Education in a Time of Disintegration
Our thinking about schooling needs to catch up with reality
When the realm of education makes it into the news and public consciousness these days, it is usually for one of three disturbing reasons: A conservative faction is attacking the curriculum or taking over a public school board; costs are skyrocketing and school districts are struggling to keep programs and services intact; or some nutcase has barged into a school and gunned down a group of children.
Each of these events reflects a larger drama playing out in society as a whole: ideological strife, the soaring costs of our precariously complex systems, and deeply rooted issues of mental health, nihilism and reflexive violence. Schools — public schools especially — are wholly immersed in the cultural and political currents of modern life, and cannot escape the stresses of a disintegrating civilization.
When the idea of universal, state-funded primary education swept across (northern) states in the 1830s and ’40s, its advocates (led by Horace Mann in Massachusetts) argued that public schools would drive economic progress, cultural cohesion and moral improvement. Ever since, education has been viewed as a panacea for addressing social problems that are too complex or intractable to resolve in the political arena; if we grown-ups can’t figure things out, let’s kick the can down the road and hope that the next generation will be better prepared than we were.
As historian Henry Perkinson observed in a cogent 1968 study (1), education is an “imperfect panacea” that does not actually have the power to change society. Schools reflect cultural realities much more than they shape them. The radical educator John Holt once wrote in a letter that “to suppose that someone who is really concerned about poverty and injustice in this country can best oppose it by talking against them in public schools seems to me so nonsensical that I can hardly think about it.” (2)
Holt and other radicals lost the American faith in public schools in the 1960s; the impossible challenges of recent decades have diminished or shattered that confidence among a larger share of the public. It is by now painfully obvious that schools are on the receiving end of social and political conflict and cultural dysfunction. The results are in today’s headlines almost daily.
And so our concerns about education revolve around book banning and teachers’ unions, test scores and property taxes, and the provision of security with metal detectors or the arming of school personnel. At best, such concerns are only marginally connected with the essential meaning of “education” — the processes of teaching, learning, human development and community-building that induct the young generation into their surrounding culture and civilization.
What is missing from the news stories and public discussion, as well as from the sparse assortment of books in the “Education” sections of most bookstores and libraries, is a serious examination of the purposes of education at a time of cultural and ecological decline. We expect schools to carry on business as usual, preparing young people to be competent workers and citizens, when our society has entered a phase of disruptive transition that is anything but usual.
This transition began in the 1960s, and Holt and his radical peers responded with thoughtful, incisive critiques of the industrial-age system of schooling that was no longer adequate for a changing world. It is hard to imagine now, but their books were bestsellers, reviewed in serious publications and assigned in college and graduate courses. Summerhill by A.S. Neill, Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, The Lives of Children by George Dennison, Holt’s own How Children Fail and several other titles, and works by still other education critics perceived that young people needed a more freeing, holistic, personalistic learning environment if they were to take on the challenges of this new world.
But this emerging understanding was thoroughly stifled by the cultural backlash that manifested in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, a surge of religious fundamentalism and the assertion of dominance by massive corporations and concentrated wealth. Moms for Liberty (or whatever the hell they call themselves) are the tip of a prodigious cultural iceberg that has squelched educational transformation for decades now.
Reagan’s 1983 white paper on education, A Nation at Risk, was the single most blatant and influential blast of the reactionary agenda, sparking a 40-year (and still counting) crusade for the standardization, bureaucratization and corporatization of schools on the part of government agencies, foundations, business leaders, and schools of education. They have sought to preserve conventional understandings of teaching and learning and rigid, hierarchical structures of administration in the face of fundamental cultural challenges that threaten to undermine them.
And they have succeeded, so far. The visionaries of the ’60s have been all but forgotten, and no one has taken their place. Sure, there are a few radical academics and inspiring teachers scattered across the land, but no thought leader with the reach that Neill, Goodman and Holt attained during their time of countercultural aspiration.
But as things fall apart, as systems collapse and the atmosphere boils, business as usual cannot continue. Conventional approaches to education will prove to be more and more out of touch with the pressing realities of a new time. I explained this in an obscure essay I published back in 2009:
Industrial culture and all that it implies — urbanization, mechanization, globalization — cannot be sustained. If we do not thoughtfully design and start to build a new civilization better attuned to the patterns and limitations of nature, then the old one will collapse into an ugly, destructive mess, of which post-Katrina New Orleans was a modest preview.
Given this impending reality, I wrote:
[I]t is terribly insufficient to tinker with existing educational practices and policies to try to make our current schools more effective or even a little more humane. If this historical moment is so critical, then no educational agenda is fully responsive to the conditions of our time unless it radically questions the foundational assumptions that produced, and continue to prop up, the educational arm of the technocracy. . . The days of standardized learning are as numbered as the days of cheap fossil fuel. (3)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was becoming evident that an overwhelming industrial culture would supplant the agrarian/local/small-d democratic society that had defined America until then, the philosopher John Dewey rose to the occasion and explored in great depth how education would need to adapt to maintain humane and democratic values in that harsh new age. The progressive education movement that he helped inspire did infuse new ideas and practices into schooling — in some communities more than in others. But the technocratic establishment declined to fully embraced his vision, and today he is largely forgotten outside academic settings.
Many of the ’60s radicals were influenced by Dewey, though, and explicitly stated that in their time, it was necessary to apply his insights to the new conditions of the coming post-industrial age. They agreed with Dewey that changing social conditions demand fresh rethinking of the purposes, goals and processes of teaching, learning, and school management. The political and cultural establishment rejected their views. But they were right then, and they are even more right, and more relevant, now that industrial age society is so obviously disintegrating. (4)
I am not arguing that a transformation of schools will save our culture or solve entrenched social problems. As I’ve suggested, education does not have that power. Rather, like Dewey and the ’60s rebels, I am asking how we can prepare young people, nurture and empower them to adapt to the conditions within which they will spend their lives. The conditions have changed drastically, but schools haven’t.
Young people are woefully unprepared for the whirlwind ahead, and so they become alienated, anxious, depressed, and sometimes violent. Their culture is failing them, and so is their education. The least we can do is attend to their delicate development more carefully, to give them enough strength and moral grounding to face the challenges raining down on them.
Notes:
1. Henry J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education 1865–1965 (Random House, 1968).
2. Holt’s comment came in a 1976 letter to George Dennison, published in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (edited by Susannah Sheffer; Ohio State Univ. Press, 1990).
3. From my essay “Education After the Empire” in Education and Hope in Troubled Times (edited by H. Svi Shapiro; Routledge, 2009).
4. I make this argument, and explore the ’60s radicals’ ideas in depth, in Free Schools, Free People (SUNY Press, 2002).
