An excerpt from Kansas –
To venture into the heap of quotations that education has amassed over the years offers little hope for those who think kindly of the accelerating progress of thought and mind. It is by far not a tragedy – the ends sought have remained remarkably constant: to enlighten Plutarch’s “internal dank gloom” of a mind that has neither “dispelled nor dispersed” in the world’s symposium. What is unfortunate is that the means of achieving this enlightenment – schooling, as Mark Twain put it, has managed only to “interfere with my education.” It is the predicament of this gap between education and schooling with which the reformer is faced with today – its forms capable of manifesting only too easily with the advancement of time.
Schooling, where education enables, at its essence manages to best bring out the natural aversion to the disabling dogma of fact without purpose. It is an all too necessary aversion – the essence of innovation is dependent not on contentment with improving within the bounds of one’s current lot, but extending beyond it entirely to further collective progress. Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins implores us that is an all too natural one as well – the framework of thought and creativity is brought about through the mind’s ability to establish analogies between otherwise unrelated aspects of life.
Yet, if the mind is only a model of reality, then education is the broadening of this model by uniting disparate experiences – facts and figures included – to forge a more complete representation of our existence. The emerging science of the mind is quickly bridging the gap between philosophies’ light. Much less encouraging words can be said about the state of the system.
Progress remains elusive. Schools have long succeeded in establishing a basic workforce and groundwork for college, yet it lacks the flexibility for its charges to break beyond this stifling, all be it in a betrayal of both words, ambiguity. Trying – and failing – to blend disparate philosophies and techniques to meet every child’s needs, schools have managed to do neither. Mandatory courses indifferent to individual aims and gimmickery are the norm. Much the same, high expectations and lax standards for admission to advanced courses make for stagnation and deterioration of quality – and a submission to bare note and fact. This burden, more often than not, results in an apathy and restlessness that works against the pursuit of empowerment. For the students who give up out of boredom or frustration, the response, paradoxically, is a further dilution of standards. Do less and think less are not the mantras of innovation.
Soon an extreme polarity forms – pervasive throughout mindsets and scores. Resistance between student and teacher – each ignorant of the other – diminishes the classroom to the doldrums of simple worksheets and drills, and sooner or later uproar out of boredom. For the bright few, such an atmosphere is at best a game for those already adept at pushing paper, and at worst, an imprisonment. It is much the same for the less gifted. Schools are not the meritocracy where rigor necessitates passion. No, they are the houses of vacuous ability. Schools, at their essence, suffer from a lack of substantive ends. They do not aspire to (nor should they) be mere centers of rote and drill and are far removed from a liberal course of study. In this in-between, everything for everybody state, progress ceases.
What, then, should be a schools aim? Preferably, it is one that realizes the necessity of schools specialization to overcome muddled thought and execution. And with these independent schools, should come a liberating multitude of choice that reaches a more dynamic end: Education would become, most succinctly, what one chooses to make of it – while ensuring equality of potential should students wish to embrace it. It is from this current lack of identity that the institutional predicaments one faces today have come. Testing cannot fill this lack of identity – it in fact only compounds it, by implementing an intensely narrow metric that results in entropy as the result of specificity. The effect is that of running in circles all the while shooting a shotgun’s scattering of incoherent initiatives and policy. To draw upon Charles Dickens’ “leprosy of unreality,” significant progress can be made from loosening the unyielding control of a wayward organizational structure and lack of centralizing ideology and returning it to the schoolhouse. “I don’t know the key to success,” Bill Cosby goes, “but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” Focus is paramount.
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
