A Stinging Indictment of Educators and the Educational Establishment
Will Educators Ever Understand the Educational Process; Will They Ever Stop Living in a Fantasy World?
The historical record of formal schooling is deplorable
Teachers deserve much more recognition and reward for the difficult work they do. They are typically dedicated, devoted, and self-sacrificing and they sometimes endure neglect and abuse. Too often, teachers are forced to follow the dictates of superiors, to make adjustments to appease anxious, privileged and over-protective parents, and they must always worry that their efforts are not bearing enough fruits. They invariably lack the time, capacity, and resources to meet all the needs of all their charges. As in any profession, not all educators are outstanding or highly competent, either. However, most are diligent and skilled in given areas and most care deeply about their students.
Yet it must be acknowledged that many students are not “well-educated” after ten or twelve years and many schools have failure rates and chronic problems involving a range of issues which seem irresolvable. Clearly, it is impossible in the real world to have circumstances where there are no conflicts between the various actors and participants involved in such comprehensive endeavors. It is not thinkable that all complaints about the operation of the organizations and institutions which are set up to serve a large and diverse population in schools will be eliminated.
There will always be much room for improvement and deficits and thorny issues as a consequence of human limitations and errors when education is the objective, all taking a toll and having a cost. These continuously drive efforts to implement change.
Nevertheless, the truth which we are obliged to admit is that educators and many of those who are working in schools or involved in various aspects of curriculum, textbooks, materials, or tests have a highly inadequate understanding of the educational or knowledge acquisition processes. Change is glacially slow. The truth is that everyone flies by the “seat of their pants” in schooling to some extent, and true expertise and perfection are rare or unattainable.
The truth is that, regardless of the talents, intelligence, and tireless efforts of great teachers, schools in the aggregate very often defeat their own stated purposes and miss the mark in serving and protecting the interests of children by a mile. Something is very wrong with the template being used and the expectations for these institutions.
It must be asked how one can reconcile the casual statements by those who have accepted responsibility for the welfare and the education of children, always claiming great love and concern for students, when they are the people who are present for the infliction of great discomfort, frustration, humiliation, anxiety, badgering, probing, and feelings of inadequacy and failure on those students. How exactly can teachers and others connected with the daily school ritual justify the caustic things which are done to students in the name of education?
How many times can one look the other way? How many times can one remain silent when the entire edifice is clearly built on a foundation of suppositions, bold but false representations of amelioration, an endless series of illusory accomplishments, and the recognition of “success” based more on capitulation, passivity, defined behaviors, conformity, and obedience than on anything substantial, intellectual, or even academic?
When we speak about schools and formal educational establishments, we quite regularly make a distinction between traditional schools or methods and non-traditional schools or methods and approaches. There are a variety of non-traditional models including progressive, alternative, and perhaps hundreds of specialty school prototypes based on one of hundreds of systems, theories, pet projects, techniques, or philosophies representing any number of social, political, economic, religious, or idiosyncratic creations designed to achieve particular educational or other goals. Traditional schooling, however, implies certain familiar traditions and a package of common behaviors, orientations, practices, and relationships which all characterize a specific set of primarily conservative ideas, a philosophy, and a paradigm which dates back hundreds of years.
There are several serious problems with the traditional school model. The first and most critical incongruity is that tradition and education are antithetical. Education is a process of continual change for the learner and requires that the environment be reliably fluid, vibrant, open, searching, and expansive. School, conversely, is centered on stability and immutability, and on a mission which is narrow and shallow, despite grandiose pretentions to the contrary.
The second absurdity is that the traditional paradigm is based on the Cartesian model of disembodied knowledge. Knowledge is embodied, not a gift from God or the accumulated wisdom and information of our great minds from history to merely be tapped or memorized. Knowledge is alive, cumulative, and creative, while academic curricula are lifeless and doctrinaire.
A third failing is that when traditions are over-valued, everyone becomes comfortable with the status quo, conformity becomes a formalized requirement, and power dynamics in the hands of authorities and bureaucrats have inordinate and inimical control over daily practices and events. Education is naturally disruptive, dynamic, and a process of discovery. School, however, is humdrum, rigidly predictable, rule-based, obsessively controlled and controlling, and summarily dismissive of individual diversity with regard to thought and expression. We follow, and following is a particularly confining way of life.
Educators enmeshed within an insular cocoon, primarily as a result of the illogical characteristics of the traditional model develop a cult-like inclination to accept a level of failure that should not ever be acceptable. Most feel a powerful drive to protect the institution at all cost, to make perpetual optimism their mantra and obsession, to follow the tradition of connecting school or academic success with diligence in completing trivial assignments, and to find the student to blame as the default position when anything goes awry. Every day is Groundhog Day.
The traditional school is an improvised, artificial, and often contrived environment, ordinarily with a rigid hierarchical power structure. Operating against this rigidity normally are the more organic spontaneous natural enthusiasm and curiosity of humans, both as children and as adults. There is a tension between these two inherent impulses (and traditions) which can be distressing and which typically cause conflict.
Teachers have become inured to this tension and conflict. Teachers, like their students are motivated to follow instructions, establish a regularity and pattern of behavior, and satisfy the demands of authorities. They were students under this same paradigm as a rule and they are well accustomed to a lack of autonomy and proper respect.
There are a number of factors which lead teachers and others within these fragile systems to rely on magical thinking, mythology, and false hope with uncommon persistence. First, they share a strong proclivity for denial and rationalization. An admission of error and responsibility for problems is painful and personal. There is a culture of defending the school as the greatest invention ever and as the road to social salvation and social engineering, despite the obvious exceptions and myriad failures. The mission is so good and so admirable. Therefore, they assume they are contributing to a significantly better world by just being there.
Problems must be attributed to certain flawed participants, to external conditions and to official actors (control taken from locals and given to “big government”). Inadequate funding is the complaint du jour. “Uninvolved parents” and permissive, over-indulgent or over-protective parents are the inevitable scapegoats. Social conditions, unruly and incorrigible students, and various distractions are easy targets for diverted blaming and shaming. Passing the buck and pointing the finger are easy. But regarding an amorphous authoritarian paradigm created in response to unconstitutional laws as the original source of the dysfunction never seems to occur to anyone.
School reform, often mistakenly referred to as “education reform” is a dead-end. Reform, regardless of the flavor or design has never led to significant improvement. The reason for this is obvious and simple. All reforms are answers to the perplexing dilemmas caused by arbitrary authority. Arbitrary authority is a central and indispensable feature of the laws requiring attendance.
As long as the laws are active, conditions will be created in which students, teachers, and parents are powerless. Officials, anonymous authorities, and administrators who are not equipped to create the essential conditions for students to thrive and become adequately independent will be preoccupied with institutional matters and goals. Authentic educational endeavors on the part of individuals must be secondary, tertiary, or further down the priority list. Reforms to be practicable and useful necessarily conflict with the structures of arbitrary authority which cannot yield their force or power for any sustained period without threatening the entire apparatus. Therefore, serious threats to authority cannot be tolerated. Reforms all predictably must die on the vine.
The question must be asked then, about why educators persist in recreating the educational wheel and never get the memo that change is not coming, after all. There seem to be several reasons for this incongruity. One is that most people in the profession are characteristically optimistic to a fault. Teachers also appear to be infected by the hopeful spirits of their students. Another is that few understand the implications spelled out in the last paragraph. However, the primary factor in my estimation is a childish faith in the compulsory paradigm and a strong tendency to deny the reality of massive failure. They merely choose personally and collectively to ignore facts, empirical evidence, and their own lived experience both as students and as educators. It is always a choice.
While it is true that some children are highly social and seem to love school and thrive there, it is also a well-documented fact that many find it soul crushing and spirit-destroying. It is true, likewise, that for most students, the contradictions, anomalies, pretentions, and hypocrisy which seem to plague even the best of schools create a common sense of cynicism and ‘business as usual’ in opposition to the proclamations of the gleeful boosters, which is telling and pathetic. But the show must go on. The charade must be tolerated under the delusion that everyone is deriving benefits and all are in receipt of some minimum level or degree of “education”. Indoctrination? What indoctrination?
One wonders how this has been allowed to go on for so long. How can the regular writing off of a significant number of students as lost and as failures, or as misfits who have rejected academics or withdrawn in disgust or frustration be accepted as the norm? How has such a disconnect between the image of school as the place for mass enlightenment, socialization, knowledge acquisition, and progress and the contradictory reality for millions of students come about and persisted? It has required people in positions of power and influence to sell children out and people in the classroom to pretend that what is not okay, is okay.
It is not okay to keep telling a child she is not doing her best or working up to his potential when the work is meaningless drudgery or when the child has not been understood or provided with stimulating and energizing ideas and material worthy of that child’s intellect and curiosity. It is not acceptable to permit the desire for “order”, “discipline”, “control”, “regularity” or predictability to override the immediate needs and compelling impulses of vibrant and anxious children. It is simply not alright to imagine that kids should be confined and restricted in their movements over long periods, during which they get little or no exercise, and deep breathing is a foreign concept.
Instead of any sort of curiosity-driven, world-observing, answer-seeking organic learning process, students under the existing paradigm are expected to be always present and attentive. They are regularly supplied with improvised answers to contrived questions in an artificial environment which in no way accurately simulates the real world of adults. Instead of being regarded as highly competent, motivated, and dignified human beings taking on bona fide challenges and using their talents and wits to confront actual problems and unknowns, students are presented with the world as it is perceived by egotistical authorities and “experts” and required to demonstrate that they have tracked with 100% accuracy the information and pre-existing “knowledge” as documented by inept curriculum designers.
It is all completely backwards, inside out, and thoroughly absurd. Educators are perfectly willing to settle for this malignant state of affairs to avoid their own personal discomfort or to avoid having to acknowledge that the systems are inherently dysfunctional because bad laws require chaos masquerading as order. Fighting city hall is not for weak and uncommitted cowards.
When will the people calling themselves educators wake up and admit that they do not and cannot educate on a mass scale, if at all? When will they actually take responsibility for what is being done to students? More than a few have compiled lists of student rights which soar to great heights and make bold claims and brash demands for the optimal and ideal conditions that will end the endless abuses. Yet, pie in the sky and heads in the clouds do nothing to lift the weight off the backs of their wards at the end of the day. Arbitrary authority remains as the solvent to dissolve any change before it can leave an impression.
Will these child-like adults ever grow up and grow a pair? Will they ever give up their inane happy talk and facile false hope to realize that power granted inappropriately to well-meaning but unqualified people and power hungry people over children can never get them to the Promised Land? In the real world people are obliged to identify a problem or causal factor (i.e. authority that inevitably takes on a life of its own) and to then address that problem directly and effectively.
Not every child can become a type of genius. Not every child will have a desire or aptitude to excel in academics or become a critical thinking, book loving intellectual. Not every child can escape the ravages of a destructive early family or social environment to develop into a perfectly well-adjusted, autonomous, and productive individual. But when generation after generation of children are inhibited and harmed by their time spent in authoritarian schools which are focused on behavior modification, obedience, and superficial knowledge, and when their protectors fail to sound the alarm, someone must step up ultimately and demand a total re-evaluation.
Should one go to a school – almost any school – and gain the confidence of students, those students will be quite willing to provide the litany of issues which confound and frustrate their lives. Without exception these are traceable to the hierarchical structure which places them at the bottom of a totem pole and to the onerous conditions which emanate in all directions from the attendance law. You cannot fix stupid, as the saying goes. The laws are stupid and paternalistic, not to mention unconstitutional. They must be removed. There is NO alternative to doing the right and necessary thing. Dancing around this fact forever is even more stupid and irresponsible. There; I’ve said it again.