Position Paper on Education
The guarantee of education is essential in a civilized society. All Americans should benefit from the opportunity to prepare for a successful future. But many do not. For many students, their years of schooling amount to little more than a waste of time and energy. For some, the experience is even worse, degrading, demoralizing, destructive.
The damage wrought by our school system is largely due to three misconceptions:
That all students of normal intelligence are capable of mastering all of the concepts and facts in the public school curriculum, at the time they are presented. Adults who have achieved a level of security in life may find it easy to recognize and accept their own limitations, brushing them off with a ready confession, "I have no head for math" or "I could never understand poetry." But for a child whose entire sense of self-worth is tied to the school grades which will determine his or her future, such failings are not trifles. Today more than ever, when a high school diploma is considered an essential requirement even for minimum wage employment, failure to grasp a required school subject can understandably make a student feel as if the door to a prosperous future is closed forever.
It is well known that readiness to understand and appreciate certain subjects depends on life experience, motivation, and psychological development, which vary from student to student. In the Republic, Plato advised postponing most academic study until the age of at least thirty. For how can a person who has never earned, spent or invested money, paid taxes, or voted in an election be expected to fully appreciate the value of mathematics, economics, political science or history? Many of our most admired and accomplished individuals of the 20th century did poorly in school as children, among them Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Will Rogers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein. Samuel Clemens quit school at the age of eleven, the same age at which Woodrow Wilson learned to read. Clearly, these individuals learned what they needed to succeed somewhere, at some time, but it was not in school.
That in order to be well-rounded and successful citizens, all adults need to have mastered, at least well enough to earn a passing grade, all of the concepts and facts in the public school curriculum. Most adults today manage their everyday lives quite competently having never understood or long forgotten much of their public school curriculum. It is a rare occasion when one finds oneself trying to remember a concept or fact taught in school because it is actually needed, and in such rare cases, there are plenty of resources to which one can turn which will provide the needed information on the spot. Aside from basic reading and math, most of the necessary skills for work or other areas of life are learned at the time they will be used, when they are most relevant.
Diplomas, advanced degrees and respectable grades are important for future success mainly because employers too readily accept them as predictors of workplace competence. They have little choice. Faced with a pool of applicants with no work or life experience, they have no other way to distinguish between them. Most supervisors know that some of the best employees are the ones with the most undistinguished academic records, but they generally view these individuals as exceptions. In fact, some studies have indicated that there is no significant relationship between academic achievement and job performance.
Because the importance of one’s school record is so heavily stressed by parents, teachers and counselors (not to mention politicians and other community leaders), children who experience early failure in school may come to the conclusion that they can never compete in the world of "respectable" citizens, and look around for other options. Gangs and criminal organizations have no academic admission requirements, and often operate quite successfully in spite of it!
That people other than the students themselves are best equipped to determine the curriculum of public schools. Since the establishment of mandatory school attendance laws in America in the early 1800s, concerned parents, educators, business leaders and politicians have criticized the inadequacy of public educa-tion. Some complain that tax dollars are being wasted on teaching methods that don’t work; some object to subject matter that does not conform to their belief systems; some simply feel that students are not learning what they need to know. Parents who are dissatisfied with the public school system may be able to place their children in private or parochial schools, but although the atmosphere and quality of teaching may differ, the curriculum is usually very similar, since all schools must meet certain criteria for accreditation. For the majority of families that cannot afford tutors and cannot manage to home-school their children, there are simply not many choices, below the college level, in education.
If public schools are failing our children, they are doing so under the direction of professional educators and educational administrators, with a fair amount of input from parents and community groups. To the extent that our high school graduates are illiterate or ill-prepared, they have become that way because of the incompetence or lack of foresight of the adults who oversee their schooling. In such a massive bureaucracy as the public school system, with administrators who often have little awareness of the world outside of their own communities, and teachers with too little time to address the individual needs of students, truly valuable and forward-looking changes are hard to implement.
In other American institutions, the free market reveals what products and services are desired by the public. If a product does not sell, it disappears. If no one uses a service, its providers stop offering it. But since students, as consumers of education, have no choice but to accept what is available, educational institutions have little need to evaluate whether their product is useful or valuable. They are assured of a captive audience and continued funding no matter how poor their product really is.