The standardized child

Children all over America are now being funneled back into that great crumbling structure we call public education. Only 75% of them will ever graduate high school, a pathetic number compared to the high 90’s achieved elsewhere. Many that do graduate will be semiliterate and unprepared for work, citizenship, and managing their own lives. I’m all for public schooling, but not the way it is done now.

One of my favorite quotes about the public school system comes from an educational reformer whose name, unfortunately, I forget. He said, “People say our school system is doing a terrible job. This is not true. It’s doing a great job of preparing the farm kids of 1900 for the factory jobs of the 1920’s”

I can’t go through the whole history of public schooling here, but remember that it started in the 1800’s in Prussia. The Prussians had just lost a war and decided that their kids needed more discipline. Hence, kindergarten, a regimented place away from home and family to teach conformity and obedience. The modern public school in America copied the Prussians when industrial development was drawing people away from the farms and into factories. The factory school system was expressly designed to filter out the intellectually promising from the future coal shovelers, obedient employees from free thinkers and rebels, and to teach most children that spending their days in oppressed boredom was normal. If you think this assessment is unduly harsh, read the words of those who designed the system.

Means become ends. When we lecture and test, we teach our children to gorge information and puke it out onto paper (What I call “bulemic education”). When we build and run our schools like medium security prisons, we create young adults fit for prison, either the corporate or legal type. Where else in society are people restricted to a set of buildings under threat of punishment and forced to run from one concrete box to another when a bell rings? The modern urban school, with its security guards and metal detectors, is even closer to the paradigm.

Ask any teacher or school administrator what they are trying to accomplish and you’ll get something like, “We’re trying to prepare kids for the adult world and develop their full potential as individuals.” They mean it. Too bad they have the wrong tool for the job – a deadening, infantilizing, conformist, repressive system. To start with, we need to get rid of grades, grades, and walls.

The first grades we need to eliminate are the age related ones. All students get rammed through a certain amount of material in a fixed time period, ready or not. If they are far enough behind their peers, they get held back, a humiliating and often school ending experience in that strictly age-segregated world. Mostly they get shoved onward, unready for the next force-feeding. Different people take different amounts of time to learn the same concepts and skills, so give each child the time to actually fully learn a skill or body of knowledge before moving on. Maybe it will take one child five years to learn what another learns in five months. So be it. Perhaps some kid will take his entire school career just to achieve basic literacy. At least he will be literate. Teachers should be teaching particular bodies of knowledge, not warm bodies of a particular age. Why allow for failure at all? We didn’t have a time limit on learning to walk, or methodological restrictions. We just tried till we got it.

Letter grades are simply a crime against children. When you consider all the factors outside a child’s control that influence that single letter summary, you realize what an absurd, arbitrary value judgement it is. “Ok kid, you have ADD, your teacher is a burnout, you are harassed by bullies, you are in a class of 35 kids, your dad is an abusive alcoholic, you didn’t get breakfast, and you had a stomach flu the day before the final. Here’s a D – you’re a moron.” Letter grades are not accurate measures of knowledge or effort. They are just as often indicators of pure dumb luck. And yet, we are dedicated to the utterly futile practice of standardized testing.

Standardized testing will work when someone invents the standardized child.

Millions of children are being tested for:

-How well they can handle intellectual bulemia
-How well they are able to work under time pressure and fear of failure without reference materials
-Their physical and emotional state on testing day
-How well their teachers “taught to the test”

We are testing how well children fit our system. It makes millions for the testing industry and gives people numbers to point at, but nothing more. The “No Child Left Behind Act”, with its combination of standardized testing and penalizing low scoring schools, is just an excuse for bayoneting the wounded.

If we want to prepare children for real life, why do we isolate them all day in an artificial environment? Why is anybody surprised when so many children find their studies irrelevant to their lives, or react like the prisoners that they are? Schools need to be integrated into the real life of the community. Yes, it will be more difficult to administrate, but why should that be the priority? All real learning is voluntary, and when children can make a connection between their lives and their studies, they will want to learn.

Our present attempts at educational repair are like computerizing a steam engine. It costs a lot and generates impressive numbers, but it’s still inefficient. It will be an act of bravery to give up on the old model, with all of its benefits for vested interests, and design a new model based on the needs of children today.