The Goals of Education
The history of education has seen a struggle between those who would grow children en masse, the way one raises pigs in Denmark, or tulips in Holland, and those who would begin with each individual child, and the education that best suits that child.
At this moment in history the former seem to have the upper hand, be it those of the NCLB, or narrow standards movement concentrated on the 3 R’s, or be it the reformers, such as Richard Rothstein and many others, who would make the standards movement as broad as possible by including a much larger gamut of school subjects, music, art, sports, citizenship et al., as well as a diminished emphasis on testing and accountability. Unfortunately the best of those who would take us a third way and have us look closely at each individual child, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Holt, Milton Friedman, and a few others, are no longer with us, and no one is loudly defending their position in the current debate over standards, accountability, and the goals of education.
Does it make sense to speak in general of the goals of education, other than what is best for the individual child? I don’t think so, yet what a lot of books have been written thereupn. Shouldn’t there be almost as many goals as there are learners, with these goals becoming more and more distinct from one another as the learner matures? How many college seniors have you ever met with the same goals? So we know that this is what is to come. In the elementary grades shouldn’t we begin the process by helping each individual learner to find his or her own way?
To speak of shared goals for an entire population may very well be appropriate for populations of pigs and tulip bulbs, and other such species of life totally subjugated to our interests. In all such instances we choose not unreasonably to disregard individual characteristics (except when we would improve the strain) and apply the most profitable pig production techniques to all pigs, and similarly the most profitable tulip productive techniques to all tulips. The result is that the pigs from Denmark, all 13 million of them, are all success stories, as are the hundreds of millions of tulip bulbs from Holland. We made them exactly what we wanted them to be.
When it comes to children, however, failure is common and successes are exceptional. At best there are a relatively small number of individuals at the top, who have turned out to be just what we wanted, those who have gone on to higher education and become themselves entrepreneurs holding important roles in the growing knowledge economy. Then there are those, many more of them, in the middle who read, write, and figure well enough to become knowledge workers, and who, if there are remnants remaining of their individualities, may even indulge themselves in being what they are in moments away from the job. Finally, there are the large numbers of those who have dropped out of school and at best get back in on the fringes of society, in the shops and the trades and the service industries, and at worst find themselves without a job, or home, or stable family situation, often turning to destructive behavior, to lives of crime and/or drugs.
I readily recognize that things are much easier in regard to the rearing of pigs and the cultivation of tulip bulbs. For those that don’t correctly respond to our production schedules are simply cut from the stock, eliminated, and we hear no more about them. Of couse there are always maniacs, such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao et al., who would do the same for men as for pigs and tulips, eliminate those that resist taking on the form intended for them. But happily up until now the maniacs have either been defeated or have died without true followers.
Today in the developed world the rulers respect individual lives enough to allow them to go on living. But, of course, just staying alive, in ghettos, bidonvilles, squatter cities, shelters, Parisian suburbs, jails etc. is nowhere near enough, and although we know all that well enough we seem unable to do more. We are constantly waging wars against poverty, illiteracy, sickness, homelessness, joblessness etc. because even we, living in the richest country ever, are beset with these scourges. But who would ever say we are winning these wars, that what we are doing is at all effective? We’re not, and it isn’t.
I believe that in important respects our problems stem from our insistence on raising our children in regard to what’s best for us, or at least what we think is best for us, by placing them, mostly separated by age in classrooms in schools. The latter can never be right for all, and are probably most often wrong for most. Somehow we have to spring the individual child loose from the school environment, allow it to become what ever lies within its power to become, because all children have within them the potential of becoming real people with their own important contributions to make to their fellows.
How can this be done? I like what Milton Friedman proposes. Give the full per capita cost of public schooling to the parents ("universal vouchers"), and allow the parents, until the child is old enough to do so for himself, to seek out the learning environment that is best for the child. Let a million different flowers bloom (to employ one of the bits of wisdom from one of the maniacs referred to above). This is what we should be writing and talking about. It ought to be evident by now that reforming the schools is not going to do the trick. Haven’t centuries of failed school reforms demonstrated this? And please, no more endless chatter about the goals of education. Talk rather about the goals for each individual child.
