“Openly embracing the kind of structures of educational pluralism [Ashley] Berner advocates would help maintain the public financial commitment to education,” writes professor of — this may surprise you — education Gary Houchens on his weblog School Leader, “but would go a long way toward solving some of these bitter policy debates by allowing each family to choose the school that best matches their own particular worldview.” He is writing about Dr. Berner’s The Case for Educational Pluralism from our December issue.
Many people inevitably argue that proposals like hers “encourag[e] people to further divide themselves into disparate philosophical enclaves.” But, he writes:
Consider the reality of our present situation: we force children of wildly differing philosophical backgrounds into a one-size-fits-all government school which teaches them its own specific worldview, all the while insisting that it offers no worldview at all.
The idea of the public school as the meeting ground of all creeds and cultures is a myth that stands in the way of genuine innovation and progress in educational policy. (But again, see the research Berner cites on the level of civic engagement and tolerance of students educated in non-state schools as further evidence that you don’t need a government-run school to create a society that values cultural and political differences).
He has a dark view of public education, as he makes clear when explaining why he doubts Berner’s description of the public school’s adherence to the philosophy of John Dewey. They’re doing nothing so sophisticated:
In my experience, schools seem structured for the century-old purpose of indoctrinating a largely passive industrial workforce and sorting and ranking the rest for university and careers (for more on this, see my previous posts on the work of John Taylor Gatto). The emphasis in traditional public schools is, for the most part, on conformity and rote memorization of an incoherent, largely arbitrary curriculum.
Which helps explain his praise of Berner’s essay.
November 29th, 2012 | 5:12 am
Jules Ferry, the 19th century architect of the French public school system was more candid than most politicians, when he said its purpose was “to cast the nation’s youth into the same mould and to stamp them, like the coinage, with the image of the Republic.”
November 29th, 2012 | 8:14 am
No, public education is far worse than what he describes. It’s indoctrination into the Culture of Death.
Public schools fail, and cannot be made not to fail (eg, by putting more money in), precisely because they are a mirror of society. When I and my peers experienced public secondary school, there was a broad consensus on right and wrong, decency and indecency, proper behavior and improper, and what constituted educational excellence–and importantly, what did not. The consensus crossed all religious groups, and the non-religious as well.
You can do a reasonable job of public education when there’s consensus on these things. We got a decent education for about 1/5 the cost, in comparable dollars, of what it costs to mis-educate students today.
When there is no consensus on any of these there cannot be an effective public education system. As the schools have failed and failed, we have done what we usually do–assume that more money is needed. However, when the “First Things” in the system guarantee failure, more money simply enables the system to fail more quickly, and more spectacularly.
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