New challenges to schoolism [op-ed CCT 18 september 2012]

Well, back-to-school season is well-launched. The children are all back in the designated school buildings, handed off to the professional educators for another nine months. (Isn’t education a great thing; and what would we do without all that taxpayer- funded baby sitting?)

The idea that it should be the fulltime job of all young people to get educated in buildings called schools is deeply entrenched in our culture, a season itself, one of life’s certainties, along with death and taxes.

There’s a curious split in our feelings about this institution. On the one hand the boilerplate verities– education is the bedrock of citizenship, indispensable to a good life, yadda yadda. On the other hand, to judge by its image in a lot of mass culture such as the widely approved movies“Bad Teacher” and “Easy A”, to take two recent examples, you would think compulsory education were a laughing stock rather than a venerated institution. Schools are irrelevant, hypocritical, and terminally boring to most of its captive audience. (Apparently we find it very entertaining to see this acknowledged).

Compulsory education is not threatened by this ridicule at its expense. School to society : Go ahead and laugh, but come September, you’re mine.

Call it schoolism, which like all ideologies has the self-protective function of preventing perspective on itself and stifling attempts to imagine alternatives.

You’d never guess it by how established it is K-12, but schoolism has taken some serious hits recently at the next level. (College may not be legally compulsory but it has become just as obligatory. 94% of American parents in a recent Pew Research poll say they expect their children to attend.) There are times, when the education-in-buildings concept at the college level seems to be coming apart at the seams, especially two of its cherished tenets.

The idea that college is necessary if not for the learning then for the bottomline, and thus for the good life, is being undermined by a lot of publicity about students leaving the system saddled with huge loans likely to compromise their quality of life for decades. According to that same Pew Research poll, although Americans are almost unanimous in thinking that their kids ought to add on those four more years, 57% think that “college is no longer a good value.”

Secondly, the personal computer and the Information Age it has spawned is making serious inroads into traditional campus-based higher education. Some bigtime colleges have begun to offer course credit for online courses. Put together by topnotch teachers, such courses have the advantage over the traditional class of being a lot cheaper and , for a generation raised on computers, more user- friendly.

It’s jarring to our idealistic notions of youth learning at the knee of the more experienced, but a lot of students might actually prefer the university of the computer (including its universe of creative distractions) to access the great world to a live classroom taskmaster, or an email connection to a teacher to the classroom version.

Whether these challenges to traditional higher education will have a trickle-down effect remains to be seen. Secondary schoolism has survived the well-documented successes of homeschooling and the lack of evidence that we are a better educated citizenry now than 100 -150 years ago when formal education became compulsory.

Motivating kids to learn is at the heart of education” writes Kevin Lewis in a “Boston Globe” piece. Seems so obvious as to be a cliché. But it’s wrong. Only in school is learning something that has to be motivated.

It seems a radical idea, but isn’t it something we all know from personal experience: that education—fact-gathering, thinking, creativity, commonsense, even wisdom—can occur outside of schools and that in fact schools might not even be the most conducive environment for these phenomena.

Whenever we can’t imagine life without something—say a large building in town where the education goes on– that’s the time we should start working on the old imagination. (What would we do without the babysitting function of compulsory education?) Thinking of this sort is not, however, something in which we can expect schools themselves to take a lead.

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