OK, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Real Life has sucked all the tourists back over the bridges. All the kids are rounded up and back in the school buildings where they belong.
A recent back-to-school newspaper story focused on a young man who dropped out of Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School to become a TV star or some such. The point of the story was the success local schools are having cutting down on the dropout rate.
The story could have gone another way. Could it be that dropping out actually makes sense for some? Maybe for more than a few? Even for kids with less glamorous options? Instead of treating the school-averse like truants or deviants who need to be brought back to the fold, how about looking at the logic of dropping out?
Is it possible that dropping out is not a problem to be nipped in the bud, but rather a solution that should be encouraged?
Is it even possible that compulsory formal education is a mistake?
But that’s a question that never gets asked. Compulsory full-time book learning as the structuring principle of life between ages 5 and 18 is one of the great givens of life. You can argue alternative models, such as charter schools and programs to encourage better teaching and correct other flaws in the system. But question the basic notion of forcing all young people to spend most of their formative years in a building called school? You might as well ask whether there’s an alternative to eating.
After all, if it weren’t for school, they wouldn’t get socialized. They wouldn’t learn how to participate responsibly in democracy. And don’t forget the statistics showing the big hit in income if you skimp on formal education.
Then there’s that other reason: the baby-sitting function. Whatever the other fine-sounding reasons, we need to empty the house of kids so we can go off to work every day (as we are reminded every snow day and have to scramble for alternative arrangements). The logic of compulsory education sounds good, but as most of us know from our long early-life academic experience (and if we are feeling obliged to talk it up to our kids), the D-Y dropout’s boredom is not an isolated case. There is, in general, too much boredom in the classroom, of the sort likely to be found in a captive audience, an indication that education does not seem to a lot of students a lot of the time to be of vital importance to their lives.
In 1910, only 10 percent of those 14- to 17- years-old were enrolled in school. Did democracy suffer in those days from a general level of ignorance? Did parents in that much more agrarian time go around admitting that they were failing to educate their kids in skills and values?
Are we, in fact, a smarter society today than a century ago when there was so much less formal education?
And how is the educational rationale skewed now in a world in which most kids know more than most parents and teachers about the most revolutionary force in all our lives — the computer?
If it were not for its indispensable byproduct, the baby-sitting function, how would compulsory education look to us?
All good questions, but compulsory education being self-perpetuating, like all institutions, they don’t get asked.
In a small town like Wellfleet, it feels narrow to see education as happening just in the one building called school. Campus Wellfleet offers so many real-life adventures with on-the-job training: fishing and shellfishing and boating (and the sciences involved), art and music and theater, designing and building, management of natural resources, and, of course, restaurants. The faculty includes gardener-philosophers, carpenter screenwriters, boat-building DJs galore. Seems a shame to lock the kids up in school away from all these potentially educational influences.
Making formal schooling voluntary rather than compulsory would require revolutionary changes in our society. It would be a little revolution simply to dare to ask: How would the world look, how would it function with the young integrated in a different way into society?
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