It’s rather that the reforms and the reformers, no less than the protectors of the public school status quo, have not, like the blind men, seen the whole of the elephant they would describe.

“Blind monks examining an elephant”, an 1888 ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō.

The whole elephant, well what is that in the educational context? What is the beast out there that one ought to see in its entirety?

We need first of all to agree on a number of assumptions, not so much concerning educational goals or aims, as the nature of the reality out there, the reality that confronts not only the kids every day of their lives, but us too, especially those of us, probably most of us, who are vitally concerned with the education of kids.

Not so much educational goals because there can be any number of these, as you will readily agree if you’re just a bit familiar with all that’s been written about education during the past several hundred years or more — goals such as making kids into life long learners, imparting to them all the necessary skills and knowledge, turning them into good citizens and good people, good fathers and mothers, and now especially turning them into the skilled workforce that will enable us to better compete in the global economy, and so on.

Rather we need to start, not with these abstract goals that have little to do with the kids, but with the kids themselves, and with the world in which they are living.

In regard to the kids no two of them are alike. They are all different, with different interests, abilities, talents, different backgrounds, family situations. And they live in different ethnic and class communities, experience different walks and rides to school, and so on.

And then in regard to the world out there in which they are living. you’d be hard pressed to find much out there that corresponds or relates in any way to what the kids are doing in school. For example, if you’re an adult living, as I am in Tampa, Florida, how many times during the past year have you encountered out there in the life of the city an algebraic or geometric  expression, let alone problem?

And how many times in your everyday lives have you even looked up at the moon and the sun in the sky let alone looked beyond these two objects and with the help of the stupendous findings of the astronomers looked all the way back to the big bang?

How many times have you been taken up with a consideration of your own biological make-up, shared, as we have learned since Charles Darwin (that which you ought to have learned in biology class in school) to a greater or lesser extent by all life on the planet?

In other words what is going on out there in the world where the children, where all of us are living, that at all reflects, or relates to in any way, let alone supports the academic programs of our schools?

I’ve never encountered anyone out there in Tampa either writing an essay, or reading a great book. What is going on in the world, and what the kids are witnessing and being a part of in that world, when they’re not in school, is something else entirely.

Do our professional educators ever ask themselves how many people, let alone kids, outside of the classroom are writing? or even, in the world of the computer and television screen, reading books? Yet reading and writing, we’re told, by these same educators, is what school is or should be mostly all about, two activities that are pretty much absent from people’s daily lives. The kids know this.

This is why, as Finn points out, the achievement levels in our schools have remained flat for a generation. We’re asking of our kids things that are not going on anywhere else. This is why kids never seem to learn a foreign language in a classroom. This is why our reforms have not made a difference. What we have the kids do in our schools is totally out of sync with what is going on out there in the world.

And there is not only the world out there, out of sync with the schools. We are not helping the kids to be in sync with themselves. No two kids, no two of anything alive, are exactly alike.

And when, perhaps because of our concern for providing if not equality, equality of opportunity, we treat the kids as if they were all alike, we naturally fail to reach more than a few of them. And if we do reach that few, it’s only because the few by chance happen to fit the description of the student we have imagined.

As I write I realize I’m not saying anything new. There are those I’m sure who said at the time of Horace Mann’s Common School that school was not the only, or perhaps the best way to prepare kids for life.

And there are those still terrifically alive and interesting, what I would call the “no school” people of the sixties and seventies, the Paul Goodmans, the John Holts, the Ivan Illichs and many more, who valiantly although in vain tried to convince us that school was dead while giving birth to a creation of their own.

If the “no school,” the school is dead people did not succeed it was not because they were wrong. Actually, I think they were right in most of what they said about how kids learn (and for the most part not in school).

It was rather that society, in the form of the educational establishment couldn’t change its spots. Didn’t even try, and instead went on pretending to change by one endless series of reforms after another. Finn does make clear that following all these reforms nothing of real substance did change.

Kids continue to go to school. We continue to pretend to teach them, and they continue to pretend to learn. Not too different from totalitarian states where people pretend to be citizens with rights, where the country’s leaders pretend to recognize those rights, such as the right to vote, but where the real life, the people’s lives, all of that is confined to private spaces, such as about the kitchen table in the former Soviet Union.

What would it take to change things, to do away with the pretense that presently engulfs our public, and probably also, although to a lesser extent, our public charter and private school environments?

It would take two things:
1) A recognition of the world for what it is and of people for what they are, and
2) The abandonment of the principle, now current in our schools, that one size fits all.

And we need to accept and admit that the schools are not going to change the world. They don’t have that power. Virtue can’t be taught. The schools are just not going to shape the kids, let alone the world, in the ways we would like them to.

But somehow kids will become what they are, what they’re suppose to be, at least when they are successful and happy, and they will do this in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the schools. The best schools, and among the enormous variety of such places in the country there are those that are “best”, will help their kids to become what they are, not place obstacles in their way.

The irony is that we do know much about kids and the world, enough to improve our “schools,” or whatever other means we employ to prepare our kids for adulthood, but we act as if we didn’t have that knowledge. We know, for example, what adults spend their time doing, doing things that have little connection with what these same adults (and now their children) did and do in school.

And we know that kids are different and need quite different paths to follow. The traditional academic and college preparatory path is, at best, only one among many, only appropriate for a minority of kids. That in itself, the fact that only the needs of a minority are being met, ought to make us reconsider what we are doing, or rather not doing, for the majority of them.

Here, taken from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics I list the jobs that the adults in the country are now doing. The total civilian labor force as of December, 2009, was 153 million, 144 million of whom were employed.

Of those employed 22 million were farm or farm related workers, 19 million were in goods producing industries, mostly construction and manufacturing.

The remaining 113 million were in the services, 22 million in government, 19 million in education and health (the fastest growing sectors at the moment), 17 million in professional and business services, 15 million in the retail trades, 13 million in leisure and hospitality, leaving the remaining 27 million jobs in other miscellaneous services.

Now have our politicians and educational establishment figures, who have so much to say about the responsibility of our schools to turn out graduates who are ready and able to compete in the global economy, have they at all considered what our own economy consists of in the way of occupations, have they considered the actual jobs that are being done by our adult population, and what sorts of preparation would be needed to get and hold these jobs?

I don’t think so. For they most of all speak as if we needed to get our kids ready to outperform the hundreds of thousands of Chinese engineers who are graduating from engineering schools in China every year. Where are the jobs to be found in this country that would employ these desired graduates?

No they can’t have thought much about the kinds of jobs adults are doing and the kind schooling, if any, that would be most appropriate to insure that the jobs out there are being filled adequately as they open up and become available. For the kind of educational goals our professional educators like to talk about have little or no relevance to the actual job prospects that the kids will eventually encounter.

Our country’s jobs, by and large, need at the most only basic literacy and numeracy skills. The sorts of things that kids ought to be able to obtain with 8 or fewer years of schooling. Most of the jobs out there are not helped, probably hurt by what we would do in the schools, or at least pretend to do — that is, teach higher forms of literacy, higher mathematics, advanced placement courses etc. Hurt, because of what we might have done instead.

We need most of all in our thinking about schools to stop believing that kids need to be highly skilled and highly knowledgeable to enter the job market. For the vast majority of positions out there they need only two things — the basic 8th. grade or less education I have mentioned, and something I have not mentioned, but that is probably even more important, good work habits.

These would be such things as the ability get up in the mornings after a good night’s sleep, to be on time, have ready for the job whatever one might need, know how to listen and to learn while  on the job, and other such things. The acquisition of these kinds of skills and habits could and ought to be stressed in the schools. It’s not, not nearly enough, and here lies perhaps the greatest failure of the schools in respect to what they might have done.

Not that preparation for the job market, which means now preparation for the service industries, should be the primary function of school. It shouldn’t. For as long as school makes up such a huge part of the kids’ growing up it should have as its primary function helping kids to find out about themselves, to discover their own gifts and interests, find out who they are. Know oneself is still relevant.

For many kids, probably the majority of them, a selection from elective subjects and activities such as music, theater, art, athletics, vocational training, including courses in computer hardware and software, public service and work internships, debating etc., and not required academic classes, would be much more appropriate and desirable for their time in school. But more and more we seem afraid to go in this direction. Afraid of the “chaos” it might bring?

It is from these sorts of electives, once having achieved a basic level of literacy and numeracy, that the kids should be allowed to choose. This is the meaning of choice. And these activities would get their attention, and then, if they were ready and interested, they would learn.

In fact, what does one ever learn without being ready and interested? It is here that lies the greatest explanation of the failure of our schools and of the reforms of which Finn speaks

Finally, and in spite of the fact that the ideal for many of us is still an academic education, meaning by that the acquisition the skills and knowledge stemming from the study of history and literature, math and science, foreign languages, et al. these skills and knowledge are not now, and probably never have been within the power and possession of more than a tiny minority of the now 7 billion people on the earth.

Why continue to force kids to believe that an academic education, suitable perhaps for a minority, is what’s most important for all? It’s not.

If the teachers were in fact capable of making kids life long learners and more reliable and responsible citizens of the Republic, those kinds of educational goals that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann and others assumed were desirable and possible some 200 years ago, then what we are trying to do would make some sense, but they are not.

In fact, we have learned, over and over again, that the acquisition of the habits of good citizenship as  well as becoming a life time learner have never had much to do with what goes on in the school and classroom. Once again the most helpful “reform” would be to accept that these sorts of educational goals are simply not within the school’s power to realize.

To accept that and to go on to do what is within our power. That would be reform, probably even for Chester Finn, reform you could believe in.

What we have now is still an aristocracy of wealth, but also an aristocracy of merit, in particular an aristocracy of verbal and mathematical merit, aka as intelligence, although with ample room and ample recompense for those talented ones who would entertain us. We are still without an aristocracy of virtue, perhaps even more so than in Jefferson’s time.

“We’ll never make it work for children unless we start much earlier. Based on the latest FCAT 57,701 children, that’s 30 percent of Florida’s fourth grade public school students, cannot even meet minimum reading proficiency standards. As the school years progress, the numbers will get even worse. A quarter of public high school students won’t graduate…. The national research also tells us that if 100 children depart first grade as poor readers, by the end of fourth grade, 88 of those are still poor readers.”

Is anyone out there reading this sort of thing for the first time? I’ve been reading it most of my adult life, 40 years or more, from at least the late sixties and early seventies when I started thinking about these things.

Most public school reform efforts have been powered by such observations, in particular the observation that too many children, and too many of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged kids living in our large inner city and rural neighborhoods and regions, are not meeting reading proficiency standards by the end of elementary school, let alone the end of third or fourth grade.

Furthermore the assumption is always made that factors external to the children themselves, the parents and teachers, the home and school conditions, the curriculum and school structure, and such are at fault for this failure, and finally that these factors need to be altered to promote the child’s learning, in this case, learning to read.

But this never seems to happen. The reforms never seem to work as they were intended. It makes one ask if reading proficiency by the end of third grade, by the end of elementary school, by the end of high school, whenever, is in fact within every child’s power to achieve?

Could it be that it isn’t, that it is no more within everyone’s power to achieve than it is in everyone’s power to achieve other bench marks in other fields, in math, music, athletics, writing, speaking a second language etc? Don’t we all fail in one or more of these areas? In fact, why have we singled out reading?

Also we know from the testing that is done that adult literacy or reading levels are also low, that large numbers of the adult population, probably quite comparable to those numbers of Miami-Dade County children, are anything but proficient readers.

Don’t we need to work with children, and adults, as they are, not as we would like them to be? Shouldn’t we stop holding reading proficiency as a sword above their heads waiting for the moment (at the end of 4th grade in Miami-Dade County) when it will fall and cut them off from the “normal” society of proficient readers?

If however, in spite of everything, reading proficiency is the most important goal that we can set for all of our children shouldn’t we make it the principal goal of 12 years or a life time of schooling and learning, and stop making children believe that if the goal is not theirs within the first few years it is not theirs ever to attain.

There is no hard evidence in support of his claim. In fact, only in mid-century did most young people even attend, let alone finish high school. Whatever our work force was during the last century it was not well-educated. Also, the emergence of our “great power” status in the first years of the century came well before the time when most of our citizens  even attended school beyond the 8th grade.

Furthermore, the manufacturing jobs that were mostly driving our economy during the last century needed little if any higher education. They certainly did not need a college preparatory program in high school, let alone college.

What these jobs needed most of all were good work habits, being on time, being attentive to details, assuming responsibility, habits that were most of all learned in strong, often immigrant families, not during the relatively short time spent in school and in class.

Much more plausible as the single most important cause of our emergence as a great power was the availability, just when it was most needed, of lots of unskilled labor, first from Ireland, Germany and China, and later from eastern and southern Europe.

In fact our success (then and now) is most of all fired by our immigrant pool, and the latter results more from hands-off government policies (such as readily obtained work visas and no fences along the border), policies that don’t get in the way of a growing, vibrant, innovative, entrepreneurial class of workers and managers.

Government or public education policies and programs just don’t do this. Such efforts do not make good workers. Nor do they make entrepreneurs. People will work well and be inventive and innovative because of the economic opportunities available to them, because of what they can achieve by doing so, because of the American Dream which is still alive today and still the principal reason people come to our shores. It is most of all incumbent on government to stay out of the people’s way.

What government (public) educational program or policy has been instrumental in fostering our economic success? You might want to say the GI Bill, but wasn’t this the government providing opportunity to people and then getting out of their way?

What government backed public school reform during the past 100 years or so, has succeeded in correcting the widely recognized failure of our public schools to “educate?” Our economy continues to thrive in spite of, not because of our schools.

The present system of public or government schools was established during the 100 years between Horace Mann’s Common School in 1850 and James Bryant Conant’s Comprehensive High School in 1950. While it’s true that these same 100 years also witnessed our country’s emergence as the world’s greatest economic power there is no evidence of a cause and effect relationship between the two.

What might have happened if education, like so many other things, had been left to the free market for its realization? Would we now be saying that we not only had the wealthiest nation on earth, but also the best educated?

As it is we deplore the poor standing of our schools in the world, just as much as we applaud the productivity of our free market economy.