The "Attack on Public Education"

Those who think we desperately need to have a conversation about what public education should look like in the 21^st-century.

Thats me for sure - I'm in category 3. My position is that we need to do a radical rethinking of education in general, and the institutions we use to supply public education.

Note the dynamic that I am describing - the tension between the process, content, and results of education, and the large (and expensive and slow) institutions and infrastructure we built in the second part of the last century to provide education.

I do tend to see the institutions as often, and generally with good intentions, obstructing and damaging the actual eductaion we provide. Often the institution imposes it's own unspoken education, having to do with power and submission, bullying and coercion, cheating and the avoidance of honesty and learning. The buildings, the managers and planners, the staff, the hosts of spoken and unspoken rules, overwhelm the most important aspect of education - which is teaching young minds how to learn, to learn for themselves, and to look for verifiable facts and measurements and sources, and to be able to test for themselves the truth, falsehood, and ambiguity of the real world and the world of ideas.

And, as I expect that we are entering a time of greater economic pressures, one that will last for decades, the institutions of learning will need to be transformed into something cheaper. It's the education, the students and teachers, not the buildings and institutions, that is important - that produces future wealth and skilled citizens for society.

This is going to produce a terrible tension for decades to come.

Of course, there’s always the risk that if you start to teach kids to think for themselves, they might come to their own conclusions. Ironically, the antidote is to have students develop some critical-thinking skills before they get to college. Then they wouldn’t be so easily swayed by every new idea that comes along. Besides, if your “truth” – whatever it is - is so powerful, you would think that it could withstand a bit of scrutiny. The problem is when the foundation of one’s belief  system is a parental “because I said so”.  That’s a house built on sand.

The other problem with this line of thinking is that, as a practical matter, we no longer have a choice about this. In less than a generation, the routine factory jobs that required minimal thinking – but which used to support a middle-class lifestyle - have vanished.  If we fail to develop in this generation of students the capacity to be creative, critical-thinkers, they will not succeed in the new economy.  (And they’ll be in no position to subsidize our old age!)

Two well-crafted paragraphs.

I'm not sure I've heard you articulate yet Hutch what you see as either the optimum, or the most likely, paths into the future to accomplish this - will you?

As the economy slowly and inexorably contracts and changes, the complaint and the political power of the regressives is likely to continue to be very powerful and to increase - how do you think public education can cope with that? Complaints about money will increase, fearfullness and the desire to retreat to an imagined past will increase. So, how are the institutions transformed?

this is going to be a long and rambling comment. 

Like Bill above, I'll say that I also fit neatly into the 3rd category. I am a big fan of public education, and also feel strongly that there is no need for it to stop with K-12, but continue on as long as the student is engaged in the process. This is done in other cultures, it could be done here if the will existed.

I suppose I might start my criticism at the early stage of what passes for education here in the US today. I am not a fan of large public schools. I never was, wasn't when I was a kid, and try as I may, I simply cannot find the good in large scale institutionalization of people.  Sure, I have some fond memories of those big class rooms, and my educators from those long ago days. But I have a lot of bad memories as well. I do not place any blame on the folks actually there, doing the actual work. That work is serious and requires a high degree of dedication and the folks doing it are -for the most part- outstanding. However, I recall a stat of how many folks used to begin their school careers walking to school, and soon there after, riding their bikes to school, something they did except during the harshest of weather, in which case, ofttimes, kids stayed the heck home. This kept up all the way into highschool, when -of course- the automobile became central. Moving quickly past this bit of nostalgia, the idea of exercise morning, noon (home for lunch) and afternoon is a great loss. Sure, this was the day when there was only one parent in the work force. However, last I checked, we have a major unemployment problem in this country and a lot of folks have discovered dropping to a single paycheck isn't quite the economic setback they expected. Tax advantages and all that. Smaller schools, smaller classrooms, and most importantly, more, as in much more direct parental involvement. Of the folks I know teaching primary and secondary school, all of them are pretty much of the same mind when it comes to parental involvement, it is critical to predictably good outcomes. The burden society places on the school system to be a full service 'raise our kids for us' system is just patently unfair. Talk about mission creep. To paraphrase James H Kunstler:

 

"What message are we -as a culture- sending our children when we send them off to a place like this? You're bad! You're being punished!" 

That many of the new schools are designed and contructed by the same firms as builds prisons and jails isn't lost on me, and it's subtly not lost on the kids either. I think it's a bad, no, a terrible idea. Further, it's all based in cheap and readily available fossil fuels, which brings us around to another aspect of the study, "what public education should look like in the 21st-century".

Now, book learn'n, the three 'r's as it were, really are of critical importance. But really, how many hours a day does it actually take to nail down the fundamentals of math? how many folks today can solve for 7+6x4-3x6+13=n correctly (without the parens) because they never ever learned the order of operations? Here's a hint, it's not a lot. And grammar? (how's that for a properly constructed interrogative sentence?) :)  And of course, the endless discussions over the importance of being able to read and construe what is being read. In small classrooms, comprised of multiple ages in a small school, the homeschoolers who have actually done these things pretty well will say maybe half the school day as we understand it currently. 

What to do with the rest of the time? Playtime. When folks talk about the deep and abiding need for more creative minds, it's my well considered opinion that they are talking about playtime. Playtime very neatly seques into work time, and I don't mean sit at your desk and do endless repetitive 'three 'r's' tasks, (which neatly prepares one for cubicle life, and the attendent inevitable health care issues) but tending the schools gardens and livestock. The 8th grade graduating class's big end-of-the-season banquet, prepared by the students. Home Ec, remember when economics really meant how to make do with what was at hand? And it wasn't some esoteric study on how to rip others off with made up fictitious money? Trust you, me; A child that by they time they turn twelve, knows how to grow, tend, harvest and prepare food, make clothing, pound a nail, multiply/divide, solve a quadratic equation, and write an essay is better prepared for an uncertain future, and again, believe you me, the future is quite uncertain. 

With all due respect for the panglossian vision best illustrated by Richard Florida's most excellent essay 'The Rise of the Creative Class', ignoring that this so-called 'shrinking globe' is -at it's heart- an accident, or anomaly of history predicated upon 'relative' world peace, a somewhat stable climate with relatively predictable weather, and cheap and abundant fossil fuels. The continuation of this state is not at all certain, in fact, it's the opposite of certain. 

In summary, before I even go further afield, we need to radically re-write our 'how to' on education nearly from the ground up. We have the basics. There are already excellent, though nascent forms of a remote learning infrastructure in place that could be much more broadly deployed/utilized. We -as a people- were once fairly self-sufficient, and we need to become so again. History for force this upon us, or we can embrace it. Gett'n raised up is the best place to start, and school is wholly crucial. 

I'd welcome sitting down and chatting with folks about this subject, as writing seeminly endless rambling essays won't really make any difference. I'm easy to contact. 

--chipper

 

The problem is this - 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and 5 years ago, the managers and planners for our large institutions made plans based on a model of the future that isn't working well at predicting the actual future.

If you extend that trend, the question becomes, what type of future are we preparing kids for, actually? It's nice to say everyone in the futue should be able to have hi-value jobs, doing complex creative tasks and advanced service and operations in a high-tech hi-energy information economy future.

But that's not the way our overall economy actually looks. The productivity paradox and advanced automation means we need fewer employees in general, and computation & information processing means we need fewer managers than before - so, large sectors of future lower-middle and middle-middle class jobs are gone, going away, or will eventually be gone.

Temping and McJobs may be the future for larger and larger percentages of students.

What the kids need, then, is the ability to creatively adapt to a rapidly changing and competitive job environment - to deal with stress - to be able to self-educate effectively - as well as being able to work in collaborative teams if they do happen to become part of the hi-value tiers of the job economy.

Sounds crazy to say it, but the situation in which we find ourselves is pretty crazy. You know, with the shortfall of money to pay for it all...

The managers and planners of the past were presumably not dumb, they just decided to plan for a future economy they hoped would happen, one where the middle class's real income didn't stay flat, which would give them the tax base to pay for all their plans. It did not work out that way. The trends were actually very clear and well known, people have been talking about the economic effects of automation, computation, productivity paradox, and lately the "flat world" and outsourcing and 'free trade' for a long time. But the planners decided to ignore those ideas...

Anyways - we would need to have some serious talks about what the actual students would really need for the future. (This applies to Chip's talk about play and skills). 

I don't see any good coming from trying to write comments on a blog. Again, if anyone wants to sit down and chat, I'd love to do so. It's a fascinating and important, very important subject. One I've read about and thought about a great deal. 

a good point you raise there Bill.

That said, it was actually poor form of me to have posted in the first place. End of the day, no one asked me for my opinion. I let it stand because it was actually a lot of work to attempt to put together a broad plethora of thoughts on this vast issue, and I didn't feel like deleting it, , , after I had taken the bait. The bait that was in my own mind.

In my experience, folks don't change their minds because of something they read in a comments section. This is something else I've studied at length. Folks usually read comment sections of essays to see with what they agree or disagree. Not for edification. That job belongs to the essayist.  

Now, folks actually post comments for different reasons. Some to give the essayist validation, and others to write their own essays and engage other reader/posters. Those other folks may be better served by actually talking. Posting comments often amounts to talking past folks, and for all that's worth, it's actually rather uncivil. Shame on me.

--chipper