Paradoxes
In part, my inability to understand education comes from some serious paradoxes which society and policy create surrounding education. A good example comes from a commenter on Arnold Kling's blog.
Arnold Kling is a libertarian blogger and it's important to note that a lot of his commenters probably share a skeptical view of the usefulness of public education. That's not to say views critical of "government education" are right or wrong but to point out that there's a particular bias here. In this case, I don't think that bias negates the usefulness of the critique.People in education tend to believe two things:1) School is America’s great driver of social mobility. School lifts up the poor. Without our education system, we would be a terribly unequal, unjust, “rich get richer and the poor stay poor” society.2) It is not just grudgingly acceptable but good and just that the more education you have, the better you are treated.
Anyway, the comment above gets to one of the paradoxes about education that keep me up at night. On one side we have the typical argument that education is a great equalizer and adequate levels of education will decrease economic and social inequality. However, what the commenter seems to be pointing out is that education increases inequality. The returns on completing college and getting a degree are higher than ever and higher relative to the non-college educated population than ever. Kids who go to college (a typical 4-year university type education, not 2-year associates degrees or private ITT-Tech type colleges) earn more and have significantly better lives in almost every measure we can apply.
'James, wait,' you might be saying, 'the problem is that not enough kids go to college.' Or something like that. Essentially, this boils down to education not being evenly distributed enough. I don't buy that argument for two reasons. First, it's not feasible to premise our education system on the idea that 100% of people should attend a 4-year college and receive a bachelor's degree. We tried that. It's called No Child Left Behind and one of its goals was literally that every kid would be college ready. Go read up on how well that worked.
Second, educational attainment is climbing. Fewer students are dropping out of high school than ever before. More students are entering college than ever before. More students are completing college than ever before. Advanced degree attainment is also huge and has grown significantly since the mid 2000s. Yet, wages are stagnant and inequality is growing. Upwards of 40 million Americans live in poverty, the highest number since at least the 1950s. As a percentage of all Americans, the number living in poverty has been relatively flat (~12-14%) since about the 1960s. The relationship between education attainment, poverty, and inequality is unclear. Why, then, do policymakers and society at large insist on a view of education as the only (or at least the primary) pathway to fixing inequality?
There is a related paradox which is very well stated by Fredrik deBoer:
9. Education is both a system for creating broad societal equality and for separating individuals into rigid tiers of relative performance. The tensions between these functions are to remain unexamined.I highly recommend reading the whole post because he gets to the "dogma" that underpins education discourse in the United States. Here, he points out that you can't really have a system of education which accomplishes both of these stated goals. On one hand every student is supposed to come out of school and be able to attain some average quality of life and earn a living. On the other hand, schools and colleges rank and sort students into hierarchies which effectively limit their opportunities. SAT scores play a big role in what kinds of colleges kids access. A degree from Yale and a degree from the University of Georgia differ greatly. A kid graduating from Spiderman's High School, the Bronx High School of Science, has vastly different opportunities than a kid graduating from Herbert H Lehman High School, 5 miles away, where only about 52% of students graduate. Within schools there are class ranks and grades and various honor societies which all have criteria for determining which students are better than others at something (or everything).
In reality, we know that this ranking and sorting matters for students' futures but we pretend like that's all some kind of odd byproduct and the real purpose of education is to fix inequality. It can't be. Schools are a major driver of inequality by design. Our economy, higher education, and pretty much every social institution in the US require ranking and sorting students according to their relative performance on a bunch of metrics. We should stop pretending like it's not something we expect from our schools.
I think both of these paradoxes lead to a third: we think every single student is completely and 100% capable of accomplishing each and every educational challenge set before them. If you take the view that all of schooling is for producing vast amounts of equality, it's really easy to want every kid to accomplish similar levels of learning. The thing is, I taught special education. I know that every kid is not capable of attaining the exact same level of learning. I had students with significant impediments to their learning which placed them at a 1st grade reading level. I had students with behavioral disorders which eroded their productive class time and guaranteed they weren't going be learning that day/week/month. What I learned, among a great many things, is that not every kid is going to learn every thing. Some kids will learn some things. Some kids will learn many things. Zero kids will learn everything. AP Calculus is not the bar by which we ought to measure every child. Neither is AP British Literature.
And yet, when society and policymakers begin considering education, they want every kid in the most advanced and most challenging courses. They want to create a system where the most advanced opportunities are available. And, crucially, they place blame on schools and teachers for not achieving these goals. It's never a question of inappropriate expectations, it's a question of how a school or teacher failed to help that student. Never mind that 14% of our students have IEPs. Never mind that 9% of our students are learning English as a second language. Never mind all the other factors that play into a student's performance. All students have the same ability and are required to meet whatever arbitrary standard is set in some education task.
The Purpose of Education
It should seem pretty clear that I don't think the purpose of education is to solve poverty, inequality, or other social ills. Both the way we've built our educational system and the outcomes which actually occur lead me to believe that the rhetoric surrounding education doesn't match the reality of what our system does. Somehow we prefer to be paradoxical rather than to try and examine these contradictions and make changes.
So what do I think the goal of education ought to be? I don't know exactly. I don't have a complete answer but I'm going to take a stab at a few ideas. Try them on. See if they fit. That kind of thing.
Being a student in a whole new social context has exposed me to the idea of educating for social justice. I wish we had a better word because social justice is a very loaded term these days. Honestly, I'm having a bit of anxiety just typing it because I expect the internet trolls will descent upon me and obliterate me from the earth. If I could condense the ideas I'm encountering to a short statement, it would be that the purpose of education is to make students socially responsible members of society. They should go to school to learn about how they should make the world a better place through alleviating poverty, eliminating prejudice, and being generally the kind of people who care deeply about their fellow human beings.
It's the kind of thing that seems somewhat unobjectionable at the surface. Indeed, I don't think it's really that problematic on principle but rather is highly problematic in practice. I find myself feeling luckier and luckier to have grown up in the South. Being a Southerner gives me a very different view of institutions and their role in the world than I think I would otherwise have had. It's a worldview I'm only just beginning to realize I had.
You see, back home in Georgia, teaching social justice would end your career. People here look at me like I'm an insane person when I say that. They can't comprehend a world in which teachers cannot advocate, say, protesting the president over climate change. They don't see how a teacher advocating same sex marriage might lose her job or how a teacher posting in support of a women's march on Washington might land in hot water.
I attribute part of this to a lack of union protection (yes, they have good uses!) but also to a fundamentally different concept of the role of schools as an institution which the New Yorkers and costal academic types I encounter don't seem to understand. As an example let me quote my good friend Jason Jones:
Children who come to us don’t get a choice, so the least we can do is be careful in how we proceed with their education. After all, when you have government representatives telling citizens how to think, we call that propaganda.
... High schoolers are mostly minors. Minors are supposed to have special protections specifically because they aren’t yet mature enough to act as fully responsible persons, and one of those protections is not being overwhelmed with a specific, government sourced narrative.I don't think this line of thinking even exists up here. I've never heard a single student or professor address an understanding of education as an exercise of power. They like to mention using power in all sorts of other social contexts. They love to mention that, before our more modern and enlightened times, educators and government exercised power to segregate and disenfranchise the poor and minorities. Somehow, they fail to see how educating for social justice is still an exercise of power. Sometimes people don't like institutions having the power do certain things, no matter how noble or justified.
Jason is not some reactionary conservative voice shouting down the system of public education. He's a committed public schoolteacher and an open, accepting humanist. But, like me, he grew up in the South and that context gives us a very different view of the role of government and of public education. Any curriculum and any "purpose" is always an exercise of state power. If we forget that lense, if we simply assume schools are now altruistic arms of the best elements of society, we blind ourselves to potential overreach and abuse. I also wonder how much assuming the institution is altruistic creates the paradoxes above? Social Justice at the beginning of the 20th century differed greatly from social justice in the 1950s and differs greatly from social justice now. That alone makes me skeptical of social justice as the purpose of education.
Is educating for social justice a bad thing? No. I think it's fine but I don't see how it could exist outside of very selective areas of the country. How great is your social justice education if it's only happening in New York and San Francisco? How can you endorse a system of schooling that half the country would reject? My opposition to social justice as the purpose of education is practical rather than theoretical. I would love to be able to have open and engaging conversations about LGBTQ issues with students in every state. I think being frank about it and examining the issues critically would make people more open and more accepting. I also think it would get me fired in about half of those states.
I've had a few occasions to explain this to people and most tell me the same thing: just go teach somewhere that would accept this. It's tough because I do want to return home to Georgia as my family and Lisa's family age. It's tough because the South offers significant cost of living advantages over New York and the Northeast. Moreover, I don't like the solution of ignoring some (most?) of the country. "Just don't teach them" is not a valid answer when considering the purpose of education. Social justice shouldn't leave people out just because they hold inconvenient views. Perhaps that should be another paradox I list: social justice education for some based primarily on the luck of geographic location.
Other often cited purposes for education also seem unlikely when you actually examine them. I hear many people concerned that education isn't doing enough career training. The assumption here is that education's purpose should be career preparatory. Mostly this is directed at STEM careers because those are well paying and in demand. While schools are rushing to push kids toward coding classes and advanced math and science AP placement, 40% of schools don't have any AP courses, much less AP STEM courses. Plus, who is going to leave a 6-figure programming career to teach computer science for $40k a year?
All the above assumes we even want every single kid moving into STEM careers and that school is the best way to prepare them for those careers. People should have some degree of freedom in choosing their life's work and not feel pigeonholed by well-meaning initiatives. Plus, a lot of these careers change rapidly but the curriculums in schools don't. When I worked as a Career and Technical Education para professional in 2011, the web design course I worked in used methods and software that were 5-6 years out of date. They were learning industry standards which had ceased being industry standards three or more years prior. Schools, as an institution, aren't well equipped to manage this task. Now, there are other moves to make here, like redesigning schools completely and putting all the curriculum in a live-updating digitally delivered "personalized" platform. I have other problems with that approach but, again, is that the purpose of education? Should schools be redesigned to turn every kid into a programmer or physician's assistant? What does the workplace look like when there is an oversupply of these professionals?
We can also dispense with the illusion that the purpose of education is to make children into good citizens, a favorite of social studies teachers I have known. Invariability this purpose appeals to the need of each child to learn how their government and civic society function. First, I don't think anyone understands how any of it works anymore and our system of government is a train gone off the rails. Second, there's a lot of disagreement about this, see social justice education above. The role of government is envisioned differently depending on who is teaching and where they are teaching it. Third, it is not clear how, say, a good chemistry class builds civic virtues. Fourth, schools cut civics and government classes because they're not on the high stakes tests. It seems clear that this isn't the purpose of our educational system.
The signaling model of education is an interesting if depressing one. The signaling model of education is simply that acquiring education is a means of showing some group that you're a part of the group. The skills and knowledge, while important, are secondary. That's why a BA at Harvard often gets you more money and connections than an advanced degree in the same field elsewhere. That's why our CEOs and Presidents and other Very Serious People all went to the same schools and live in the same places.
If you can't tell, I have a little bit of belief in the signaling model. It seems to explain some of the "bubble" that has developed in the country. It is not, however, a good purpose for education. It's inherently exclusionary. It's inherently classist. It's inherently anti-meritocratic. Accurate, perhaps, but not what the purpose of education should be.
Engagement: my current koolaid
Recently I've decided to dig into the idea of "engagement." Prior to doing a little learning, I always felt like engagement was a gimmick. Maybe it was a gimmick for many people who talked about it. My principal used to dress up like a little blonde cheer leader and barge into classrooms shouting school cheers in the name of engagement. Gimmick. Also, not engagement. Engagement isn't fun. Engagement isn't making school some kind of enthusiastic and desirable environment. Those might be good things to do but they're not engagement.
My current understanding of engagement is that it is basically the self-motivated followthrough to interest. If a student is interested in a topic and that student takes it upon herself to seek out more information and deepen her understanding, that is engagement. Engagement is intrinsically motivated and only something that a person can accomplish for herself.
So why is engagement interesting to me? Well, I think engagement may be a good purpose for education. This is a bit of an Aristotelean idea but bear with me. Ultimately teachers and society want schools to produce students capable of accomplishing things. As I noted above, those things are varied and inconsistent. What if, rather than focusing on the "accomplishing things" we focused on the "capable". To me engagement is the primary capability we should be seeking to help our students cultivate (see, totally Aristotelean). We want kids to leave school knowing that they can pursue their interests and develop further in whatever areas they choose. We want to equip them with the skills to handle the new content but we also want to help them realize that they are ultimately the agents of their own education. Engagement places the responsibility for learning on the child and tells her that she needs to pursue what is interesting using what tools she has available. Engagement also means that student may need to develop new tools to further refine her ability to engage.
Now, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what a pedagogy focused on engagement would look like but I think this is a great way to address the various cross purposes and paradoxes we find in the educational world. If a kid is interested in programming, let her become engaged in learning about it. Give her books and activities and practice and turn her loose. The same goes for social justice or civics or anything else.
Hopefully I can refine and better explain engagement as I learn more but I'll summarize with this: I feel like the best thing a good education can do for a child is to build in them the desire to never stop learning. That's engagement. Next I need to learn how to teach it.
No comments:
Post a Comment