Schooling like war is expensive
I’ve just read a Boston Globe article, and learned therein that the Boston schools are facing big job cuts, in particular the loss of 900 positions including 403 teachers (out of some 6500 in the district). And I assume, given the dismal state of our economy, that this sort of thing is happening everywhere, most of all in the big city school systems where costs are greatest.
Now we’ve been made aware over and over again, at least for a generation or more, that these same school systems, now confronting the necessity of huge budget cuts, have failed to educate, or provide with needed job readiness skills, huge numbers of mostly poor and minority students. The budget cuts now upon us suggest that these failures will become even more pronounced.
More money for the schools has always been the holy grail for the school people, for school committees, school superintendents, administrators, and teachers, and most of all teachers’ unions. For these groups more money could solve widespread and deeply entrenched problems such as the high dropout numbers and widening racial and class achievement gaps. Whereas less money would inevitably grow and intensify these same problems.
Now, when more money is the only answer, there seems to be no solution to our public school woes. For even without the present budget cuts there will never be enough, never enough money. Schools like wars will always cost too much. And school people like war people will never have enough. Why haven’t we learned this?
There has always been but one answer to the never ending problem of school costs and inadequate school budgets. And that is the following: We ought to abandon our emphasis on schooling, for which there will never be enough money, and instead concentrate on education. For schooling doesn’t mean (why haven’t we learned this?) education. And while schooling is expensive — it will always need schools and teachers at the very least — education is cheap. It will never need more than someone who wants to learn.
And in fact that’s why societies have, up until now, progressed. Not because of schools, but because there have always been those who, with or without schooling, want to learn, and there have always been those who have done so in spite of the clear failure of the schools which they may or may not have attended.
What if we began to help children, and adults, to learn, provide they with real opportunities to learn, that which doesn’t mean simply sending them to school? In my own experience the so-called immersion methods work best. How might we provide more of them?
We know that very few people have learned to speak a foreign language by sitting in language class? And we know that many have learned that same language by being with those who spoke and used the language, by immersion. Why don’t we provide more of such opportunities? In Tampa where I live we put English speaking children in Spanish class where they learn little Spanish while all about them large numbers of the population are speaking that language.
The language model could be extended, as it is now in regard to things that children really do and do well, such as play a musical instrument (in band or orchestra), act in a play, be a member of a basketball, lacrosse or other team, to mention only a few instances of how children learn best.
Where schools fail is where they do not take into account the student’s wanting to learn or not, usually not in the pre-algebra class, the American history class, the English literature class. In all these classrooms (that are very expensive) the students are there but not there, and no changes brought about by additional monies will be likely to change things in the direction of more learning.
Once again, learning, or education is cheap, because this depends entirely or almost entirely on the learner, the one who wants to learn. The learner makes learning happen. Schools, schooling, even teachers by themselves (for the most part, for there are exceptions, there are unvengeful pied pipers among them), even in good times with all kinds of money available, do not.
