Nine Truths about the Public Schools
There are truths about public school education that need to be said. The endless debate about the schools, the equally endless series of reform efforts mostly ignore these truths
Truth number one. Public, as in public school, doesn’t mean public. The word, a poor choice from the beginning (common was better but not much) probably should be banned.
Why? Because the word is divisive, it sets up a false opposition between public and private, rich and poor, town and gown… A false opposition because learning, when it does occur, is exactly the same in private or public circumstances. The word school by itself would have been better.
Truth number two. Schooling is not education. The assumption is made that it’s enough to go to school, and to eventually complete the school’s program, to become educated.
Everyone who has been to school (now this means just about everyone) knows that this is not true. One’s education or learning is always the result of one’s own efforts, wherever they are made, and not necessarily while in school and in class.
Truth number three. Virtue can’t be taught. From a reading of the mission statements of public and private schools alike (which, by the way are not all that different) Plato was evidently never taken seriously in this regard.
But even someone who surely had read Plato’s Meno, in this case Thomas Jefferson, could make a statement like the following: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
I don’t think Jefferson meant that without school civilization was not possible but his words have too often been interpreted by educators ever since to mean that school, by dispelling the natural ignorance of the people, would thereby create the proper basis for an enlightened American civilization.
Does anyone seriously believe that the citizenry today, after nearly 200 years of compulsory schooling, is somehow better, say, than the citizenry of 200 years ago? Or even that people today are more knowledgeable than people at the time of Horace Mann and the first Common School? There is absolutely no evidence that this is so.
On the contrary, the schools may have, if anything, by defending the status quo, retarded the real progress our country has made in many areas, in regard for example to women’s rights, the rights of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities, the improved conditions of the work places etc.
It’s simply not true that we can look to the schools to make us better people. We should stop doing so. Perhaps by recognizing this simple truth we would do a better job with what the schools should be all about, the transferal of skills and knowledge to a new generation of young people. We wouldn’t expect that to necessarily dispel their ignorance, for probably only real life experiences can do that.
Truth number four. Parents and teachers, the adults in children’s lives, have only so much influence, and in the now too many cases when they are absent, almost no influence at all, on the lives of children.
Parents (and probably teachers also) would do much better to give their children some space, get to know them from a little distance, find out what their children’s interests and talents are, and then support what they see, not what they would like their children to be.
For in regard to the latter they will inevitably fail, and in the very worst cases bring the children down with them.
Judith Rich Harris, in an article published in the Psychological Review in 1995 (Vol. 102, no 3) asks the question whether parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality and concludes that no, they don’t. From my own experience I would agree.
Truth number five. Not everyone should go to college. This truth flies in the face of today’s political correctness in regard to public education. Correctness tells us that everyone should, or at least should have the opportunity to go to college.
And when faced with the young people before us in the classroom, and when we know that their future chances, in particular their earning power, will be significantly improved by college attendance, how could we not allow them that opportunity?
The conservative Charles Murray, and the progressive Howard Gardner, for widely different reasons, would both agree, I think, with my conclusion that not everyone should go to college.
Murray makes it clear that college preparatory schools emphasize word and number proficiencies and that achievement in these areas is not evenly spread among the school population, and that only those registering on the right side of a normal or Bell Curve representing their test scores would be able to satisfy the academic demands of college.
Gardner persuades us that all kids are intelligent and should have the opportunity if they want of following their particular talents and interests, their own brand of intelligence, into a higher education environment.
But to say that all should have the opportunity to go on learning is not at all to say that all should go on to a traditional liberal arts college, what we usually mean by the word college. The artists, musicians, athletes, the craftsmen, even some of the technicians, and many others representing other interests and talents, should not be pushed onto a traditional college prep track.
Truth number six. Testing, and especially the debate over testing has taken on much too much importance. This debate is, I believe, a Red herring or attempt, perhaps in too many instances deliberate, to change the subject and thereby place other and more important educational issues on the back burner.
Those who take up arms against testing would divert attention, it seems to me, from how and what children learn, that which any educational debate should be mostly about, and instead make the testers their target, the tests the object of debate.
Too bad, for testing does have its legitimate place, and should be allowed that place without undue discussion. It should never have become, as now, the main issue that separates progressive and conservative thinkers on the subject of children and the schools.
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So much for what I call the negative truths about education, those things about education that should not be. On the positive side are these other truths, truths that ought to get the lion’s share of our time and money, but, helas!, do not.
Truth number seven. Learning is always by doing. John Dewey was right. In fact, there is no other way to learn. The irony is that, in spite of Dewey’s real insights into how we learn best, for most kids activities in school mostly tax their powers of memory, not their powers of thinking.
From one day to the next while in school kids do much too little in respect to exercising what they are asked to learn, be it reading or speaking a foreign language, researching a topic in science or history, applying mathematics to problem solving. For them and the teacher remembering is easier than doing.
Truth number eight. The circumstances of the child’s life, the big example being poverty, need not be destiny. But they need to be addressed, for otherwise the school and the teacher will have little chance to undue the unfavorable life circumstances the child has brought with him into the school and classroom.
In the so-called “no-excuses” schools, those mostly “public charter” schools where the kids are not allowed to make excuses for not being on time, for not having done the homework, for not paying attention in class, the “circumstances” are left at the door to the school, and as a result the child is able to listen and learn. His circumstances will not determine his destiny.
Truth number nine. In life the readiness is all. In learning especially is this so. And in school being ready means being interested, being motivated. And it follows from this that motivating kids ought to be every educator’s number one priority.
Helas! It is not. In the current discussion raging about how the education stimulus money should be spent I haven’t heard the word readiness mentioned.
The discussion, instead, is all about societal funded “paths” to education (new school buildings, better equipped libraries, smaller class sizes, not to mention testing and accountability and all the rest) not about the kids themselves, about their motivation level and how any new monies might, if at all, favorably influence that motivation. For without that there will be no learning.
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