Let me end this book,
my testament, with a warning: only the fresh air from millions upon millions of freely made choices
will create the educational climate we need to realize a better destiny. No team of experts can possibly
possess the wisdom to impose a
successful solution to the problem inherent in a
philosophy of
centralized social management;
solutions that endure are always local, always personal. Universal https://www.blogger.com/null
prescriptions are the problem of modern schooling, academic research which
pursues the will-o-the-wisp of
average children and average stages of development makes for destructive social policy, it is a sea
anchor dragging against advancement, creating the problems it begs for money to solve. But here is a warning:
should we ever agree to honor the
singularity of children which forced schooling contravenes, if we ever agree
to set the minds of children free,
we should understand they would make a world that would create and re-create itself
exponentially, a world complex beyond the power of any group of managers to manage. Such free beings
would have to be self-managing. And the future would never again be easily predictable.
Here might be a first
step toward such a great leap forward for human beings. Not a comprehensive formula, remember, but a
first step:
If we closed all government
schools, made free libraries universal, encouraged public discussion groups everywhere, sponsored
apprenticeships for every young person who wanted one, let any person or group who asked to open a
school do so — without government
oversight — paid parents (if we have to pay anyone) to school their kids
at home using the money we
currently spend to confine them in school factories, and launched a national crash program in
family revival and local economies, Amish and Mondragon style, the American school nightmare would
recede.
That isn't going to happen, I know.
The next best thing,
then, is to deconstruct forced schooling, minimizing its school aspect, indoctrination, and maximizing
its potential to educate through access to tools, models, and mentors. To go down this path requires the
courage to challenge deeply rooted
assumptions. We need to kill the poison plant we created. School reform is
not enough. The notion of
schooling itself must be challenged. Do this as an individual if your group won't go along.
Here is a preliminary list of strategies
to change the schools we have. I intend to develop the theme of change further in a future book, The Guerrilla
Curriculum: How To Get An
Education In Spite Of School, but I'm out of time and breath, so the
brief agenda which follows will
have to suffice for the moment. As you read my ideas maintain a lively awareness of the implicit irony that to
impose them as a counter system would require as dictatorial a central management like the
current dismal reality. The trick, then, is not to impose them. My own belief based on long experience is that
people given a degree of choice
arrive without coercion at arrangements somewhat like these, and even improve upon them with ideas beyond my own
imagination to conceive. Such is the genius of liberty.
Dismiss the army of
reading and arithmetic specialists and the commercial empire they represent. Allow all contracts with
colleges, publishers, consultants, and materials suppliers in these areas to lapse. Reading and arithmetic
are easy things to learn, although
nearly impossible to "teach." By the use of common sense, and
proven methods that don't cost
much, we can solve a problem which is artificially induced and wholly
imaginary. Take the profit out of
these things and the disease will cure itself.
Let no school exceed a few hundred in
size. Even that's far too big. And make them local. End all unnecessary transportation of students at once;
transportation is what the British
used to do with hardened criminals. We don't need it, we need
neighborhood schools. Time to shut
the school factories, profitable to the building and maintenance
industries and to bus companies,
but disaster for children. Neighborhoods need their own children and vice versa; it's a reciprocating
good, providing surprising service to both. The factory school doesn't work anywhere — not in
Harlem and not in Hollywood Hills, either. Education is always individualized, and individualization
requires absolute trust and
split-second flexibility. This should save taxpayers a bundle, too.
Make everybody teach.
Don't let anybody get paid for schooling kids without actually spending time with them. The industrial
model, with pyramidal management and plenty of hori-zontal featherbedding niches, is based on ignorance
of how things get done, or
indifference to results. The administrative racket that gave New York
City more administrators than all
the nations of Europe combined in 1991, has got to die. It wastes billions, demoralizes teachers,
parents, and students, and corrupts the common enterprise.
Measure performance with individualized
instruments. Standardized tests, like schools themselves, have lost their moral legitimacy. They correlate
with nothing of human value and
their very existence perverts curriculum into a preparation for these
extravagant rituals. Indeed, all
paper and pencil tests are a waste of time, useless as predictors of anything important unless the
competition is rigged. As a casual guide they are probably harmless, but as a sorting tool they
are corrupt and deceitful. A test of whether you can drive is driving. Performance testing is where genuine
evaluation will always be found.
There surely can't be a normal parent on earth who doesn't judge his or
her child's progress by
performance.
Shut down district school boards.
Families need control over the professionals in their lives. Decentralize schooling down to the neighborhood
school building level, each school
with its own citizen managing board. School corruption, like the national
school milk price-rigging scandal
of the 1990s, will cease when the temptations of bulk purchasing, job giveaways, and remote decision-making are
ended.
Install permanent
parent facilities in every school with appropriate equipment to allow parent partnerships with their own kids
and others. Frequently take kids out of school to work with their own parents. School policies must
deliberately aim to strengthen families.
Restore the primary
experience base we stole from childhood by a slavish adherence to a Utopian school diet of steady
abstraction, or an equally slavish adherence to play as the exclusive obligation of children.
Define primary experience as the essential core of early education, secondary data processing a
supplement of substantial importance. But be sure the concepts of work, duty, obligation, loyalty, and service
are strong components of the mix.
Let them stand shoulder to shoulder with "fun." Let children engage
in real tasks as Amish children
do, not synthetic games and simulations that set them up for commercial variants of more-of-the-same for the
rest of their lives.
Recognize that total
schooling is psychologically and procedurally unsound. Wasteful and horrendously expensive. Give
children some private time and space, some choice of subjects, methods, and associations, and freedom from
constant surveillance. A strong element of volition, of choice, of anti-compulsion, is
essential to education. That doesn 't
mean granting a license to do anything. Anyway, whatever is chosen as "curriculum,"
the vital assistance that old can
grant young is to demand that personal second or third best will not do — the favor you can bestow
on your children is to show by your own example that hard, painstaking work is the toll an independent spirit
charges itself for self-respect.
Our colleges work somewhat better than our other schools because they
understand this better.
Admit there is no one right way to grow
up successfully. One-system schooling has had a century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure.
Children need the widest possible
range of roads in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves.
The premise upon which mass
compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into
one ugly boot that fits nobody. Tax credits, vouchers, and other more sophisticated means are
necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp competition can
reform the present mess; this
needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor
state government oversight is
necessary to make a voucher/tax credit plan work: a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth,
and a policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection needed. It works for
supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.
Teach children to
think dialectically so they can challenge the hidden assumptions of the world about them, including school
assumptions, so they can eventually generate much of their own personal curriculum and oversight. But teach them,
too, that dialectical thinking is
unsuited to many important things like love and family. Dialectical analysis
is radically inappropriate outside
its purview.
Arrange much of
schooling around complex themes instead of subjects. "Subjects" have
a real value, too, but subject
study as an exclusive diet was a Prussian secret weapon to produce social
stratification. Substantial amounts of interdisciplinary work are needed
as a corrective.
Force the school structure to provide
flex-time, flex-space, flex-sequencing, and flex- content so that every study can be personalized to fit the
whole range of individual styles
and performance.
Break the teacher
certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important
than this.
Our form of schooling
has turned us into dependent, emotionally needy, excessively childish people who wait for a teacher
to tell them what to do. Our national dilemma is that too many of us are now homeless and mindless in the
deepest sense — at the mercy of
strangers.
The beginning of answers will come only
when people force government to return
educational choice to everyone. But choice is meaningless without an
absolute right to have progress
monitored locally, too, not by an agency of the central government. Solzhenitsyn was right. The American
founding documents didn't mention school
because the authors foresaw the path school would inevitably set us upon,
and rejected it.
The best way to start offering some
choice immediately is to give each public school the independence that private schools have. De-systematize them,
grant each private, parochial, and
homeschool equal access to public funds through vouchers administered as a loan program, along with tax credits.
In time the need for even this would diminish, but my warning stands — if these keys to choice are tied to
intrusive government oversight, as
some would argue they must be, they will only hasten the end of the
American libertarian experiment.
Vouchers are only a transition to what is really called for: an economy of independent livelihoods, a resurrection
of principles over pragmatism, and restoration of the private obligation, self-imposed, to provide a living
wage to all who work for you.
School can never deal
with really important things. Only education can teach us that quests don't always work, that even
worthy lives most often end in tragedy, that money can't prevent this; that failure is a regular part of the
human condition; that you will never
understand evil; that serious pursuits are almost always lonely; that
you can't negotiate love; that
money can't buy much that really matters; that happiness is free.
A
twenty-five-year-old school dropout walked the length of the planet without
help, a seventeen-year-old school
dropout worked a twenty-six-foot sailboat all by herself around the girdle of the globe. What
else does it take to realize the horrifying limitations we have inflicted on our children?
School is a liar's world. Let us be done with it.
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