare time than college professors who are miserable and unfulfilled in their lives - or, for that matter, be anything that allows them to best harness their skills, passions and intelligence to give them a life they're satisfied with, and to be good people to boot.

I think the school system we have is a lousy start toward that. Most of the reforms proposed are akin to rearranging the deck chairs...no. No, we need a new cliche to describe the system of education we have in this country. It's rearranging the patio chairs behind the house of a family whose parents are emotionally crippled and stunted from generations of ritualized emotional abuse so comprehensive that nobody knows who really has the problem.

(Parts One, Two and Three)

Posted by Mitch at March 5, 2004 05:03 AM