It’s always nice when you can poison the well of the discussion with a title like the above. It implies that anyone who has a different view is not humble. Given the arrogance and condescension that accompanies much educational visioneering these days, this corrective seems appropriate.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is Woodrow Wilson’s statement, made while he was president of Princeton University, that “The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” Now Wilson was actually saying that as a man grows older he specializes, and a university ought to expose a student to as wide a range of experiences as possible. But even this is perhaps condescending. The notion that a son ought to “follow in his father’s footsteps” doesn’t seem like a viable concept from Wilson’s perspective.
Here is a quotation from the Common Core website about “What Parents should Know”:
The standards were drafted by experts and teachers from across the country and are designed to ensure students are prepared for today’s entry-level careers, freshman-level college courses, and workforce training programs. The Common Core focuses on developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful….
Here is another quotation from the “Myths vs. Facts” section:
Myth: Adopting common standards means bringing all states’ standards down to the lowest common denominator. This means that states with high standards are actually taking a step backwards by adopting the Common Core.
Fact: The standards are designed to build upon the most advanced current thinking about preparing all students for success in college, career, and life. This will result in moving even the best state standards to the next level. In fact, since this work began, there has been an explicit agreement that no state would lower its standards. The standards were informed by the best in the country, the highest international standards, and evidence and expertise about educational outcomes….
There are two basic assumptions one finds in the above:
- Experts know best.
- Education is a funnel channeling students into a well-defined path through life.
I believe both assumptions are incredibly arrogant, condescending and presumptuous. They are, however, perhaps the inevitable outcome of mass-production education. Jacques Ellul, in his book The Technological Society, talked about the tendency for every aspect of a society to become regularized and subject to rational organization. Every activity is organized along lines that prioritize efficiency and method. Inevitably such organization is designed to deal with abstractions: the typical student.
Unfortunately for this approach, there are no typical students. While educational establishments give lip service to the uniqueness of each student, their entire raison d’etre — perhaps with the objective of making them as unlike their fathers as possible — is to make them as like one another as possible. One notes above the focus on developing “critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills….” Just try a little genuine critical thinking in the average classroom and see where you wind up. There are plenty of horror stories about students who demur from the narratives presented in their classrooms. Perhaps the infamous No Pressure commercial gives an ironic perspective on this. WARNING this is a graphically violent piece, meant as a “dark humor” attempt to promote the 10/10 campaign.
So what is this humbler view of education that stands in contrast to the totalitarian tendencies that government-run endeavors always gravitate toward? In one word, it is minimalism. Government education should do a few things well instead of many things poorly. Those few things should be enabling and empowering things.
Paulo Friere is famous for his claim that literacy can be achieved in 30 to 40 hours of teaching. It seems to me that basic empowering skills can be taught in a minimal amount of time — but only if the students themselves are motivated.
What are these basic empowering skills? From a minimalist perspective, they are basic reading, writing and basic arithmetical skills up to fractions and percentage. These are the skills our society demands that pretty much every functioning member possess. And these are the skills that the vast majority of people need to live.
One can also argue that “minimalist” education should teach the nuts-and-bolts of our political system — the things that people need to interact with it: things like voting, the legal system, the US Constitution (and appropriate state constitutions), the tax system, and so on. However, this should be done at a minimalist, factual level. If society requires us to know certain things in order to function, it should make provision for people to acquire knowledge of those things.
This does not mean that education stops with the acquiring of these skills. Notice that I called them “empowering” skills. By that I meant that they are skills that form the basis for all other training or education.
That education or training (there is a difference, and it is not one of value) should be pursued by the student and his family in accordance with their agenda. The large majority of students in our society do not need to go to college; they just need training in some field in which they can be productive. College simply serves as a way to keep people out of the job market as well as providing sinecures.
It is the responsibility of a family to empower children to become adults. It is not the responsibility of the state; in fact, it is a responsibility for which the state has proven itself time and time again to be ludicrously unsuited. All we can expect of the state is that it would seek to perpetuate itself and to accrue more and more power to itself. This is exactly what has happened in the last century and a half in the United States, and it has strongly warped the education system.