A School for People

A friend sent me a piece of memetic folk wisdom called "The Animal School":

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school.

The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviours of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all the subjects.

The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact, than his teacher. He also did well in flying. But he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject, he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so no body worried about that – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of her class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming – a subject she hated.

The squirrel was excellent at climbing until he developed a psychological block in flying class, when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle-bound – and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem; in climbing class, she beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but she insisted on using her own method of getting there.

The gophers, of course, stayed out of school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

I'd like to criticise the parable on its assumptions.  The idea that we all have different natural abilities as differentiated as flight to an eagle and a rabbit's swiftnesssuggests a reductivist genetic determinism that eventually leads us down the slippery slope to social Darwinism.  The other extreme that people are blank slates to mold and fashion doesn't hold up either.  

Really, people are like web pages: that is, they are plastic templates onto which nearly anything can be pasted (with a few exceptions, like some aspects of math for instance).  For the purposes of our education system, the ability to compose sentences and paragraphs (English), an understanding of numbers as a language (math: something that I have argued is of utmost importance to societal well-being), a thorough grounding in the scientific method and what we have learned from it (science), a firm grasp of who we are and where we came from as a species, civilization, culture, country, region, or ethnic group (social studies) have all been widely agreed as being important enough for every citizen to learn.  That all citizens may be given access to this important knowledge was a battle hard-fought by progressives at the turn of the century, and the result was the national, standardized, public school system that has provided millions of American citizens with the basic suite of knowledge required to determine their own paths.  The result has been the most technologically skilled workforce in the history of the world.  

That being said, the way people live now is very different from the way people lived when our public school system was first devised.  Some private schools have recognized this fact; for example, the Sudbury Valley School allows children to learn to read at their own paces on the basis that it would happen eventually anyways since we are now living in a literate society.  While I generally think this sort of curricular practice is a bit extreme, I can sympathize with the premise.  The fundamental ways and means of the industrial-era public school classroom clash strongly with our contemporary reality of increasingly decentralized information flow and egalitarianism.  

Public schools where they're needed most are failing, and overstandardized education, paradigms of teacher "accountability" and the ensuing emphasis on "results" is to blame, such that nowadays many quintessential progressives support school choice.  I am not a progressive, but I support school choice to coincide with what I see as a technological broadening of the global economy and its main medium-term problem of a fundamental mismatch between skills available and skills demanded.

Nevertheless, given the present transitionary shape of the world, it is important to strike a balance between choice and the rote learning of necessary skills.  As I wrote in response to my friend's parable:

I really like this, but I think the school system we have generally prepares us well for the world we have. I was always the "discipline problem" kid when I was in school, and I never really learned to follow proper procedures, although I could duplicate results, so I got good grades. But I continue to have problems with authority and struggle profoundly at basic and important tasks like filing my taxes, applying for visas, signing up for health insurance, applying for a vending license, or composing a cover letter. I kind of wish I had had at least one teacher who made me practice repetitive and boring tasks until I got it right instead of trying to build the self-esteem of the students, since repetitive and boring and often nonsensical deference to authority is the basis for our society and the happy existence of the individual in it.    

In order for school choice to work, the same decentralizing and technological changes that occur in the school system must also occur in the greater society, since it is the primary responsibility of the school system to prepare individuals for existence in the greater society.  Regarding that greater society, we as a nation have two choices: we can continue to have a society based on rules and procedures, tight authoritarian hierarchies, and collective coercion along with a hyperstandardized school system that kills passion, encourages passive learning, fails to teach in response to the demand for skills, and prepares adequate managers to perpetuate the system.  Or we can develop a more decentralized society with a more decentralized and loose school system.  

To get to this point, right now we can start promoting more cooperative public school systems: arrangements can be made with students's parents to participate more actively in school.  Perhaps in a class of twenty-five students, each parent could teach one hour a month: I may choose to teach Japanese geography; my wife could have the students read a short story and analyze its characters; my child's friend's dad could teach about electric circuits; and his wife could teach the children how to develop photographs.

This sort of cooperative home school/public school hybrid would provide parents with concrete opportunities to address what they may personally view as shortcomings in the school system; and it would foster a culture where parents are necessarily invested in their own children's education and themselves held partially accountable for their child's education.  Such a hybrid school would also provide students with enough broad knowledge to choose what it is they're truly passionate about and begin pursuing it at an early age.  At a certain stage, students can engage in more projects where they themselves take the lead - teaching a topic that they are reasonably competent about to their peers.

Such a school system would demand that the teaching of subjects which are more about acquiring skill than learning facts can benefit from dramatic improvements in efficiency or be pared down considerably.  A subject like math could be taught primarily in the form of an electronic game with minimal oversight.  Customizing such programs to the levels of individual students would ensure that teachers will no longer have to contemplate which percentile to teach to, another source of tremendous waste.  The current, low price of computer equipment and Internet access plus the money saved by having parents teach subjects they are experts about would ensure that schools are not bankrupted by the necessary massive investments in technology. 

Nevertheless, in order for the improvements such a school might generate to have any meaning at all, corresponding changes would have to occur in the greater society.  Structural reforms like encouraging self-employment and entrepreneurship by reducing government-imposed barriers to entry, ceasing to encourage economies of scale past certain points, and ending the tethering of health insurance to corporate employment must accompany near-future technological changes like the decline of the importance of the traditional office, marked improvements in information technology interfaces with daily life, and the ability of anyone anywhere to fabricate anything, all of which promise to tear down established power structures and replace them with more plastic empires of the mind.