Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Purpose of Public Education

I recall reading years ago some left-wing educational writer complaining because he believed our entire public education system was originally designed by mill owners and those sympathetic to them to create a population that would be good for working in mills and being obedient employees. I now think he was only half wrong. I thought of this again when Grim had an education piece up

I am fond of pointing out how little effect school has on academic results, which has been demonstrated repeatedly, despite the researchers often wanting to find something else.  Teachers, didactics, and curriculum may matter more to worse students, but even then it is often just the occasional rescue of one on the brink.  Certainly, there is an advantage to going to a school where you aren't constantly worried if violence is going to break out right next to you. Though I went to a mill-city highschool that had fights a fair bit.  Now that I think of it, though, about half of that were "I'll meet you after school" fights (and they did, with a crowd), which is already putting some boundaries on shock and what will occur. So there needs to be safety and some structure for the students on the brink. Beyond that...

So schools fall back on teaching values, which is what they have always done.  Not so much as they hope, and often not quite the values they intended.There is also conflict when the professional educators teach the values they think are important, regardless of surrounding culture. That's why you got taught so much pointless grammar, because it was supposed to be important for schools to turn out kids who sounded middle-class. Ditto Latin, which is a class signifier more than an education.  The energy would have been far better spent on a living language. Conservatives look back fondly on what was taught for values then, but I'm less impressed. We were taught a lot of patriotism, but that turned out to be a lot of "respect for the flag" and some songs.  Nothing particularly wrong with teaching such ceremonial aspects of living in a place, and it is hard to teach the young abstract ideas, so one sees how it happens.  Focus on the concrete acts, it's probably about all you're going to get anyway. My son went to a Baptist school where he had a workbook page about one boy saying something bad about the flag and the hero punching him in the eye. The usual mouth agape, the bruise already formed just a moment after the punch, and large exclamation marks next to his head. I don't know how often first graders hear another child say something bad about the flag, and I'm not sure that's the patriotism I want taught. But it lingered on even to 1990 in such circles.

Yet in teaching patriotism it often turned to citizenship. I don't mean Civics and the three branches of government or right to a speedy trial, but a fair bit of focus on how a good citizen behaves. I think there was a lot of emphasis, though not expressly stated, on obedience. I know, I know, when you've got thirty hoodlums thrashing about your fourth grade, anything that promotes obedience is going to be looked at fondly, and as above, you have to teach concrete actions they can understand. Doing what the policeman says was not an automatic in a lot of our neighborhood, and I'm talking about the parents, not the teenagers. It was mostly applied as a civilising influence at the time - no trash in the streets, no destruction of property, no stealing - all good things. 

Not all of it. We were also taught not to jaywalk, to register our bikes, not to be too noisy, not to be tardy or (horrors) skip school, to do our homework. To stay within the lines, do what authorities told us. That was citizenship, and thus indirectly, patriotism. Now citizenship is more focused on environmentalism, being extra-careful to being respectful of other groups (rather than of older people and government people), but still staying within the lines.  It's the patriotism that Obama talks about, and I don't think it's an act.  He thinks that is what is supposed to be good about America and he wants to see more of it.  Respect for the flag?  Well, fine, but really, not so important.

I guess all this to say that public education - and private education even more so, perhaps - has always had the goal of teaching children to stay within the lines. (See Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn.)  Just different lines in every generation. It's very much what education does in all cultures. Next up, I think I'll have to say something about the conflict between the stated rules, the real rules, and the unintentional rules does to us.

5 comments:

Randomizer said...

I am fond of pointing out how little effect school has on academic results, which has been demonstrated repeatedly, despite the researchers often wanting to find something else.

"Assistant Village Idiot" is interesting because you're a smart person who writes well on a variety of topics. I must be missing something about your point.

I taught physics at a nicer suburban school. Students came into my class being polite and intelligent, but knowing little about how the physical world worked. They left with a pretty good understanding, and ready to learn more in college. Many went on to become engineers. None of that would have happened without school and my diligent effort.

There are 50 million students in school. Sure, it doesn't work out for all of them, but are you really saying that school is irrelevant? I can't imagine you are saying that we should free-range those 50 million kids, and it will all work out. What alternative model do you propose?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

My point would not be that unschooling works fine, (See Astral Codex Ten [ACX] for the discussion of his audience and what things unschooling does not (math, hard science) versus does (everything else) work for) but that an average teacher with a decent textbook, or a decent teacher with an outdated textbook seems to produce about the same SAT results, and this has been true for decades. My developed opinion over the decades is that teachers are there to do the basics for all their students and look for the few they might rescue. "Rescue" in this sense not just meaning "from prison or drug addiction" but "from their own immature poor habits." You will only get a few of those a year, maybe. The rest, you have to hope that some other teacher or other event has the magic.

Genetics is king.

Physics is a particularly good choice for this discussion. I had a highschool physics teacher who could easily be distracted into discussing photography, or Notre Dame football, or how the new 20-story Hampshire Plaza had ruined his parallax experiment out the classroom window. I mostly just learned F=ma and some hazy ideas about optics, doing none of the homework. We had students who got 800s on the Physics SAT2's in 1971. He taught us some things. But improved didactics, or knowledge, or lab funding, or whatever would not have improved my knowledge of physics going into Honors Physics in college as much as convincing me that this was one of the 50% of classes I needed to actually do the work in. I cared about math, studied maths other than what I was assigned (Martin Gardner, mostly), and was great at it, which helped me slide through physics.

Grim said...

"Yet in teaching patriotism it often turned to citizenship. I don't mean Civics and the three branches of government or right to a speedy trial, but a fair bit of focus on how a good citizen behaves. I think there was a lot of emphasis, though not expressly stated, on obedience."

I often reflected at the age at how similar our experience was to being in prison. We were transported on the same kind of buses that jails or prisons use, to a walled and fenced compound we weren't allowed to leave, to obey a schedule composed for us all day long. We ate in a cafeteria where institutional food similar to that in prisons was served; we could not so much as walk down the halls without special permission and under surveillance.

We were subject to corporal punishment and other extra-judicial punishments at the whim of the agents of the state who controlled the place. We were under standing orders to obey every instruction by an agent of the state under penalty of punishment, which could include being arrested and prosecuted as well as the extra-judicial beatings and 'in house' no-talking, solitary-style confinement.

Questions of rights, which are at the basis of our Declaration of Independence and Constitutional amendments, were of no matter. You did not have a right to free speech, free movement, freedom of assembly, and certainly not the freedom to file for a redress of grievances. We were children, of course, and the state leaned heavily on the right to act in loco parentis: but that is to say that the education prepared us to act like children of the state, under a paternalistic system of governance.

Aristotle says (and Plato, separately and with somewhat different emphasis) that the most important thing about education is that it should fit a citizen for the kind of state they will live in. Plato tries to give a universal answer for what kind of education is best, but Aristotle says it depends on the kind of state one lives under: one education is right for free men in a republic, another for democrats, a different one for those who live under an oligarchy or a tyranny. I hadn't read them yet, but I often thought that this was not the way to raise people who were meant to be free and possessed of rights that the state should not dare violate.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Piggybacking on that, there seem to be at least two types of trying to assert freedom, as there are multiple types of liberty right off the bat. We can talk all day about freedom to work at whatever we choose, or freedom to move to another place, or freedom of worship and a dozen other realms of our existence where we do not even notice that there are no fences, until someone who has lived with those fences points out to us what a blessing we have. Then we rather sheepishly admit we have been ungrateful.

But what really rankles at some primitive level is "not being told what to do by people I don't like/don't approve of their authority. We see red and it erases our gratitude for the other things. I think this is true of men more than women, but not solely. When something is so primitive and even a bit adolescent but is so universal, I have to suspect it is hardwired into a percentage of us, and hardwired for good reason. We can rail against it and condemn it all we like, but it seems to be a necessary part of who we are.

I have mentioned before my despair at watching Romanian elections after the revolution, when the final choices were a real communist, a real fascist, and a party expressly asserting Hungarian minority rights which garnered around 11% of the vote. I would think "Can you just drop it about your group's prominence for a little while? There are bigger issues here." But they couldn't, and upon reflection, they might be right. They didn't want Romanians telling them what to do. It wasn't about this kind of Romanian or that kind, just that they weren't Hungarians. It sounds primitive, but maybe it's bigger (in the cultural survival sense) that the "larger" issues.

Yet in the end, I note that I don't like any of them telling me what to do and I get my back up, first against this one, then against that, but I need to just drop that and keep my eye on the prize of the deeper freedoms. People under actual tyrannies learn many secret ways to obey without obeying, smirking as they turn away rather than raising their blood pressure. We should learn to toast our oppressors as they drive one more mile to where the bridge is out. And we also learn to identify what freedoms are most valuable, not just the "that guy can't tell me what to do" ones

I sigh. I can't manage it myself, I can only envy those who can. Education is a good place for it. I had to correct for the public schools when my children were there, and the Baptist schools when they were there. There are not many "Free Parking" squares in this Monopoly game, and a lot of places you have to pay rent to.

Grim said...

The military is an excellent teacher of how to obey an order in degrees, which may at times arise to outright disobedience that can't quite be quantified as such. You're right that one can often find one's self seeking freedom within the context of a bad political order, or just one that is corrupt or self-seeking. As someone who has never had a political party that was actually on the side of what I believed in (and who has spent his life watching the Democratic party of my youth, which used to at least have a major faction more-or-less aligned with my views slowly purge itself of that faction and then demonize it), I have sympathy for that idea.

I don't pursue politics any more, just political philosophy. I'm not trying to change anything or accrue power to change things. I just want to mark out what I think is right or true.

One of those things is what I said above about education, though: our system is allegedly pursuing the production of people fit to be free citizens of a self-governing order, but what it actually pursues is producing people who obey authority and submit to daily, ongoing violations of the rights they are told they have. We are supposed to enjoy a kind of political equality (the 'President' is just primus inter pares), but our paternalistic system of education elevates the state into the role of parent and trains students to accept being treated as subordinate children. I think that's a problem that lies behind many of our other political problems, because the citizenry has been trained wrong from youth to be citizens of a free and equal society.