ParisTampaBlog

Many of those who write about the schools seem to be totally without a sense of reality as to what the schools are. Especially those who would return the schools to an imaginary time in the past when the schools were going to be the glue that was to hold our country together. The schools are not now, nor have ever been, that glue. What the schools are, and what the schools ought to be, or might have been in the past, are worlds apart and no amount of well intentioned prescriptions are going to close the gap between them.

For an example of the unreality of those who write about the schools, I go to the web site of The Forum for Education and Democracy and read the following:

In pursuing its mission, The Forum uses the following guiding values:

   1. Public education is foremost about enabling each young person to develop his/her strengths; use his/her mind well; and become connected to his/her community.
   2. The work in schools should be intellectually challenging, connected to the skills needed for real world success, and personalized so that students are known to those who teach them.
   3. Public education is fundamental to a democratic, civil, prosperous society.
   4. Public schools are critical institutions for breaking the cycle of poverty and redressing social inequities.
   5. Public engagement, community support, and adequate resources are essential to the success of public education.
   6. Parents and communities should be involved in all attempts to improve public schools.
   7. The work of education for democratic citizenship is not only the responsibility of the public schools, but is shared by other cultural institutions and should be supported by them as well.
   8. Public policy choices effecting public education should always be assessed on the basis of their contribution to equitable educational resources, their impact on local control, and whether or not they support the public education’s most central mission – the development of democratic citizens.
   9. Our young can only learn when basic needs, nutrition, health care, and housing, are met. Our commitment to education is also demonstrated by our commitment to provide these basic needs.

Now, there is not a tenet in the above that anyone interested in the best possible education for our youth would disagree with. These purported characteristics, children developing their individual strengths, doing intellectually challenging work, becoming connected to society, are what we would want in the best of all possible worlds for our own children as well as for all children. But what we want is not at all what we have.

I challenge you to visit the schools and look for the presence of even one of the values mentioned above anywhere other than in the school’s mission statement. You won’t find it. Rather, as Steven Wolk has made clear in a recent Phi Delta Kappan article, Why Go To School?, what you would find instead are,  “children primarily filling in blanks on worksheets, regurgitating facts from textbooks, writing formulaic five-paragraph essays, taking multiple-choice tests and making the occasional diorama, that is, a total lack of opportunities of having even one original thought.”

And further Wolk reminds us that a generation ago John Goodlad in his book, A Place Called School, after observing classrooms across the country and more than 27,000 students, wrote, “I wonder about the impact of the flat, neutral emotional ambience of most of the classes we studied. Boredom is a disease of epidemic proportions…. Why are our schools not places of joy?”

Why is this so? Why are the schools so little of what we would have them be? The best answer to this question is that the schools are nearly powerless to undo, let alone overcome, the influence of the environment in which the children are living while attending school. Reread the nine tenets above. How many of them are accurate descriptions of that environment?

For example, Number 7 reads: “The work of education for democratic citizenship is not only the responsibility of the public schools, but is shared by other cultural institutions and should be supported by them as well.” Do you know anyone, other than the writers I refer to, for whom “education for democratic citizenship” is a high priority, let alone his or her responsibility?

The other day I read that, “High numbers of students in Gaza UN-run schools are failing math and Arabic tests.” Now what would be your first response to this headline? That the UN run schools were failures? Of course not. You would be amazed that schooling, any kind, even takes place in that cursed land. In all, about 195,000 children in Gaza, a territory with 1.4 million residents, attend UN schools. You wouldn’t blame the schools but without hesitation you would attribute the poor showing to “violence, overcrowding and poverty.”

The lesson here for us is that we need to cease speaking of the schools we would like to have, and instead see the schools for what they are, probably much more influenced by our own versions of “violence, overcrowding and poverty,” than by our mission statements representing wishful thinking of what the schools should be. In short, the nine admirable guiding values taken from the Forum for Education and Democracy’s mission for the schools are not yet of this world. What is of this world, the actual lives of children, should have all our attention.

This entry was posted on October 2, 2007 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Schooling or education. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.