Institutions and Education
Here’s the second of James Herndon’s explanatory notes that I’ll write on.
It’s not overstating it to say that this insight has completely changed my perspective on the word.
Here’s how Herndon puts it:
“The first characteristic of any institution is that no matter what the inevitable purpose for which it was invented, it must devote all its energy to doing the exact opposite.”
For example, a savings bank should be there to be a safe place where people can save their money. But, in practice, the bank doesn’t actually want to help people save their money. They want them to not only spend all their money, but go into debt and take out loans. Because, if everyone really saved all their money, the bank would really not serve much of a purpose.
The church is an institution that is supposed to help connect people to God (this thinking works for other religions as well). But in reality, the church keeps people far from God and focused on buildings, politics, money, and a hundred other things that don’t matter at all. Because, if people really were able to connect fully with God, there would be not much need for the church.
A government is an institution that is supposed to regulate the laws and provide basic services and protections to its people. But of course the government doesn’t do anything like this, and instead inspires unrest and disorder and incompetency. Because, should a people ever be fairly governed, they would have very little use for a bureaucracy.
Then comes the school. This institution is supposed to teach children. But in fact, it must “inspire students to stupidity” in order to keep the system going. The school must restrict learning and strangle it so much that it never happens. Because if the school were really teach children all they needed to know to do well in the world, children would have little need for the school after a few years at the most. And they got them kids for 13 years.
This leads to the second characteristic of any institution. THE INSTITUTION MUST CONTINUE TO EXIST. As Herndon says, “The second characteristic is the reason for the first.”
We’ll pick on schools for a while, but we could easily focus on any institution.
For example, my friend’s kid was in a Kindergarten class. The teacher would ask a question and my friend’s child always had the answer. This made it hard for the other kids to answer, so the teacher mentioned this to the parent, who said, “Next time, just find something else to do.” So, the next time it happened, the kid got up and went to go read a book, which was insulting and insubordinate to the teacher. Then, the parents had to further instruct the child to “think of something else” when the teacher was asking questions.
Which means, this little girl is learning How To Pretend Like You Don’t Know Something, which is a very foundational thing for the school to teach, seeing how the school already knows what it is going to teach whether you know it or not.
My son is having a lot of the same experiences in his first year. Largely he’s learning How to Feel Bad During PTO Fundraisers, How to Avoid Authority When You Want Something Harder to Do, and How to Sit in the Same Room With 20 Friends Without Playing With Any of Them.
When visiting my niece at her school for lunch, I was reminded of the extremely important subject of How to Sit Down and Shut Up.
Herndon goes on to say that schools are very much aware that they don’t teach much and must restrict what they teach. In fact, everyone knows that should you want to learn something, the last place you will go is to a school. If you want to learn how to read, rather than teaching you how to read, the school will break down reading into 100 different lessons and sub-lessons and invent reading rules to help kids learn things they already know how to do.
Herndon says, “You want to learn something? The school says, ‘Hire a tutor! Watch TV! Get your parents to teach you! Fuck you!’” We’re trying to run a school here.
You may think the way to correct this is to draw criticism against the institution to change. But institutions thrive on criticism and very slow change because it allows them to adapt, and most of all…endure. Institutions have the same genetic drive to keep surviving and reproducing and spreading their DNA everywhere that any other species does.
Should the institution come under fire, it absorbs the criticism, calls a committee, studies the issue, makes recommendations, and keeps moving in the same direction. Delay decisions, small changes, keep moving.
In a very poignant thought, Herndon says “The public school is the closest thing we have in America to a national established church…and it should be possible to treat it and deal withit as the church has been treated and dealt with.”
As hard as it might be to see, the public school is very much like the early national churches that demanded obedience and could do pretty much whatever they damned well please because it was in the name of God. Schools do what they like and don’t have to change because it is in the name of educating our kids, and politicians will always give them more money, because who wants to be the candidate that hates kids?
Herndon says to treat the schools like they did the national churches. Strip away their authority. Make them optional. Remove the fear.
How we go about these things I don’t know, but an institution’s ability to perpetuate the problem they claim to be eradicating is very troublesome and something I find myself thinking about all the time.
