The future of education

[fpb]

There can be one Western country that is satisfied with current educational provision, but I have not heard of it. From America to Germany, from Italy to Sweden, from Spain to Britain the cry goes up: our education is not working! Efficient Germany, well-administered France, intellectual Italy, aspirational America, all cry out together that educational provision is going down the toilet; that it is turning out generation after generation of self-regarding illiterates with no values, neither willing to crack a book open nor prepared for work and real life; that the level of factual information conveyed to children has diminished, is diminishing, and - in the opinion of most - ought not to diminish; that discipline is abysmal to nonexistent.

I have dealt with some features of this educational crisis, as it is unfolding itself in Britain, elsewhere (http://fpb.livejournal.com/250748.html). I do not change the views I have set out there, about the symptoms of educational malfunction in the United Kingdom, and, in particular, about the ruinous effect of governmental busy-ness and make-work which fiddles with non-essentials and burdens teachers with initiatives while studiously ignoring the core of the problem. However, this essay will deal with a deeper issue: that is, that it is possible that our current educational model - which is fundamentally that which arose out of the French Revolution - may have outlived its usefulness.

Universal state provision for education is not a natural feature of society. The West managed long and contentedly with a provision that left a large minority of the public more or less illiterate. (A side note. Beware of statistics from the period. They consistently underrate the peasant class' acquaintance with documents and writing. Peasants had many reasons to disguise any learning they might have; in France, for instance, educated peasants might be subjected to onerous public duties. But at decisive moments such as the revolt of Wat Tyler in 1381, significant episodes show that peasants could tell the difference between genuine, ancient charters in Anglo-Saxon script and falsified modern ones imposing duties unknown to the earlier items; a quite sophisticated kind of knowledge one would have thought restricted to lawyers and scribes. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that most of the labouring classes in pre-revolution Europe did not read and write, nor feel much need for it.)

What changed everything was the French Revolution. Building on ideas that had already become prevalent, and that had been partly realized in America, the French Revolution established a new model of government built upon the proposition that all adult male citizens (later, all adult citizens, period) were to be responsible parties in the governance of the country. In fact, the Revolution - which was nothing more or less than the collapse of royal governance, which left the nation to fend for itself - completely boxed the compass in terms of both forms of government and of principles; from the same set of events one can draw a model for an aristocratic republic led by an elite, for a one-party tyranny ruled by terror, and for a nationalistic and militaristic dictatorship based on mass support - what later would be called Fascism. In effect, the whole political future of Europe, in every direction, was set out in the generation between the collapse and the return of the Bourbon kings. But the one that made the most impression, that went the deepest, and that did the most to shape the future of Europe, was the republican and egalitarian model - the notion of free and responsible citizens equally involved in the governance of their native country.

This notion, to begin with, was found to develop enormous power. The world was stunned by the apparently irresistible advance of France's novel conscript armies, driving away from their own border coaltions formed by every major military power in Europe, then surging to the Rhine, and finally - under a lean Corsican adventurer with blazing eyes - ripping through Europe in every direction and humiliating every traditional army in their path. The conscript army was a new thing. Until 1789, European states hired and paid professional "standing armies" whose members were soldiers by trade and all their lives, and migbht well be found still lugging a musket at fifty or sixty if they could physically manage it; and which had no necessary connection with the country at all - France and Britain both hired foreign troops by the thousands, and half of the renowned Prussian army was not Prussian-born at all, often not even German. Apart from these professionals, some countries also had a militia, a local levy with only very basic training and that was rarely called out to fight except in the direst of emergencies. But the French revolutionary army was the strenght of the whole male population of the country, yet armed and drilled by officers trained to the highest standards of the old military academies, and filled with a spirit of individual daring and collective responsibility that arose from the certainty that upon them, the citizen soldiers, rested the destiny of the country. They were as responsible for its future as their generals, and indeed there was no reason why at some point one of them should not become a general himself.

The ideal of the sovereign citizen, equal before the law and equally responsible for the country, was of course an ideal, which meant that in practice it would be possible to point to a million large and small breaches of it. But the immense military success of France after the revolution shows how practical a thing it was; it was the new spirit, the new belief in civic duty and virtue, in personal responsibility, in a direct connection between citizen and fatherland, that drove hundreds of thousands of men to enlist and train, to slog and freeze, to fight and die. A change in the idea of citizenship had meant a change in politics and an even bigger change on the battlefield.

The evident counterpart of universal citizenship is universal education. If the citizen is to be responsible for his country, he must be prepared for that responsibility, both by an understanding of his rights and duties, and by training in the suitable virtues that underlie those rights and duties. Universal elementary education was the almost immediate result of the Revolution, and remained a part of the French state ever after. It was, evidently and to everyone, the other half of the fundamental French institution of conscription, and it was correspondingly unpopular according to whether the ideas of the French Revolution were accepted or rejected. Universal elementary education was only accepted in Britain in the eighteen-sixties, in Austria and Russia even later; and Britain, Austria and Prussia all rejected the idea of the conscript army as long as they dared - in Britain it only existed from 1939 to 1958.

The purpose of elementary state-provided education, then, is to be the first half of the process which culminates in one, two or three years of military service, and which forms a citizen. Its presuppositions were that in a society which tended to be highly stratified, and in which economic and cultural forces tended to separate the members of society into highly distinct classes, a forceful and continuous intervention from the State was required to counter the effects of social status and to form, from the disparate elements of society, a number of potentially equal citizens. It must be understood that equality in this sense did not mean absence of social stratification, but rather that every citizen, rich or poor, is prepared and allowed to take a responsible role in society; that no citizen should be such as to allow a nobleman to say, as someone in Shakespeare does, "Out, dunghill!" if he dared to take an interest in public matters. But in order to do this, the natural clay of man - the clay that, left alone and to the heedless working of social forces, creates those "dunghills" that the old aristocracies were taught to despise - must be forged in a specific shape; a shape of responsibility and of at least basic education, able to read and write so as to be able to understand his duties and assert his rights.

The basic idea of the kind of universal state education that arose from the French revolution, then, was to raise the average native from the level of a toiling, passive peasant to that of a conscious, active citizen. In doing this, the schoolteacher was aware that he or she was to some considerable extent working against the grain of society, that asked to peasants, and later to industrial worker, nothing more than the use of their brawn. To get all young children to read and write was not necessarily something that their parents would welcome, and indeed the more backwards of them - shepherds were a notorious case - would withhold their children from school to do more useful, and even more interesting, things. A whole mindset had to be faced and fought, in the name of the nation and its future; and to do so, generation after generation of mostly female schoolteachers spread across the face of Europe and the Americas, horribly underpaid and barely recognized, spreading the ABC and the Pythagoric table with the zeal of soldiers going to war, and just as willing to use violence for the greater good. The ruler, or the rod, or the knuckles of their own tough old hands, were to these missionaries an undoubted part of their trade, which they would not hesitate to use for what they regarded as the good of their children.

It was a heroic generation, or series of generations, worthy of an epic that perhaps has not been written yet. They created our world; without mass, standardized education, the modern world simply would never have happened, at least not as it has. But in doing so, they eventually made their own model outdated. Their time is gone. It simply is no longer true that to educate a child is to go against the grain of the society he or she lives in. The mass media, television, and the internet, have taken care of that; illiteracy, in modern societies, is for all practical purposes restricted to the criminal classes and to some groups of immigrants (by no means all). The ploughboy, even where he still exists, spends his free time on the internet, and the shepherd's boy whiles away the long hours with comics and videogames. Where once the forces of the lower half of society pulled away from all kinds of literacy, now they pull towards them. Farmers have to know how to fill forms, how to drive and repair machines, how to read textbooks in their own subjects, professional magazines, market news.

It follows that there is a crisis of legitimation for the schoolteachers. The students who want to study know that they can find out about things just as easily outside the schoolroom as inside; and those who do not are no longer subject to the discipline that once insured that they would scrape by whether they wanted to or not. And discipline, in turn, is no longer rigid, because the republican model of citizen in whose name the older generations of teachers worked and starved is no longer so certain and so admired an ideal. It has not gone away, of course, and nine parents out of ten would tell you that they want their children to grow up in something like its image. But its full force existed when it was bound up with a number of notions and experiences - the nation, the flag, the constitution, and the experience of conscription that made one a soldier in their service. These things began to be seriously criticized from the end of the first world war, and today it is difficult to even imagine, and impossible to recreate, the uniting emotional value they once had. An evident symptom of this is that the conscript armies that were once the other end of educational provision in every European country have been reformed out of existence. Most continental European countries now have professional standing armies, and I belong to the last generation that knew what it is like to spend a year or two in barracks, training for a war of great armies.

As the ideal becomes weaker and more conflicted, so the will to assert and impose it becomes weaker. Today's teachers would be horrified at the means their predecessors used to impose their own idea of a citizen on the stubborn clay in their classes. And today's children would not have it by any means. The very peasant mentality that the educators wanted to remake was the mentality that accepted that authority should, in the final analysis, be obeyed whether you liked it or not, and that therefore allowed the teachers, as representatives of the State, the authority to order and discipline their children. That mentality is largely dead, and the teacher can no longer rely on peasant submissiveness to let little peasants be shaped into little citizens.

The model of state provision of universal education has therefore outlived its origins, and struggles for relevance in the modern world. And yet we cannot say that the need for universal educational provision has passed. It is as relevant as ever, indeed more so; and that not only if we want to keep at least some of the features of a democratic society, but even more fundamentally, if we want to live in an orderly and peaceful world.

People who make personal acquaintance with the jail system all tell the same story: illiteracy is the basic common feature of the vast majority of its inmates. Repeat criminals are not necessarily more wicked, or even more stupid, than ordinary citizens, but the overwhelming majority of them are infinitely less educated. The British politician Jonathan Aitken, who spent eighteen months as a guest of Her Majesty, tells how he became the unofficial scribe of the jail, writing out letters for dozens of inmates who knew what they wanted to say but not how to say it. One fellow jailbirds told him that since he had been in, all the girls outside could not believe the difference in their boys' letters. And it makes obvious sense. In a society such as I described, in which literacy and numeracy are the common currency of every person, in which everyone follows the mass media or the internet, to come out of the school system unable to read and write properly - or to have never been a part of it - is a warrant of exclusion from the mainstream of society. To a young man or woman who, for whatever reason, have waste their school years, a totally literate society offers very little. It seems almost inevitable that very many of them will become criminals: if the norm of society gives them no space, then they will make any kind of living, and even a career, outside the norm of society.

This shows the crushing, overwhelming need for universal education. In our world, the lack of education means exclusion from mainstream society; it means stunting, and misshapen growth. But - and here we come to the heart of the matter - just as universal educational provision has become more and more indispensible, the institutions that should provide it have become less and less able and willing to do so.

State education has never been uncontroversial; but there has never been so much irritable debate about it, its goals, its very existence, as there is now. And I think we are at a point where we have to seriously reconsider it. For a start, in our society parents are able and often willing to take a major part in the education of their children. At the same time, they are no longer as respectful of authorities as the old model implicitly expected. Whether this is seen as a positive and negative development - it is probably both - it is a fact, and must be accepted, dealt with, and made use of. The notion of the teacher as a soldier or a missionary sent by the State to form future citizens from unwilling materials is no longer significant. The material is mostly not unwilling, and even without schools it would quite likely learn by itself at home. What is needed in these cases is support and cooperation rather than having everything imposed from above.

Nonetheless, it remains indispensable that all children should be educaed to a certain and equal standard. The matter of professional criminals, apart from anything else, shows that our social peace depends on it.

Summing together these two points shows us the direction in which we should go. The State should shift from being a main, often sole, educational provider to being a guarantor and a provider of last resort. Schools should be provided and ran by any body that is capable to and can show the need: not only the ministry of education - which I would of course not prevent from having schools - or local authorities, but charities, churches, private companies who believe they can make a profit, institutions that wish to offer them to the children of their employees (e.g. the armed forces or the police, for the children of soldiers or policemen), universities that wish to establish lower instititutions, and so on. One painful point: it is impossible to see how one can prevent undesirable bodies, such as mosques financed by Saudi Arabia or extreme environmentalist charities, from establishing their own schools. That is why state intervention, verification, inspection - and inspections must be unannounced and severe - are going to be extremely important, and why a national ministry for education is and remains and absolute necessety. It must issue vouchers that allow parents to send their children to any school they like, within bonds of sense - Eton will never be open to anyone who asks, nor cheap enough to be entered by the voucher that pays for the average school. But even in the case of Eton and the like, I would issue the same voucher as for any other child, which could be redeemed as a contribution to educational expenditure. The voucher would represent the public commitment to the education of every child, and to use it for anything but education would be a punishable offence. Of course I envisage a variety of schools, both on a commercial and on a non-profit basis. The state must encourage their formation by appropriate incentives and laws, and provide them where nobody else does. It must welcome and foster alternatives such as homeschooling where anyone wishes to provide them, but insure that they do not result in second-class educational standards or worse. It must insure that schools meet certain standards and do no harm. It must set exams - and the standards of those exams must be ironbound - to ensure that whatever the educational course, people leave school with the basic learning at least, and that young people of student age go on either to real apprenticeships or workplaces, or else to continuing study preluding to university. Under no condition can the current poisonous British practice of handing exams over to for-profit private bodies, which have an interest in raising the number of passes as high as they can, be continued.

However, Britain and the USA are at least further along this path than continental European countries, where nearly exclusive state provision seems to remain the unthinking consensus. That homeschooling should be illegal in Germany and virtually unknown elsewhere is shocking. (Interestingly, the ideological roots of homeschooling are different in the two Anglo-Saxon countries. Homeschooling is a largely left-wing, hippyish tradition in Britain, but a conservative and Christian one in the USA. This shows that there is no inevitable party label to be attached to this kind of movement; the only common feature is that in both countries it arises from dissatisfaction with state educational provision.) I do not think that it is possible to reform universal, standardized, top-down education models so as to make them relevant to modern conditions; and that means that until people understand the issue, they will go on complaining about bad educational provision and refuse any practicable alternative.

Comments

[filialucis]

"Universal elementary education was only accepted in Britain in the eighteen-sixties, in Austria and Russia even later;..."

??? I've not yet read further than this sentence, but with respect to Austria (and the rest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), the empress Maria Theresa introduced compulsory education for all in 1774, a decade and a half before the French Revolution. Are you implying that the decree was a dead letter for over a century?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, I just made a blooper, and you are perfectly correct (the worse since I actually knew it). I would say however that the whole spirit of the provision was different, and that is shown by the fact that Austria resisted coscription until, yes, well into the mid-nineteenth century. A real system of coscription, as opposed to volunteer enlistment, was not introduced until the constitutional settlement of 1867, with the creation of the Landwehr and Honved, and even so it was so faulty that only one-fifth of adult males effectively passed through military training. The republican notion of education had its climax in coscription, with its oath to defend constitution and fatherland, and Austria (and Russia) absolutely did not want that. Disastrously, the nobility dominated the army from beginning to end, and kept it an instrument for the old paternalistic concept of society - as well as for remarkable corruption at the lower levels. This explains the repeated failures of the apparently imposing Austro-Hungarian military apparatus, down to its destruction by the smaller but defiantly conscripted and national army of Italy in 1918.

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

Having been through the whole mess that is the "collège unique" in France (one state middle school system that's theoretically the same for everybody and which tries to mix together people of all backgrounds) and having a close friend teaching there at the moment, I'm quite aware of its difficulties and of the sometimes near impossibility to teach in a context where the teacher has no real authority and directives sent from above are not helpful.

I'm not convinced by the alternative suggested though: homeschooling suggests one parent would have to be either unemployed or only with a very small part time job, plus would have to be reasonably well-educated themselves, and I'm not sure that many people would be willing or able to do that, except possibly in the upper classes.
Even if the complex system suggested was easily workable, it would probably tend to increase social inegalities: all the educational systems which separate early into several types of schools tend to have that effect (cf. Germany vs. France for example) and I think it's important not to "segregate" too early between people from different backgrounds: it's even more difficult to form an inclusive society as adults if we've been kept apart from people different from us since childhood.

All in all I'm still in favour of one state school for all, but there is a serious need for education to be revalued: for politicians and adminitrators to stop looking down on teachers and piling up useless contradictory directives on them, for parents to acknowledge that teachers are not necessarily the enemy and for society at large to try and accept the idea that money is not the only thing of worth.
It would also probably help if crafts demanding skills were not looked down upon, but deemed valuable choices and if the state did not try to drag 80% of the population to higher education, willing or not, as if everybody had the capacity or the inclination to take their studies this far.

Yes, I know, that's a lot of things to hope for, but one can dream...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am glad to have stimulated one of your valuable and all too rare responses. I am interested to see that, in spite of all the differences in detail between English and French systems, the trouble you describe is virtually the same - alienated and hostile parents, interfering politicians unleashing fifteen irrelevant initiatives per day, teachers without authority or power. However, I have to say that I do not understand why, after practically underlining all the major points of my analysis, you find it so hard to agree with my proposals. You must see that the one-size-fits-all, centrally determined model of education no longer fits modern society, any more than coscription does. My proposal - of which homeschooling is only a small part, which I never envisage as being anything but a minority pursuit - amounts to going with the grain of modern society, taking advantage of its energies rather than opposing them in the name of a model whose basic meaning - the patriotic republican idea of the citizen formed by school and conscription - has clearly had its day and is no longer effective. Of course, a variety of educational provisions mean a variety of experiences and expectations; which is why I prescribe (against the instincts of all my American friends) a powerful ministry of education with far-raning powers to impose basic requirements of education, set exams, and keep schools on their toes by a regimen of constant and unannounced inspections. I am not for anarchy, but I am in favour of letting a hundred flowers bloom, and of involving parents as far as possible in the schooling of their children.

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of involving parents and more generally society in schooling: the French Republican ideal of education results in schools being cut off from the world and very serious misunderstanding arising between the two universes.
However, whatever the exact system chosen, I think social mixity inside the schools should be a top priority so that equal opportunities are offered. With a "hundred flowers" as you elegantly put it, social mixity is still possible, but one would have to be careful that people don't use the opportunity to keep their kids in exclusive secluded communities sharing the same values and / or social status.
Basically I'm quite open to alternatives to the single state school system, but I want guarantees that the remedy will not be worse than the ill. :)

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Homeschooling does take commitment, but in the United States and Canada at least, there is a fairly sizable portion of the middle class that is willing to do it. Here, in a mid-sized city in south-central Ontario, I am aware of of at least three home-schooling collectives that provide support and extra-cirricular activities (like sports and museum visits) for homeschooled children and their parents.

I friend of mine who's husband is a drywaller (putting him firmly in the working class) is home schooling her first grader. She has a second-year university education herself. She does not work, but the family has made lifestyle choices that do not require her to. Her "job" is raising their daughter and she takes it seriously.

Likewise, my sister, until recently an army wife, had been homeschoolering her children. Unfortunately a serious illness on the part of my nephew required her to put the older kids in a "regular" school so she could devote more time to his care (he was in the hospital for the better part of a year). My point however, is that a solider's family is not upper-class either.

As for "reasonably well-educated", well that is a sore point of mine. When my grandmother, a former rural one-room schoolhouse teacher, later farm-wife and then textile factory supervisor, died and we went through her papers, we found an eighth-grade exit exam from the 1930s. My brothers, husband and I were a little shocked that with four bachelor degrees and two masters degrees between us there were a couple of questions that none of us could answer! My grandmother often talked about her preparation to teach school. Basically, at the beginning of her third year of high school (out of a four-year program) she transfered into teacher-prep classes. She graduated with her high school diploma and elementary teaching certificated. She was qualified to teach grades one to eight.

Having "crafts demanding skills" not looked down on may be a lot to hope for, but here in Canada the goverment is taking steps in the direction. There have been ads running for the past couple years to promote trades and apprenticeships as a viable "alternative" to college/university.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

US homeschooling is often assumed to be about Christian conservatives avoiding moral 'corruption' or evolution, and they did push a lot of the legal openness through, but there's a sizable secular component to homeschoolers, as well Christians who wouldn't make seculars mutter "crazy!" My local library has Homeschooling Today, a Christian homeschooling magazine, and Home Education Magazine, a totally secular one.

My mother was born in 1938 in Los Angeles and raised in large part by her father's siblings, who hadn't gone past 8th grade (in Providence, IIRC), though her father had. She said their education seemed rather better than hers, well able to help her with her homework, and to manage the books of a family business.

But I saw an old school test a while back, from around 1900? I dimly recall a mix of good hard questions, obsolete questions about agriculture, and picky little grammar or trivia questions that really don't matter. "I can't answer this" needn't be a bad thing if the questions are about how many square rods in a hide, or grammar questions based on shoehorning English into Latin straitjackets. Then of course there's the putative tradeoff between memorization vs. mental flexibility and being able to look stuff up. Most schools have finals requiring a fair bit of memorization; Caltech tends to have take-home open-book finals where you can look up any information you need. This does not mean they are easy, even for Caltech students with a 1450 average SAT score...

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

homeschooling suggests one parent would have to be either unemployed or only with a very small part time job, plus would have to be reasonably well-educated themselves, and I'm not sure that many people would be willing or able to do that, except possibly in the upper classes.

I was home-schooled from kindergarten through 12th grade, as was my sister, who was three years older. My dad quit his job when I was 7 (= 2nd grade) to go back to school to get his master's degree; during that time, my mom was both the bread-winner, doing home-day care, and the primary teacher of my sister and me. After he finished his degree, my dad had a good job when I was 10-12, but around then he was made redundant and throughout the rest of my middle school and high school years, he worked in temp jobs and my mom was working two minimum wage jobs. We certainly weren't poor in that we had a house and always had food on the table (though I can't recommend ground turkey, even though it's cheap!), but I would hardly call most of my growing up "upper class".

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

jeez! did your mum ever get to sleep at all during those years or does she have super powers? ;) honestly, I'm quite impressed at some of the testimonies people have been posting on this thread, I couldn't imagine take up such a huge responsibility on top of everything else.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Some interesting conclusions to be sure drawn from a historical perspective of state education I had not considered before.

It must welcome and foster alternatives such as homeschooling where anyone wishes to provide them, but insure that they do not result in second-class educational standards or worse.

This line amuses me a little because someone on my friends list was homeschooled her entire life (elementary through high school) in the upper midwest (I can't remember if she is from Minnesota or Wisconsin) and is now at the University of Amsterdam doing a PhD in medieval logic. I would have to say that what she recieved was definately not "second-class".

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, but so long as homeschooling is a volunteer and barely tolerated movement with some characteristics of insurgency, it will attract only the really motivated and committed. I am familiar with the high educational achievements of many homeschoolers, but if it ever becomes an entrenched and accepted, then it might become a faute de mieux or worse for families that do not want to educate, or who want to miseducate, their children. One dreads, for instance, homeschooling Muslims or anarchists.

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

Muslims or anarchists?

that's an odd pair of examples... I don't see the problem as such with Muslims or anarchists as long as we're talking about educated and open-minded people.

Now of course I agree that extremists, whatever their political or religious outlook, should not be left with the task of teaching anybody, not even their own children, for fear that they transform what should be striving to open kids' minds to many possibilities into narrowing them into narrow channels.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I don't think homeschooling can be characterized as a "barely tolerated movement" on this continent considering the number school boards that almost bend over backwards to accomodate homeschoolers. It's not like we have truant officers anymore.

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

Hi,

you seem to know a good deal about homeschooling and I gather it is much more common in Northern America than in my own country (is it partly because a lot of people live far from the closest school given that distances are not quite the same as in Europe?) so I wondered if you could explain a bit more about how it works.
I can imagine how it would work for the first years, but all the way to the end of high school seems rather daunting. Also from what I gather, it works with several families teaming up or at least having the kids meet fairly regularly... as you can see from my ramblings I have a very uncleared idea of how it works, could you give some details?

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Wisconsin. :)

And yes, I wouldn't trade my home-schooled education for any public (or private!) schooling I could've had. I can think of three reasons for why I came out with a good education, being homeschooled:

(a) both of my parents had college degrees (in food chemistry and art history). Though chemistry and art were probably my worst subjects as a kid, I think it helped that I had highly-educated parents.
(b) my parents' decision to homeschool my sister and I was based on the fact that they thought they could give us a better education at home, and not on any religious principles. Through about 6th grade our curriculum was generally taken from an evangelical Christian publisher, but that was mostly incidental.
(c) given that my parents had to work/go to school for a lot of my growing up (see my comment above), they taught me very early enough about time management and self-discipline. "This is what you have to do by the end of the day (week/month/school year). Any questions, come talk to me." Those two qualities are the ones that have stood me in the greatest stead as I've slogged my way through the Ph.D. years (T-55 days until the dissertation gets handed to the committee...)

[thefish30.livejournal.com]

An excellent essay. I hope to have time to comment on it later.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I read this insightful essay last night, and am still thinking about it!

Your concerns about extremist groups indoctrinating children are not unfounded, but there is already a strong tradition of private, sectarian schooling (in the U.S. at least), some of it ideologically countercultural (though not really extremist, per se), and it seems to work fine. There are already Muslim schools, Jewish schools, evangelical schools, Catholic schools, private schools with interesting philosophies about education (ie Montessori, Waldorf). Some of them teach creationism. Some teach that homosexuals are going to hell. I'm sure that some of them tell students that American values are corrupt.

I don't think any of these schools have, or will, undermine the state.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wish I shared your optimism. America has proved relatively unbrainwashable by bad education because of its very polycentric structure, that makes it very difficult to establish a nationwide orthodoxy. Even so, bad educational ideas have hardly been without issue; one would have to study the now forgotten mania of eugenics, which led to the sterilization without consent of considerable numbers of blacks and poor whites. And the reverse of this is that whole areas of America have seen the predominance of really bad education and really bad values for decades if not centuries. Southern racism and segregation are the most notorious but scarcely the sole instance of this. And the reason why creationism is not more widespread than it is is not any innate excellence in the system, but the fact that, a quarter of a century ago, the American scientific establishment fought a ferocious battle, through the court and the media, to stop by all means necessary a determined effort to introduce creationism in science classes. Even so, that particular bad idea is hardly dead; Bobby Jindal, no less, Governor of Lousiana and rising star in the Republican Party, has been caught hands in the cookie jar to his elbow trying once again the same stunt. One way or another, bad education is ruinous. And in smaller or more centralized systems than America, it can literally destroy a country. Nazism triumphed in Germany because it was in effect repeating the commonplaces of racist and social-darwinist discourse that had come pouring from schools and universities for three generations; Hitler himself said that he had learned everything he knew from a schoolteacher in his Linz high school. And I have had personal experience of this in the virtually complete Communist dominance of the teaching profession in my childhood. If you want to know why Italy suffered from Communist terrorism in the seventies and eighties, go read the school textbooks in use in the sixties and early seventies. I remember one that treated both Lenin and Stalin as high moral authorities, quoting them without a touch of criticism.

[atheneglaukopis.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I was not aware of the history of the current educational system, so your essay was an interesting read on that point.

I agree wholeheartedly that centralized public education is problematic for a lot of reasons, and as in many things, a one-size-fits-all model fits few well and many badly.

Just to contribute an anecdotal sign of failure that I encountered recently: a highly motivated student with no obvious socioeconomic factors that might account for a particularly poor education (WASP, essentially), who identified "richer" as a verb.

There is nothing else to say to that but -

[fpb.livejournal.com]

->gulp!<-

[lyssiae.livejournal.com]

Homeschooling is - apart from a slight exception - illegal in the Netherlands. That exception is that one might be able to gain permission (permission!) to homeschool one's child if one can claim a "life approach" that is not adequately provided for by existing schools. For "observant" Catholics, this presents a dilemma unless one lives in a very remote place, as there are Catholic schools just about everywhere. Unfortunately what they mean by "Catholic" and the Catholic Church means by "Catholic" rarely match up.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, that will have to change. And I do not say that only because I am hostile to what passes for Catholicism in the country of Schillebeeckx, but because the way society is moving across the West is in the opposite direction. Top-down state provision will increasingly be seen as unsatisfactory - even to Dutch minds - and one of the things the Internet is doing is powering a generation of aggressive and articulate conservative Catholics, and more in general all sorts of movements that do not find themselves at home in the official press and the official media. I am not suprised: the Dutch always reveal themselves to be this nation of independent thinkers that somehow always end up thinking what their leaders think for them. But the future is with diversity, and I mean real diversity, not the kind Channel 4 and The Independent mean.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Homeschooling is - apart from a slight exception - illegal in the Netherlands.

Wow, I had no idea! A couple of the Dutch faculty in my department find me a bit of a curiosity because of my background being home-schooled, but none of them had ever mentioned to me that it was illegal, only that it was rare.

[fox-sejant.livejournal.com]

As I teach High School in the province of Ontario I read this article with great interest. I also read the linked article 'Blair's legacy of dead kids'.
Many of the things you say about the education system in Britain sound similar to what I work with here.
The failures of the system are such that I often say to myself that I am working for the enemy. My wife is due to give birth in a month and I am not certain that I'd be willing to put my child into the very system I work for.
Ontario has for all intents and purposes two public school systems. The "public" system and the Catholic system which must follow all the curricula and meet all the regulations that the Public system must follow. Nor can the Catholic system select students preferentially based on religion. It functions as a Public system with a veneer of Catholicism laid over it. Come to think of it, it sounds somewhat like the system you propose of various school systems all answerable to the Ministry of Education.
In spite of this the idea of alternative school systems is anathema in Ontario. Even the two system structure that exists now is under attack by people claiming that in order to produce a unified citizenry we must have a single public education system. The voucher system was proposed here a number of years ago and was derided as "an American" idea. (American being the worst possible thing any proposal in Canadian politics can be called)

In your earlier article you mention the unteachable minority that exists in each class. This same phenomenon occurs here though depending upon which district you are in it may be the unteachable majority.
Official eyes are just as firmly clamped shut here about the issue as you describe them as being there. Occasionally ideas come forward that appear to address the issue but they are contentious. The Toronto District School Board has approved an Afro-centric set of schools to engage students who do not "engage" with the allegedly Euro-centric curriculum of Ontario. This came about primarily due to two major factors. A 40% drop out rate among male black teenagers in Toronto and a school shooting in which a male black teen was killed.
The decision has been criticized as a return to segregation and praised as way to engage students and reduce the number of drop outs.
As you describe, those who cannot or will not succeed in the educational system here for all intents and purposes are frozen out of main stream society. Though I have noticed that more and more there is an active rejection of main stream society by those who do not succeed in school.
The collision between these two societies became front page news a few years ago on Boxing Day when a teenage girl (of mainstream society) was caught in the crossfire of two groups who began shooting at each other in the middle of a busy shopping district. She was killed.
The young men arrested live by a code of "not snitchin" and refused to cooperate with authorities even against the people they were shooting at. One witness, when told by a Judge that he would be compelled to testify, exploded in the courtroom yelling that the Judge had just killed him. The witness fully expected to be murdered for testifying even unwillingly.
As far as I know he is still alive.

interesting

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Very interesting analysis. I had no looked at compulsory public schooling in light of its roots in mass-conscript style republicanism (small 'r').

Any observer of the scene in America can tell you the public school system is failing or failed. Many a household in America homeschools merely for the educational advantages. It seems that amateurs can outperform professionals, when the professionals are not free to discipline (and therefore educate) the children under their charge. Others want to avoid corruption, real or imagined, of educators using their position to indoctrinate rather than educate the children.

Oddly enough, in America one of the main political obstacles to 'education vouchers' is the unwillingness to have the church perform her ancient and respected business of educating the youth.