The Green Cup

Three basic educational approaches competed in the second half of the 20th century to shape our views on WHAT we should teach and HOW we should teach it. Those apporaches were:

• Perennialism – a teacher-centered philosophy that focuses on “great books” the hope of impart the culture’s enduring themes to students. The goal is to develop the ability for rational thought in students.
• Essentialism – a teacher-centered, back-to-basics approach to education that stresses the three R’s and emphasizes the remembering of facts.
• Progressivism – a student-centered philosophy that attempts to interact with the real-world concerns and experiences of students. Classrooms are more democratic in governance and learning is more participatory and experimental than in either Essentialism or Perennialism.

  Most teachers tend to be eclectic – they draw from more than one of these approaches. And I fall into that same category; I’m an eclectic, I suppose.

  Adjectives serve as better answers than do nouns in describing what the curriculum of education should be like. The content of the curriculum should be flexible, responsive to the changes of society. The content of the curriculum should be sympathetic to the values and limitations of the students. My own experience leads me to believe that every life is richer if the individual has read Kafka and Steinbeck, Aeschylus and Blake, Camus and Hemmingway. But I view the Great Books approach to education today as more of a misguided effort to preserve a cultural timeframe than anything else – to halt (or at least slow) cultural change.

  I believe that reading (and literacy) is essential; it is the medium of later instruction. To the extent that an emphasis on basic skills has become exclusive, to the extent that a concern with math and language skills has crowded out social studies, music and the arts, the emphasis on basic skills has become a destructive force. But kids who show up at school should learn to read. And as much as I hate to agree with George W. Bush about anything, they should learn to read early. They should learn to do arithmetic and they should be exposed early to more abstract forms of math. They should be introduced to the various formal genres of language – to poetry and letter writing, the short story and the novel. When Piaget allows, they should be introduced to epistemology and taught to ask “but how do I know that.” And of course they should be given an understanding in social studies classes of how our society works (civics) and why (history). And there is science. But none of these core classes should be allowed to displace completely the arts. And an understanding of the importance of the role of creativity in fields like math and grammar needs to be maintained.

  Finally, schools have to teach values. They should make students aware of thier community’s values and they should be sure students understand that alternative to those values exist and must be tolerated in a democracy.

  Curriculum must be viewed in terms of culture and values. It must also impart essential knowledge and skills. And it must keep up with change in the larger society.

Before a child is taught anything in school, the school system provides a service that is indispensable: it ensures that the child has been inoculated against diphtheria. And tetanus. And whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio, and a few other things.

Through the various carrots and sticks available to society from universal schooling, public health in America has been greatly advanced in the last century; I can’t think of a more reasonable agency to carry out this service. The decline of child mortality in America that has resulted from every parent knowing that eventually they’ll have to produce that shot record at the door of a school house may by itself be make the cost of schooling in America worthwhile.

Without establishing a timeline for what services (or mandates) entered the public school system at what point in time, I tend to just push the blame for all of them off on Lyndon Johnson. He started the modern trend, at least, of providing services that were not directly educational in nature. Among my favorite is free and reduced lunch. It serves society (and students) with a safeguard against poverty. Children are disproportionately impacted by poverty. The free and reduced lunch program has served to keep large parts of America from turning into scenes from a Charles Dickens novel. And the school system has been the tool society used to achieve that.

Another example has to do with the treatment of people with disabilities in our society. Forty year ago America may have been far above much of the world in the treatment of disabled individuals; but families were still largely on their own in dealing with and supporting their disabled members. Today, disability laws in America require that children with disabilities be sought out early during the preschool years, and that services be provided under many circumstances to families with disabled children. This is part of the reason the life expectancy of a person with Down’s Syndrome has more than doubled in the last few decades. And it is the public school system that at least seeks out and identifies the children with disabilities and, often, provides the actual services. The quality of life for the retarded, the hearing impaired, the visually impaired, and those with other disabilities has been greatly improved as a result. That safeguard against neglect of the disabled is part of what makes us a civilized society.

Some socialization also takes place, and I would argue that much of the weight of socialization in American society falls upon the public school system. It is where kids learn to stand in line in the cafeteria the way they will have to stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles of the Post Office later in life. It is where they learn that you can’t hit people just for what they say (even if your father says you can). It is where they learn not to steal, not to bite, how to act in groups, and how to relate to authority. Schools serve as an experimental playground of social actiivism and civic responsibility and development more fully the idea of citizenship. Schools partner with the home in the porcess of socialization.

Of course, some of the safeguards provided by the school system are in fact educational, or academic, in nature. The school system should infuse a minimal level of literacy and math skills into all the children who come through its doors. And there are economic safeguards – the hope that schooling will provide employability skills to the majority of students.

Society currently disagrees about what that minimal level of literacy is; perhaps there has never been a consensus – just an idea. And the employability skills need to survive in society are rapidly changing. It becomes easy to lose sight of the many other things the school system does with success when the educational goals become difficult to measure. Parhaps we should start with its role in helping to rid America of polio – and work from there.

(Note: This series on the philosophy of education is something I’ve published elsewhere. Here it is updated, though only slightly…)

A philosophy of education should include discussion of several basic components. Central issues should include the purpose of education, the nature of the curriculum, the place of students, and the role of teachers.

Education in America has no purpose – at least no one, singular, canonical purpose. The purposes of education are multiple and interwoven. Those purposes change with time and politics, with age, with environment, and the with peculiarities of individual students so that even within a specific classroom the primary purpose of schooling for this child may be one thing and the primary purpose for that child may be yet another. In the case of any given child, the parents’ purposes for sending the child to school may differ significantly from the purposes of the educational agency requiring the child’s presence. And in as much as the provision of educational services is a joint venture that usually involves funding and policy initiatives from at least three different government agencies (a local city or county, a state, and the federal government) the purposes of the various agencies taking part in this partnership may vary significantly, or even be at odds.

For all parties involved, the purposes of education change significantly with age. Programs for PreK students have a unique set of priorities for everyone engaged in the educational process. The nature of those priorities change significantly when the student hits kindergarten, then again by middle school. They are additionally altered in high school and are further renovated in the college setting.

I am not avoiding the question. I am simply acknowledging its complexity – and the ambiguity of the semantics involved. “What is the purpose of education?” The answer depends on who you are, and on whether you’re providing it or receiving it. And that is what the answer should depend upon. Because somewhere high on the list of the many and various purposes education serves in our society, the preservation of pluralism, the equipping of those who are somehow different in our society to maintain there membership in it nonetheless, holds a now prominent (and hopefully permanent) spot.

My view of the purpose of education (now, at the age of 48, with three degrees and 100 some odd graduate hours already under my belt) is mercenary: I continue to participate in education as a student for economic reasons. I’ve been paying tuition because doing so keeps me my job and creates the possibility of personal career advancement. That’s not very philosophical; nor is it a complete picture. I have three degrees and 100+ graduate hours because I like going to school. And if I came into some large and unexpected inheritance this week (or won the lottery), my new financial security would probably only result in a change of major, not in a change in my status as a student. In the meantime, I am compelled to pursue professional development goals; I would prefer to have the time and resources to use education as tool in the hunt for self-actualization.

If the question were put, though, to me with the idea of determining why I want my children (ages both now adults) to continue as students in some educational setting my answer would be somewhat different. I see college (preferably at a liberal arts-oriented institution) as the logical place in our society for them to obtain skills (some cognitive, some technical) that will improve significantly their vocational prospects and the general quality of their lives (by which I mean their ability to understand the news and appreciate Steinbeck).

In both of these cases my answer to the question differs significantly from my answer when the question is rephrased more abstractly, more globally. If the question is phrased in such a way as to ask why I think that educational services (schooling) should be provided universally in my society at my expense (through tax dollars), I’d say that I am not particularly concerned with my next door neighbor’s self-actualization. And while I think in terms of maximizing benefits from education for my own children, I understand that not everyone shares my values in this regard. Instead, I would say that school should be a universally available service in our society and that participation in it should be mandatory because it provides a huge number of safeguards (for lack of a better term) within our society.