School

                At least once, and sometimes several times, a day I walk by the public elementary school in my neighborhood.  Like a lot of schools, it has that unmistakable architectural footprint somewhere between a factory and a prison, a lot of asphalt and chain link fencing.  Even when the kids aren’t there, it smells and feels like a school.  I wonder if we disappeared like the Mayans and our buildings were dug up a thousand years later what the archeologists, aliens to be sure, would make of such a place.  Every culture has practices and artifacts that are so normalized within the culture that no one really sees how odd they are.  School is one of ours.

                There are so many things about the institution of school that really don’t make much sense anymore, from both a pedagogical and organizational perspective.  The herding of children into buildings and segregating them by age groups sounds more sinister than we allow.  Breaking them off into small groups with one arbitrary adult leader for a year sounds even worse.  If we really valued what any of these children could become, wouldn’t we do more make this experience more like the world they existed in until they reached the magic age of five?  Wouldn’t we do more to match them up according to talents and interests that said more about them than their age does?   It’s easy to see that the purpose here is to homogenize the children, to make them into one interchangeable group of voters and workers.  School used to be a way off the farm and out of a stifling small town, now it’s just an assembly line for disenfranchised people.

                In the early part of the last century, institutions such as schools were a way of creating a common culture, of setting a standard of societal expectation and involvement that went beyond the geographic limitations of what was then a mostly agrarian nation.  Even in the middle of the century immediately following the war, school held its place as a means of cultural generation along with the emergence of mass media and consumer capitalism.   School was where we went to be immersed in a bigger world and get ourselves shaped up and ready for a new future, one that our parents were incapable of preparing for us on their own.  All of this happened in the context of a society that had a high sense of shared values and trust in its political institutions.  Even when those values were papered over the racist and sexist assumptions shared by most Americans, they were promoted in schools where we held our hands over our hearts and said the pledge.  We were all going to Disneyland.

                That world seems pretty far away now.  School couldn’t compete with the digital explosion of information, and it eventually got swept away in the consumer culture that created and destroyed fads and fashion faster than an archaic agrarian institution could possibly absorb.  The population of chronically underemployed women that had found a sheltered market in public schools (just as they had in the charity schools in England a century earlier) were suddenly freed to seek (almost) equal employment in a variety of better paying and higher status jobs.  Economic mobility in America eventually ground to a halt, and instead of being a mixing place for different classes of people, schools became a caste system that locked kids into the economic stratifications of their parents.  The central curriculum that was supposed to level social knowledge and mobility stagnated under this new economic and social order into the dried out and decaying testing desert it is today.

                Maybe in the first decades of the 20^th Century, school made sense.  It was certainly a laudable goal to treat us all equally and give us all the same chance to excel, but that isn’t what school does any more.  A radical democracy requires an educational approach that is far less formal, one more attuned to the technology and the politics of the moment.  Instead of sending our children to school, we need to start finding ways to bring school into our daily lives.  We’ve tried a mass cultural, top-down, formal approach to school, and it didn’t work.  We are more segregated and less able to communicate across the cultural barriers that divide us than we ever were.  Perhaps it is time to rethink this situation before the alien archeologists have to dig them and puzzle over just what the hell these people thought they were doing.