I have any number of comments to make about education in America. But in my mind, most of the questions I find truly interesting and important about education are questions that could be asked of most American institutions. In fact, many of the education debates swirling about today about standards and accountability and vouchers strike me as not being big enough. No doubt these topics seem huge to those who are wresting with them, but at the level of impact I ask again, are they big enough? So often it seems we in America accept the educational enterprise as natural and therefore never question our basic assumptions underlying the system. I’m not necessarily ready to heed Illich’s call to “deschool society” but I do want to challenge Americans to ask bigger questions. Maybe the system we have is the best possible, but how will we ever know if we don’t have the guts to ask?
Most of my own concerns regarding American institutions can be boiled down to the one-size-fits-all mentality. This is a critique which a number of writers and thinkers have made of our approach to international development (Thomas Friedman), to healthcare services (see “eclectic therapy”), and even to data processing models (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ugur/fits_all.pdf). Naturally there are those who argue back that too much individualization is what created the “me generation” and that not only is it impractical or unrealistic (are these words really synonyms?) to expect institutions to be able to give individualized attention but that it most cases it is unnecessary. A one-size-fits-all system is certainly the most efficient in getting the most bang for the buck. But should education, of all public services, settle for an average education for the average kid? Even the questions we are asking about education follow this one-size-fits-all model. If vouchers are good, they are good for everyone, if standards and accountability are good, they're good for everyone.
Unfortunately, it seems that lately every news story I read about American education makes me question the very idea of a public education system. A piece in Education Week by Robert Epstein (www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html) about compulsory attendance in high school made me wonder how something intended as a public good could be required and how much of our resources go into making sure that people who do not want to be educated are “educated” anyway (I think a number of questions could be asked about how beneficial such practices are to those individuals and to society at large). This is a question I dealt with in detail in my previous post, but is one that continues to bother me. Likewise a story about the recently proposed use of plastic hand-cuffs to restrain out of control students in Milwaukee (www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=591105) makes me ask again how this system is good for anyone involved. Why do we keep students in a school that is obviously not meeting their needs and simultaneously allowing such students to detract from the learning experience of others? A new curriculum, better teachers, and standards just can’t solve what I perceive to be deep structural problems.
Some readers may be wondering how I can on the one hand call for a more individualized education for each child and on the other hand question the existence of the public education system. But this is exactly the point I’m trying to make. If we are unwilling to ask those big questions, even when they challenge our own values, we are doing a disservice to our community and our children. Certainly the idea of public education is something that Americans hold very dear, but sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to question our most closely held ideals and offer them up for critical examination. While I like many Americans am dedicated to the ideals behind the public education system, I am also afraid that we have come to associate an attack on the public school system as an attack on those ideals and therefore refuse to ask those potentially dangerous but also potentially rewarding questions. America why are we so scared of the big questions?
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