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3 Comments

Freddie
June 7th, 2009 | 1:00 pm

Aside from the hideous cliche of of “thinking outside the box”, the problem with that comment is that it has the failure of most every idea about remaking education that I see, optimism to the point of fantasy. We don’t, actually, have flocks of geniuses sitting around constrained by the Man. We have a lot of people who are of average intelligence, some of low intelligence and some of high. It’s true, our credentialism and higher education system– not, actually, elementary or high school– disadvantage a lot of brilliant people. But it also accurately tracks most people, and why? Because most people aren’t that brilliant. Similarly, we don’t, actually, have tons of budding Einsteins sitting in schools that are casually considered failing. We have a bunch of students who, I’m sorry to say, are not going to be succeeding academically no matter how “innovative” the schools they go to are. (You can substitute whatever jargony, voucher-proponent buzzword you prefer.) Education isn’t actually improved by innovation, and never has been. Education is improved when people have realistic expectations about natural aptitude and the limits of a child’s environment.

And, of course, there’s the little matter of the constantly asserted, never supported by evidence claim that public education results suck. The fact of the matter is that public education actually serves most people very well. Orthodoxy and really, really wanting something to be true aren’t substitutes for evidence. Sorry.

More than anything, conservative attitudes towards education have been crippled by this insanely rosy outlook towards the potential of every student, an outlook adopted precisely because of its use as a bludgeon towards teachers unions. I can’t take seriously people whose opinions on education are under the sway of a vision of limitless student achievement that is frankly fantasy.

Does The Schoolhouse Rock? Or Does It Suck? Vol. 324 « Around The Sphere
June 8th, 2009 | 5:09 pm

[...] James Poulos links to a comment to this article by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic business section. [...]

James Poulos
June 9th, 2009 | 8:57 am

So, I don’t really have the time to give this its due, but the issue is less whether ‘public school sucks’ than HOW it sucks, and whether there might therefore be any way to make it not suck. And my great love for that comment is tied to its author’s recognition that the USE of public school as a machine for pumping out science-and-math-powered INNOVATORS is what makes it suck. Viewing public education as the only means by which we can hope to ‘beat’ China and India at what they do best, or rank higher than South Korea or wherever in total hours of schooling per year, is not only a recipe for doom but the wrong recipe altogether when it comes to conceptualizing the purpose of mass education. Aspiring to beat China will more likely cause us to join them, as second bananas, no less. So you’re right, Freddie, as often you are, that the line about public school being automatically lame is the weakest part of the comment by far. But hopefully I can steer us away from that blemish and toward the rest of the issue, which I think holds up quite well — even better, in fact — once public education is treated as a good that can be badly, badly damaged by our deranged and desperate obsession with competition for the sake of the almighty BETTER SCORES, by the colossal anxiety that sits behind it, and by our contemptible and suicidal interest in denigrating, marginalizing, and decommissioning kinds of mass education without any immediately quantifiable — that is, ECONOMIC — ‘value’.

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