My workplace is having an internal conversation, a symposium if you like, taking a step back to ask some big questions about school and our positioning within the institution of K12 education. Here are some thoughts from our founder, tackling the question “What is school?”
…I was thinking about the items that are clearly missing from [conventional] definitions of school. The most obvious is that schools are providers of social services such as child and health care, meals, and shelter. As [coworker] and I experienced first hand at Knox, school is where many children and families get a majority of their food each week. Keeping open a source of food and shelter to undernourished and homeless children, and a place to care for children while their parents or caregivers are at work, will continue to be far more of a driver in the closing and re-opening of schools in this country than opening a “place to learn.”
Less obvious, but equally important, is that school is an assessment device for a society to track and direct its citizens. While we don’t like to admit it, countries use school to sort their populations. Resume building starts earlier and earlier in an increasingly global and overpopulated world and school is the first place where one’s resume is built. While the importance of what university one goes to in finding a job is now openly discussed, K-8 school record is now a greater determinant of one’s career path than face to face interviews and other traditional job search requirements. As the use of data continues to grow, this trend will persist and schools will serve as an even more impactful tool in determining the pathways available to each of their students.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, I believe school, in particular the concept of public school, enables capitalism to survive. We know that a capital system will by design create and exacerbate larger and larger wealth gaps between citizens. School therefore is necessary as the “great equalizer,” the construct that posits that everyone starts with an opportunity to be educated, and with that education and hard work, they too can achieve anything. This is of course at odds with the two other items listed, as not all children have access to basic social services like food, shelter, and good health care, and that children are more aggressively tracked and directed at a far earlier age than we would like to admit. But the role of school as creating a level playing field or at least the opportunity for everyone to “play the game” is necessary for a society to accept a capitalist system and its inevitable consequences.
Unpacking this:
- “Schools are providers of social services such as child and health care, meals, and shelter”
This rings true and is one of the first lessons for anybody who has interacted with schools operating in underserved communities. An overwhelming sentiment I have heard from teachers is that by far the most important part of their work is showing damaged or demonized kids that someone cares. And of course this function only becomes more important as social services that meet citizens’ health, nutrition, entertainment and child service needs are eliminated.
- “School is an assessment device for a society to track and direct its citizens.”
I agree here as well, although of course education is hardly the only device intended to sort participants into achievement-based castes to follow them long term. As the passage above indicates, competition logic bleeds down from a globalized labor market to the higher education industry and below, increasing a focus on delayed gratification and development of the ongoing Entrepreneurial Self project, to continue throughout our lives. At the other end of the spectrum, police presence and zero tolerance policies punish low-performing students at schools themselves, forming the notorious “school-to-prison pipeline.”The prevalence of ADHD diagnoses and associated amphetamine prescriptions, plus the multi-billion dollar test prep and essay writing industries, speak to the emphasis placed upon routinized performance instead of a more comprehensive experience of the educational process itself. I would argue that this reflects the proliferation of technocratic values that appear virtually anywhere you look when analyzing modern American culture—i.e. framing school as a machine to produce optimized results, those being test scores and college admissions. Subjective experience or character development are necessarily more difficult to translate to machine input (data) and therefore sidelined as legitimate answers to questions about the purpose of education.
- “School is…the construct that posits that everyone starts with an opportunity to be educated, and with education and hard work, they too can achieve anything”
Also largely true, though I would also recognize that American culture contains an interesting anti-education sentiment in its mythologization of entrepreneurs and creative dropout types. So you could even remove education from the statement and still find many who would agree with the premise that “with hard work, they too can achieve anything.”
Of course, the American Dream itself originally reflected disgust with Old World aristocratic inheritance systems (sorting citizens by birth status), instead relying upon the new continent’s appetite for material abundance and technological power to sort citizens by life outcome. Modern education was created to provide an obedient workforce for a robust industrial economy. As this material abundance and our capacity to exploit it have become more limited, however, the old inheritance systems have reemerged, casting an existential shadow over the heart of American guiding ideology. The lofty ideals of universal education appear fragile as education alone evidently fails to compensate for the advantages or disadvantages bestowed by one’s material circumstances at birth. Rather, we find that education, generally speaking, tends to advantage the already advantaged or further hinder the already disadvantaged.
I would also add a feature left out in the bullet points above:
- Socialization and behavioral self monitoring
School helps students adjust socially and self direct in response to input from teachers, plus it provides some civic values—I can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance and all 50 states in alphabetical order from years of practice as a third grader!
So, at this bizarre juncture in our lives, we now have an opportunity to seriously ponder—what does school look like in the future? How can education as a field adapt to, incorporate or reject technology to more skillfully advance the needs of 21st century students? As former Mass. secretary of education Paul Reville writes,
The only precedent in our field was when the Sputnik went up in 1957, and suddenly, Americans became very worried that their educational system wasn’t competitive with that of the Soviet Union…The best that can come of this is a new paradigm shift in terms of the way in which we look at education, because children’s well-being and success depend on more than just schooling. We need to look holistically, at the entirety of children’s lives. In order for children to come to school ready to learn, they need a wide array of essential supports and opportunities outside of school. And we haven’t done a very good job of providing these. These education prerequisites go far beyond the purview of school systems, but rather are the responsibility of communities and society at large. In order to learn, children need equal access to health care, food, clean water, stable housing, and out-of-school enrichment opportunities, to name just a few preconditions.
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