Whither, Education?

The principle “Education for all” is everywhere apparent in American education”—from John Dewey to the G.I. Bill to the development of the Internet. We want no child to be left behind, and we want no child that’s been left behind to stay behind. It’s been our policymaker’s job in both public and private sectors to write a plan of action to accomplish this, and we rely on them, in a sense, to steward the American population’s access to education and make the thousands of quarterly decisions about our collective learning habits and learning environment.

Some of the decisions they make about school policy—What time will our school recess?—are bound to seem inconsequential to how we actually learn. Other questions these administrators field, however, are more obviously significant: Will we substitute online classes for in-person classes? Which curriculum will we require our teachers to use? Will we continue to operate x-many schools in Los Angeles, or will we close some down and expand others?  

As they have led their respective institutions, administrators have considered the relationship between the institution of learning and the individual learner in many different ways. And “what’s best for the student” has often depended upon the reigning administrator’s convictions about young people’s nature. Students may have an elevated nature or a debased one. They may “require” inspiration, or criticism, more tests, more classroom participation, or a personal computer. They may be worth the administrator’s and the teacher’s life’s investment or they may not even be worth a fraction of their time. These and other calculations have been made and entered into each school’s curriculum and hiring decisions before any students ever show up to a class.  

With so much deliberate programming surrounding how and what we learn, it seems a little crazy that many of us never ask why we were taught the way we were, even in retrospect after having completed twelve to sixteen years of schooling. If we enjoyed school, we stayed in. If we didn’t, we either tuned out or dropped out.

Together we could recite the names of prominent individuals who broke the stereotypes about school dropouts—the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs who dropped out of college, for instance, and surpassed the college graduates in their field at business strategy and innovation. But dropouts, even the later-successful ones, tend to carry very few people with them. Which is to say, it’s still unpopular to drop out of school. On the whole, our wish to see institutions of education survive and train us illustrates our faith in the goodness of education in general and our conviction that a system for education—as opposed to dropping young people into “life”—is the best way to ferry young hearts and minds into adulthood.

But it’s possible that, as the cost of formal education goes up, more people will reconsider the value of our current education system—whether its practices are really our best practices and whether its cost, in both time and dollars, is proportional to the goods it delivers. Nevertheless, the invisible work of our policymakers ought to be in the background of these considerations. If our current administrators decided to jump ship and determine that our academic institutions are not financially solvent, we’d see the death of one form of institutional learning, and then a new permutation of learning and schooling.

The shape of education is changing, but it’s not disappearing. And while it’s changing, we have as good an opportunity as any to ask how we can make it better. The contemporary classroom tends to favor students who test well, who are out-spoken and/or who participate frequently in a large group of their peers. Is this the demographic we mean to inspire above other ones, or do we mean, by “Education for all,” something a bit more level?