Education. Like religion and politics at an Irish family dinner, education is a topic that everyone has an opinion about. I don’t think that, in a crowd, you’d find a single person with an unequivocally good opinion of the education system. There don’t seem to be too many people who enjoyed their educational experience, few who can even find minor good things to say about it.1
Teaching is probably one of the only jobs that most everyone feels confident they could do better than those folks who actually get paid to do it. Do most people think they can perform brain surgery better than a brain surgeon? Litigate better than a lawyer? Design a plane better than an engineer? Clear a toilet blockage better than a plumber? I don’t think so.
Why is this? Where does the negativity come from? Is it because most people have direct experience with education and teachers and found something to dislike in both? Because our society “doesn’t value” education (and it bears looking at — what type of a society would not value education)? Because looking after children isn’t seen as a profession but a privilege? Because teachers are not seen as authoritative through the possession of an arcane body of knowledge, even in their content areas? Because even teachers know the truth — that they don’t have the foggiest notion how to do this job? Why do we tend to remember and talk up those nasty experiences more than the good ones?
As individuals, we struggle between the demands of authority and the pursuit of ‘our own way”. Education is undoubtedly piggy-backed on some heavy psychological issues concerning the controlling roles of both (male) parent and super-ego. The need to hand down a legacy from the past is at odds with the need to cast off the tyranny of the parent and start anew. When education was closely linked to survival, as it still is in many cultures, it was easier to see its direct value.
There have been many attempts to justify education. It’s surprising to realize that none of these attempts work. I might as well make my own bias in favour of traditional liberal education overt right now. Yet even I cannot buy into the elaborate justifications of liberal education presented by great philosophers of education like JS Mill, RS Peters, EB Hirsch, and xxx. By and large, members of our Canadian society agree that a traditional education in the nineteenth century mold is unnecessary today. We (government, philosophers of education, parents, teachers, students) are not quite sure what teachers and students should be doing in schools. In fact, education is far easier to critique than to exalt: it’s much easier to say what we don’t want education to do.
As for those misguided optimists who think education is a science (the French translation of Concordia University’s education department is “departement des sciences de l’education”), I’m sorry but that’s simply a non-starter. Plainly, education is not a science. If it were we would have, for example, some idea how people learn. We don’t have a clue. In fact, we don’t even know how simple organisms like earthworms learn. There are some time-honored teaching methods: verbal explanation, learning through experience, following procedural instructions, and so on. Many have learned through reading, some through writing, few through introspection. Is it possible to know which methods work and which don’t? Does it depend on the person being taught, the person doing the teaching, the thing being taught? Attempts have been made to measure these things. Attempts have been made to automate them – CAI has been a failure until now but, given the new direction of re-defined education in Canada today, it may be only a matter of time until the Internet replaces the classroom
After all, the traditional classroom is expensive. Too expensive, everyone agrees. And it’s not accountable. And it doesn’t train students for 21st century jobs. And teachers are incompetent. And they’re racist, sexist, and too old. And they can’t reach or teach the kids – teachers are boring, they way they talk on and on and prescribe drill exercises. And the kids act out, naturally – wouldn’t anyone? – and drop out. If education and teachers were only fun, and interesting, and fair… If we had good teachers and if success could be measured objectively, the way it is in factories, the paying public could be sure it was getting its money’s worth.
There’s a large school of educational thought predicated on the notion that, if we could only get rid of teachers, we could perfect education. Break down a course (even a discipline) into “competencies” that “clients” want to “acquire”, develop specific formative experiences that ensure “mastery” of each “competency”, set “objective” “benchmarks” that allow clients to test (and retest until successful) whether they have “mastered” the “competency”, and then carefully replicate the entire experience so that each cohort of clients is processed through exactly the same steps to achieve the same outcome. The course is programmed to such an extent that anyone could deliver the material. In fact, it could be argued that a computer is the best provider of competency-based education — infinitely patient, tolerant of repeat errors, immune from contaminating the competencies with personal anecdote, personal prejudice, personality. The teacher’s role is reduced to the mechanical/clerical one of measuring “objective criteria” and checking off competencies.
I taught part-time in a department of education for eight years, actively participating in the education of future teachers. There I encountered (and challenged) a list of compulsory (if unstated) shibboleths uncritically absorbed by new teachers: testing (indeed any form of com petition) is pernicious, children are pure moral beings, given equal opportunity all children can perform equally well, children can learn from each other better than from a teacher, and so on. I have taught in a vocational program at the community college (cegep) level these past 19 years. I’ve seen my college change from the university model to the high school model, motivated by financial necessity to “keep bums in seats”.
Why is there such pervasive dissatisfaction with the status quo in education? Professional critics of education like John Holt, Would it be possible to sit down and design a optimal curriculum and the best-of-all-possible teaching methods to convey the content of this optimal curriculum? Does “society” care enough that it would even listen, let alone act, if some best possible school could be postulated?
I picked up a book for $8.99 (reduced from $23.50 Canadian) from the remaindered book shelf at Chapters last year simply because the title intrigued me: The Educated Child. My, I thought, who today still believes that an educated child is a laudable aim? What would we want educated children for? Aren’t children supposed to be natural, spontaneous, simple, joyful, and unfettered? All those adjectives that don’t jibe with what we think an educated child would be. Reading books and reciting facts like a tiny Ken Jennings isn’t the ideal twenty-first-century parents hold out for their children. I dare say that to today’s average parent, an educated child would be a freak of nature, like those genius children occasionally featured in the lifestyles section of the newspaper, going off to college at 16, playing with the Boston Philharmonic at 8. In fact, we seem far from certain that educated adults are necessary for the good of society or, indeed, good for much else (except for a few eccentric souls somewhere in academe working on the cure for cancer, the less-expensive plasma tv, or a pleasing legal solution to the Napster problem). Society could do quite well without the rabid archaeology buff, the keen theologist, the obsessive art historian. In fact, we question the mental health of such arcane passions.
We Will Not Fail You 