Equality and Difference
Those who write about education, and the schools, rarely address the principal problem that parents, teachers, and all those who spend much time with children, must confront on a daily basis. On the one hand the teachers and the others have learned to believe that all children, no less than all men, are equal and are deserving of equal treatment. On the other hand their experience with children has convinced them that no two children are exactly alike and that consequently no two children must be treated in the same manner.
This seeming paradox accounts for the widely different statements that people make about education and the schools. There are those who say categorically that the Common School is a failure. They are of the opinion that the neglect of the differences between children has meant that too many children have been left out.
Then there are those, just as many or even more, who attribute to the Common School and its graduates the predominant leadership role that this country has achieved during the past 150 years. For them promoting equality, or at least equal treatment has meant equal opportunity for all regardless of ethnic, class, or racial origin. No one’s chance of being one day president of the company or president of the country will be diminished by a common school environment where all are equal.
Thus there are, as it were, two poles, that of equality and that of difference.
Those drawn to the equality pole would not track children. They would have every child enrolled in an academic program leading to college. There is a "what’s best," and this "what’s best" ought to be what’s best for all.
Those drawn to the difference pole would separate the children from one another at various points along their way through school, having some leave for work, some go into vocational programs, some do advanced placement work, some even go on at an early age, 15 or 16, to college, and so on.
If children came in different colors, colors that meant college, no college, the trades, etc. things would be easy, but they don’t (although for a long time the color black was considered to mean no college, even no school). The colors of children don’t now relate (and never have related!) to how and what they will best and most usefully learn, although there are still today those who may use ethnic origin for this illegitimate discriminatory purpose.
Now what does the classroom teacher do with all those "equal" children no two of whom ever learn in exactly the same way? It’s a big problem and it sends young teachers fleeing the classroom in large numbers after only a year or two on the job. The problem has not yet been solved.
The politicians have mostly come down on the side of equality, NCLB being their bungled attempt to make the underachievers equal to the achievers. Of course it can’t be done, given the differences, the fact that children, although equal, are not all, or at all alike.
So what is to be done? First of all we should, I think, understand differently, if not play down the place of "equality" in our thinking about the schools. Change "equality" to equality of opportunity, or "equal treatment," and certainly give everyone equal respect.
But in our schools, and in our legislative bodies we should much more "play up" the differences among us. For they are real. And ultimately it’s by our differences that we will make something of our lives, not by what makes us all the same, not by what we all share equally, even those qualities that make us all human.
Title One plays, rightly, to the differences, as does the Westinghouse now Intel Science Talent Search program, as do all those great teachers who see and support each child’s different and unique learning style.
NCLB would have been more acceptable if it had not been presented as something applied across the board equally. If there hadn’t been an achievement gap there would have been no NCLB, so why then wasn’t NCLB, like Title One, directed to those most at risk and most in need of extra help?
Well, I know why. We weren’t, and are still not ready to abandon the facade of equality that we insist upon in our schools. At best we may reach some of the large number of kids at the top of the Bell curve. But in reality we probably won’t. In reality we lose most kids to the extent that what we teach is addressed to all of them equally. To repeat, they are not equal in how they learn.
The lesson to be drawn from all this? Pay more attention to differences in our schools, and more attention to equality everywhere else, especially in our lives in common with others like and different from ourselves.
