ParisTampaBlog

There is much talk, and gloating among the members of the education (read school) establishment about the $100 billion in new money for the schools now made available by the stimulus bill just passed by the Congress.

The talk, however, is all about getting the horse to water, about changes to the paths to learning, not about getting the horse to drink or the kid to learn, not about what it would take to get the kid to learn.

And there is this assumption, widely held I believe, and wrong, that the more money spent the more learning that goes on. (Actually, in an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Jay Mathews makes it clear just how much kids’ learning may be enhanced without spending one dime.)

The irony is that our country ought to have “learned” a long time ago that this is not the case, that the amount of real learning that does go on anywhere has little to do with the amount of money spent.

To go back a minute to my image of the horse and the water, it’s probably not the right one because the “water” or learning for the kid, unlike for the horse, is everywhere. And learning can and does take place anywhere. One doesn’t have to bring the kids somewhere, such as to a school.

Learning may even occur more outside the places of learning, the schools, than inside.  And furthermore, the supply of learning, unlike water, or of situations from which one might learn, is limitless.

So the problem for us and for the kids is different from that of our horse and the water. Our problem, and the kid’s problem of which he is probably not even aware, lies entirely with his state of readiness for learning, and that’s what most of all we should be trying to influence. Yes, William, the readiness is all.

All the billions of dollars of new money just made available to the new Department of Ed head, Arne Duncan, may do little or nothing to influence that readiness and so far neither Duncan nor anyone else is even talking about that.

Again, is one’s readiness for learning ever related to the amount of money spent? to the cost of schooling? Ask the parents about their own experiences with their own children.

Parents “learn” very quickly that any additional expenditures on their children do not necessarily increase their children’s learning. Would that our educational establishment had learned the same thing, not to be expected, however, since that money is also their livelihood.

In fact, additional monies spent on improving education may even have the opposite result. Witness the number of wealthy parents the learning of whose children may even vary inversely with the money spent on them.

So what does it all mean, the $100 billion in new money for the schools and colleges, aside from our going still further into debt? That is, what does it all mean if it doesn’t mean that our kids will be better educated as a result? I don’t like to think about it. I certainly don’t like the answer.

Wouldn’t we be better off if we concentrated, not on the difficulty of first coming up with money we don’t have, and then on the almost insuperable difficulty of spending that money, as in the present instance, effectively and efficiently, but rather on what it takes, often not money, to “make”  kids drink, or get them to learn?

This entry was posted on February 17, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under 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.