How we think about and voice the purpose of school matters.
It affects what we put in or take out of the curriculum and how we teach that curriculum.
It affects the way we think about students—all students—about intelligence, achievement,
human development, teaching and learning, opportunity and obligation.
And all of this affects the way we think about each other and who we are as a nation.
—Mike Rose
Those who are regular readers may have noticed that it has been an unusually long time for me since my last posting. However, I have been deeply enmeshed in the thinking and writings of Julie Lythcott-Haims, Mike Rose, and Trabian Shorters that has kept me quite busy, and they have all had me doing some intense, prolonged thinking about a question: “What are schools for?”
As the lengthy epigram above points out, how we think about schools and their ultimate purpose matters—a lot!—and as I have pondered the work of these authors and this question about schools, I have realized that while I have voiced myself extensively about the educational process and even its ultimate purpose, I have not really explored the formal institutional systems through which we engage in educating individuals in this country and how we have structured those systems and for what purpose. Therefore, in the coming series of postings, I am going to explore three things: what we might want to accomplish with our schools, whose intelligences might we want to value with our schools, and how the framing of these two questions impacts how we ultimately address them.
Part 1: Adulting
As I have explored in an earlier post as well as in Chapter 8, the classic purpose of schools in the last 100+ years in the United States has been essentially social engineering. Education from this view serves the purpose of preparing individuals for their specific “cog” in society’s “machine,” and “the task of the efficient school system is to guide people into their likely place in the social order” as quickly and predictably as possible (MW, p. 178).1 Furthermore, this emphasis on schools generating the “correct” social ordering has taken on a progressively greater economic character over the past few decades until now, “kids go to school to get themselves and the nation ready for the global marketplace” (WS, p. 72).
Yet there are fundamental problems with this strictly socio-economic, social ordering understanding of schools. First, as fellow educator, Mike Rose, at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies points out, “this rhetoric of job preparation and competition can play into reductive definitions of teaching and learning” like the Cartesian one I have been arguing against since this project’s inception. Indeed, so reductive can this understanding of schools become that we have seen in every single one of the last three national school reform movements efforts to “teacher proof” the educational process. After all, the thinking has gone, “since teachers are—when it comes down to it [according to this reductive view]—the problem, we [need to be] busy devising systems and techniques to direct them, [using] objective statistical procedures to measure their effectiveness” through standardized tests (WS, pp. 71-72).
The “only” problem with this vision for schools and education is that “you can prep kids for a certain kind of test, get a bump in scores, yet not be providing a very good education” because the quality of learning you are prepping the kids for happens to be inferior from the very beginning (WS, p. 51). Furthermore, this vision rests on the insulting belief that teaching is not a demanding profession with its own unique skills, talents, and expertise. As Rose challenges: “a presidential candidate tours a hospital, but isn’t a ‘urologist for a day.’ A philanthropist visits a women’s shelter, but doesn’t lead a counseling session. As a teacher all my adult life, I can’t help but be bothered by the familiar implication that anyone can teach”(WS, p. 78). Because if “anyone” could teach, our schools would not be facing the current staffing crisis and the average tenure of someone in the teaching profession would be more than a measly 5 years.
In addition, there is also something problematic as well about the recent emphasis on the strictly socio-economic purpose of schools and the need to endow future workers with the now nearly mythic “21st Century Skills!” Demanding that schools be all about employment needs smacks a bit of hypocrisy on the part of the business community that is allegedly so in need of such workers and, consequently, in favor of the kinds of schools that would produce them because:
Our new economy, we are told, requires people who are critically reflective and can make careful distinctions; who can troubleshoot and solve problems; who have an interpretive, analytical edge; who are willing to stop and ponder. Yet young people grow up in an economy of glitz and thunder. The ads that shape their needs and interests—and the entertainment produced for them—champion appearance over substance, power over thought. Such tactics make money in the short run, but what effects do they have on youth culture over time? The relationship of mass culture and individual habits of mind is complex, to be sure. But there is a significant disjunction between the kind of youngster business says it needs from the schools and the kind of youngster one could abstract from a youth culture that is so powerfully influenced by business interests. (WS, p. 81)
What we are left with, then, between the reductive, Cartesian, teacher-proofed understanding of schools and an economy that actively undermines the very purpose it claims schools are for is a very pinched and restrictive vision of the educational system in this country. To answer the question “what are schools truly for?” from this perspective is to have our schools become merely mechanisms for churning out unquestioning consumers who will engage productively in their assigned employment until death-do-us-part. And any notion that such institutions would actually be educating critical thinkers (let alone collaborators or empathizers or any of the other so-called “21st Century Skills”) is the cynical equivalent of declaring the emperor’s new clothes “positively smashing!”
Worse still, according to Julie Lythcott-Haims, former Dean of Freshman and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University, such a vision for schools fails to produce the functional adults any society needs simply to survive. As she puts it, “let’s not lose sight of the fact that this young human is whom you’re bringing forth out of relative incapacity as a 5-year-old into this place of 18 where they might be capable of more of less fending,” and when schools serve a strictly socio-economic, social ordering mission, she argues, they fail to teach children the very “becoming” skills necessary for them to engage in what she terms “adulting.” Granted, she acknowledges, “these becoming skills are not very visible. They’re hard to see; they’re hard to measure, and as a result, they get dwarfed by the things that are measurable.” But she believes that they are the most critical things our children should be learning in schools, and she is convinced—and I agree—that most schools right now are failing at this most important of education’s jobs.
Why, though? What has brought schools to this dysfunctional state in which Lythcott-Haims and I suggest they find themselves? A principal cause, I suspect, is the changes we have observed in parenting habits in our society post 9/11. As the research of M.I.T.’s Sherry Turkle has shown, parents today insist on maintaining an almost omnipresence in their child’s lives via technology and the micro-scheduling of nearly every minute of the day. They seek to keep their children as safe as possible in a world where the awareness of deadly violence is perpetually available through the apps on their phones, and thus, when schools have the “audacity” to suggest that a child be allowed to fall down and fail in order to learn the necessary skills to stand up and succeed, “they are [left] in a tough spot because [their] students are getting mixed messages” (p. 247).
The result is that too many of our schools have backed down from their most important educational mission (no teacher or school administrator enjoys an angry parent on their doorstep!), and the consequence is schools where students no longer practice the “adulting” skills they will need to become one one day. Indeed, I actually suspect that one possible source of the anxiety, helplessness, and despair so many young adults report feeling about their futures is because our schools stopped deliberately “tripping” them so that they could learn how to “stand up” again. To feel empowered to effect change, you have to have actually practiced employing real power!
Which brings me to the next logical question: how to we fix our schools? How do we transform them back into the institutions for practicing “adulting” that is what schools truly should be for? I suspect I could devote the rest of my career to answering these questions, but let me elaborate on just two simple suggestions of how we might begin.
First, stop over-managing students’ tasks and time for them. A decade ago, I could post my course syllabus and calendar up on my school’s on-line management system with the expectation that my students would keep track of deadlines, assignments, etc., thereby learning the skills needed in adulthood to succeed in navigating through lifes’ events. But today, I am required to use my school’s on-line system to manage my students’ progress for them, uploading in advance all items they need so that the system can tell them what to do and when to do it. The result? Teenagers who are completely dependent on technology to steer them through their routines and who freak out when I make an abrupt adjustment based on a lesson I have determined needs repairing.
The second suggestion I have is to promote a growth mindset in children by creating in our courses and curricula deliberate opportunities where students are guaranteed to stumble and fail on a first (or even second) attempt at some task, skill, or activity. We already do the equivalent in sports training; so why not in our academic programs as well? By doing so and by providing the corresponding support to learn from their mistakes, students will not only eventually succeed at mastering the specific academic challenges we want them to; they will master one of adulting’s most important skills: how to fend when life does not go your way—something those of us who are adults know will happen…and likely happen multiple times!
Now I know from conversations with fellow educators—and particularly school administrators who have to deal more directly with parents—that both of my suggestions may feel harder to do in the midst of a pandemic, where we are already battling enormous learning deficits; hence, why make school even more challenging? However, I would argue that failing to learn adulting is, in fact, part of this larger learning deficit our society needs to help our children overcome as we move forward in the pandemic’s wake, and we need to be addressing it as immediately as possible.
After all, as I have quoted Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury character, Rick Redfern, before, “the world needs grownups.”
1Since I will be referencing the research of Mike Rose from two different sources, I will be using the abbreviation “MW” for The Mind at Work and “WS” for Why School?
References
Fish, T. & Solomon, L. K. (Sept. 28, 2021) New View EDU Episode 8: Schools as Practice Zones for Adulting; An Interview with Julie Lythcott-Haims. National Association of Independent Schools. https://www.nais.org/learn/nais-podcasts/new-view-edu/episode-8-schools-as-practice-zones-for-adulting/
Loewus, L. (May 4, 2021) Why Teachers Leave—Or Don’t: A Look at the Numbers. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-teachers-leave-or-dont-a-look-at-the-numbers/2021/05.
Rose, M. (2014) The Mind at Work & Why School: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. New York: Penguin Books.
Rose, M. (2014) Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. New York: The New Press.
Thompson, T. (Sept. 22, 2021) Young People’s Climate Anxiety Revealed in Landmark Survey. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8.
Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3rd Edition. New York: Basic Books.
U.S. Department of Education (2011) Facts about the Teaching Profession for A National Conversation about Teaching. https://www2.ed.gov › teaching-profession-facts.
Light a Candle 