| The Education Crisis: A System Approach Xavier Sonnerat Drury College Fall 1998 Abstract In this paper, the educational crisis that everybody talks about is discussed with a system approach, that is, an approach taking into consideration many variables to have a full understanding of the real problems of the educational system and their interactions. Thus, several issues are brought up, such as the schools serving as scape goats to mask the failures of the federal government in dealing with internal issues, and the inequalities existing in schools today between the different social classes and sexes. Then, I discuss the cultural values of education we currently have, and explain why they cannot lead to what we expect the schools to do, that is, to provide efficient members for the community. Emphasis is placed on the fact that our current system works well for the way society is built and our economy, but not for the children who have a natural instinct to learn what is useful for them, and who are therefore now restrained in a culture that is profit-driven and competitive to the extreme. The Education Crisis: A System Approach We often say that education is the future. Indeed, we get an education in order to be efficient members of the society and thus contribute to the common good of the nation. We therefore spend many years of our life learning different skills that are supposed to prepare us for what awaits us outside the classroom. However, everybody knows that schools are incompetent: they are said not to give the adequate training to the students, who are therefore lost in “The Real World.” This is very alarming for the whole society as, if education fails, the whole social order is threatened. Of course, when things go wrong, it is very easy to blame the source of all things, that is, the education system. However, this affirmation is often misinterpreted: people in general think that education itself is flawed, but we become more and more aware that it is the system in which education, as many other institutions, operates that has a lot of problems. This is even more alarming as everything rests on the system to function; moreover, changing a whole system is much more difficult than changing just a component of it, so that the strategies that have been used so far to fix problems have just been quick fixes that did not do much good. Now, however, it becomes clearer and clearer that a whole new approach has to be adopted, and everything has to be understood in terms of relations between every element composing the system. This is the approach that I will use in this paper, by presenting different views of the education crisis, and putting them together to have a global understanding of the problem. A first point to consider is that education might not be so bad after all, but it serves as a scape-goat to explain the inability of the politicians to solve social problems. This approach is taken by Berliner and Biddle (1997), who claim that after the rapid expansion of the educational system in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, the schools “came under pressure to provide better opportunities for ... ‘minorities’ who had been under-represented among college bound elites in earlier years.” (pp. 358-359). Thus, schools at that time became more liberal as minorities were better accepted, prayers were forbidden in classrooms, and sex education along with other cultural values were discussed more openly. This new view on education did not please certain groups, such as the Far Right, the Religious Right, and the Neo-conservatives, at all, and they were able to express themselves about this issue when presidents Reagan and Bush took the power in the White House. In 1983, the Regan government thus released a very important report on the status of American education entitled A Nation at Risk, which denounced the liberal views on education, condemned them as “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” (pp. 362-363), and publicized the tenets of conservative educational thought. This position, of course, only reflected a difference in opinions of what schools should be like, but did not provide solutions to fix the real problems in American schools and society that required long-term efforts. To get rid of the guilt posed by the presence of these problems, the Bush government therefore tried to decentralize educational reforms, so that educators were blamed and accused of incompetence, making the people focus on that rather than on federal failures in dealing with domestic problems. We now know that American schools are not generally mediocre, but that some establishments suffer from lack of resources and bad learning environments. Indeed, there are some differences between the schools that can be explained by the elitist politics that the Bush and Reagan administrations approved: school vouchers were proposed to be used in private schools so that the high-status education would have been much less costly than “regular” education, which shows that elites are given more privileges than others, thus increasing the difference in the quality of education given to children in rich and poor neighborhoods. Kozol (1991) talks about this issue by claiming that there are “two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely two different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed.” (p. 370). Basically, we have on one hand rich people who can afford going to good schools, who claim that everything is the way it should be, and that they should not be ashamed of inequalities. These people feel meritorious for their success, so that they do not recognize the problems of others who, unlike the former, do not govern the discussion of the issue. But on the other hand, we have schools with no money, and it is impossible to lie to children about the availability of funds from the government when a rich school is right across the street. The message passed is therefore that the government does not really care about a certain portion of the population, and that it prefers favoring an elite rather than giving an equal chance to everyone. In the less favored schools, children are in such a bad and ugly environment that it is extremely hard for them to focus on their education, too busy trying to survive among drugs and crimes, which build a toughness and hostility in them. As there are such inequalities between rich and poor environments, Sadker and Sadker (1994) claim that there are also important inequalities between boys and girls in elementary schools, the classrooms thus resulting in two distinct worlds: “one of boys in action, the other of girls’ inaction.” (p. 376). Later on in life, this pattern persists as males are paid more than women for performing the same job with the same competence. This is the consequence of the attention the boys receive at school compared to the girls: boys are more helped, allowed to break the rules and to grab more than their share of time, whereas girls are always reminded of following the rules set and are thus less challenged by the discussion, letting the boys make fools of themselves, which is rewarded by the teacher’s attention. This is emphasized by the way children are reinforced: girls often get the “okay” response from a teacher, which, although well meaning, is very superficial; boys however receive more help and praise. This could be explained, I think, by the fact that girls are expected to know better, to be better students and thus to get better grades, so that the teacher does not allow them as much time as boys to answer a question and therefore to be rewarded for giving the right answer, or to be corrected if mistaken. The difference is even more accentuated in the children’s games outside where boys play together in a big central area, letting girls play among themselves on the side of the field. The result of that is that schools are not separated by different sexes with different but equal interests and strengths, but by opposite sexes where boys are strong and powerful and girls weak and helpless, making it a punishment for a misbehaving boy to have to sit with the girls who are thus considered a subspecies. In the 1970s, a book called I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! was even used in class, picturing girls as watching boys in action and using things boys invent. Finally, history books also favor males as more important in the building of our culture as they are two to four times more represented than females, letting girls unable to see the glorious actions of their own sex and without role model. In this first part, I presented an educational system where things are far from being equal for different groups of people as, being part of the privileged ones who are able to attend a good school, we might forget about the others who do not make less efforts than us but who have nevertheless to strive against unfavorable conditions in order to get a good education. As we are the ones who will be taking decisions about the same kind of issues in the near future, it is very important for all of us to have a global perspective of what is really happening for people in general. What we have just seen is that our present system works well for our economy and society where we need a few leaders and a lot of followers, but not for the whole population. To solve problems we therefore need to focus on a system that would work for the community as a whole and not for an small elite. In this second part, I will thus focus on questioning our present system, pointing out its inadequacies in providing children with useful tools to be efficient members of the society. If you think of education as an institution where children will discover the wonders of the world around them, you will be very deceived. Indeed, “schooling falls short from the ideal of ‘young minds being awakened.’ Teachers, for the most part, would be delighted to awaken young minds, but the system within which they must work fundamentally frustrates that desire by insisting that all minds must be opened in the same order, using the same tools, at the same pace, on a certain schedule,” (Quinn, 1997, p. 131) because everybody knows that talents and abilities do not develop at the same rate in different children. Knowing that, we might then wonder who is to blame for all the troubles we have in education today. According to Skinner (1987), students, teachers, and schools are not the ones on which the fault should be rejected as they only obey the culture in which they function. Thus, it looks like if we want to really tackle the problems down, we need to concentrate on changing the source of everything: the culture itself. Indeed, as we have seen in the first part of this paper, the present educational system works well for our society and economy but not for the people, so that we need to change the view we have about education as a whole, and not try to change small pieces within the same culture. Present schools are obviously not a place where kids are supposed to learn: after all, if we made it this far it is because we passed every class we took; but how much do we actually remember of all that? Not a whole lot I am afraid; we might recognize vaguely the contents shown, but we are often incapable to explain spontaneously and logically the mechanisms of a specific model, just because we never reached mastery of the subject, and were not even expected to do so. The scary thing is that even instructors do not expect us to remember what we previously learned, but merely that we have heard about the topic presented. Skinner (1975) claims that “we ask students to read a text and assume that they know what they have read. Effective communication, however, must provide for the so-called acquisition of knowledge, meaning, or information.” (p. 62). We may then wonder whether it is really useful to study everything as we do. Indeed very few persons in their everyday lives will ever have to use the boring stuff children learn at school everyday; so what is the use? If the claim is to teach children how to be efficient members of the society, but we do not teach them anything about what is called “the real world,” then they are just wasting time at school! But of course, instead of rethinking the whole concept of education, it is much easier to blame the incompetent teachers, the lazy kids, and the underfunded schools, which of course does not do any good. It is well accepted that schools should be here to prepare children to have a successful life in society, but we see that their main function is to regulate the flow of competitors into the job market. Indeed, “ a hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States were still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age ... With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change ... [so that now] everybody should go to college.” (Quinn, 1997, p. 135). This shows that we now do not have enough jobs for kids to have, so that we need something to keep them busy until the older adults make some room for them. Because anyway, who gets a job in their college major? Many young people graduate from college, and then immediately go to work in an entirely different field, so that what they have learned will never really serve them. If we were really in school to prepare us for our future profession, we would simply learn only the things we would find useful for it, and we would learn it until mastery of the subject. In our system, however, we spend most of our time studying unrelated things, and we learn over and over again the same things, without ever being expected to master anything, being slowed down when we want to do more than usual. Another important aspect of our culture is that we attach an economic and honorific value to education. Indeed, if you ask students what they expect from a class, they will inevitably tell you that they want good grades so that they can have a scholarship, or because it is important for them to get a honorific title with their degree. What is wrong with this view is that we do not go to school for the sake of learning any more, we just go there to get through classes without too much trouble or to reach a secondary goal. However, Skinner (1976) claims that education should have “its own value or none at all.” (p.110). Indeed, the way students learn is heavily influenced by what they want to get from the class, and also what the teacher expects from them, which is often not too challenging as teachers now fear students’ evaluations of their work, so that they have to give easier tests and less homework to please the kids. Biggs (1996) did a study showing that the way students are assessed in the class influences their learning strategies. Our present educational system uses a quantitative method for several practical reasons: it is objective, unarguable, visible, and allows for a standardization used by companies to compare different candidates. In this view, learning amounts to knowing more and being able to reproduce the learned items. We now know, however, that it is not the most efficient way of learning materials. Unfortunately, in a system where it is more important to have a good grade than to understand what is being taught, students always “attempt to understand the material in ways that they perceive will meet the requirements.” (p. 9), so that they just learn simple factual statements that overlook interconnections between aspects of the material, and which usually miss the author’s point. This technique used by students is the less demanding and as they are allowed to get by pretty easily because of the test format, they cannot be blamed for doing so, even though they learn much less than they normally would by trying to understand the deep meaning of the materials. Thus, Biggs (1996) claims that for students to adopt a deep approach to a subject, that is, for them to reach for the meaning of things and to understand how they work, they should be tested in a way that would encourage them to use such a learning strategy. This would be possible with a qualitative assessment of the students’ knowledge, where they are supposed to “learn cumulatively, interpreting and incorporating new material with what they already know, their understanding progressively changing as they learn ... Content thus evolves cumulatively over the long term, having horizontal interconnections with other topics and subjects, and vertical interconnections with previous and subsequent learnings in the same topic.” (p. 8). In this view, the students would be tested on real-life problems to assess their global understanding of the world around them, and how they can operate upon their environment. The consequences would be that kids would finally learn how to be efficient members of the society as they would be taught how to comprehensively understand their surroundings, whereas right now they are just wasting their time as they are learning things they will never have a use for. Therefore, we understand that it is the whole system that needs to be changed, and that we must stop adopting the quick-fix approach. Indeed, Skinner (1976) touches this subject, pointing out that “the ordinary teacher spends a good share of her time changing the cultural and intellectual habits which the child acquires from its family and surrounding culture.” (p. 109). In Walden Two children are provided with a rich environment in which they can experience things in a practical manner. There is no need for standardization or for grades as every child goes at its own pace. No time is wasted in forcing a child to participate in, or be bored by, activities it has outgrown, and more attention can be given to the slower kid. This is based on the principle that “a baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency does not die out, it’s wiped out.” (p. 114). Children are natural learners, so that in grades K to 3 most children master the skills that citizens need to get along in our society. But starting at age 5, the child is constrained, confined, and compelled to learn what state legislators agree it should learn. Basically, we understand that a child naturally knows what it has to learn as three million years of natural selection have imprinted in its genes what it needs to learn in order to survive. However, how can a legislator who has been raised and confined in a ill society know what is good for a child? It is just nonsense to believe that taking into consideration monetary and political issues, along with a desire for easiness and standardization will do any good for the child’s natural development. A child is naturally interested by things and will learn what it wants. For instance, a kid might never understand percentages, but will master batting averages, which are of course nothing more than statistics. Also, teenage computer-hackers are the living proof that anything can be learned to mastery level just by experiencing, without having to seat for hours in a classroom where the emphasis is put on getting a grade and not leaning. This shows that we should trust the children’s instincts on what to learn, and let them experience things by themselves, if we want them to learn materials that would not make any sense to them if they had to learn it from a restraining institution. In conclusion, we have seen that the education crisis might not come from problems in education itself. As Berliner and Biddle (1997) pointed out, the claim that in general educators are incompetent, the children lazy, and the schools underfunded is a myth propagated by the conservative governments, which did not agree with the last liberal reforms. However, it is true that many problems in the schools are real. We briefly touched a few points showing how much inequality was in the education system today, both at the social class and sex levels, but it is clear that these inequalities cannot be changed within the schools themselves. Indeed, these problems simply reflect the values we have in our culture, so that to fix the illnesses of the educational system, we need to change the system as a whole and not adopt the quick-fix method that does not take into consideration the interactive forces within the culture. Of course, to change a whole culture is a near-to-impossible task, but it is what it will take if we want good long-lasting results. Now, we shall therefore focus on implementing new values in our culture, so that education will finally serve the purpose it is supposed to fulfill, that is, to form efficient members for the community. References Berliner, D. C., and Biddle, B. J. (1997). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. In Konradi, A., and Schmidt, M. (Eds.). (1998). Reading Between the Lines: Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems. (pp. 358-369). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Biggs, J. (1996). Assessing learning quality: Reconciling institutional, staff and educational demands. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 21, 5-15. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. In Konradi, A., and Schmidt, M. (Eds.). (1998). Reading Between the Lines: Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems. (pp. 370-375). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Quinn, D. (1997). My Ishmael. New York: Bantam Books. Sadker, M., and Sadker, D. (1994). Missing in interaction. In Konradi, A., and Schmidt, M. (Eds.). (1998). Reading Between the Lines: Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems. (pp. 375-385). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Skinner, B. F. (1975). The ethics of helping people. In Mattaini, M. A., and Thyer, B. A. (Eds.). (1996). Finding Solutions to Social Problems: Behavioral Strategies for Change. (pp. 61-72). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Skinner, B. F. (1976). Walden Two. (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc. Skinner, B. F. (1987). The shame of American education. In Upon Further Reflection (pp. 113- 130). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc. |
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