The Purpose of Schooling

Why do we send our children to school? This question, it seems to me, has been unasked for several decades. In colleges of education much time is spent addressing issues of standards, alignment of curriculum to those standards, and assessment based on those standards. Current buzz words or phrases like standards based teaching and standards based assessment abound in the hallways and classrooms in colleges of education, public school board rooms, principal meetings, and teacher meetings. Grant money is based largely on how one addresses these issues in sometimes, but not necessarily, unique ways. Text book publishers demand that authors align their texts to the national standards that may, or may not, be in harmony one with the other. Assessment publishers get rich as No Child Left Behind requires more and more testing. But, at no time in this discourse does one address the issue of why we send children to school.

I would like to think it is to educate children to think clearly and critically about democracy and when and how to defend this institution to which we all pay lip-service but little more. If we were doing this then, perhaps, more people would step up to the polls and vote for national or state leadership, but more do not do so. If we were educating for democratic values I am not certain we would be fighting a war of aggression in Iraq in the name of bringing democracy to those who need it most. In fact, what the discourse of schooling is about is developing children that will fit neatly into the corporate economy as drones in the system, being able to read and do math at some level but not able to think clearly about anything.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury had the Fire Chief say something like, and I only paraphrase here, We want people to think they are smart, not be smart. Fill their heads full of incidental facts like how much corn grows in Iowa or how many gallons of water are in Lake Michigan and they will be able to tell you and think they are smart. But they don't have to think about it. It is thinking that gets us all in trouble. Now, I know that isn't a direct quote, but the idea is there. This is what is happening in school. Set a whole bunch of standards so that we have no time to teach students to think, then test them using objective testing techniques, sort them out into winners and losers, and everyone will be happy. I am afraid for the future of our people when trivia is taken as a substitute for real knowledge.

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