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Public Schools: Programming Not Educating

(Contextualizing High School to College, and 20th to 21st Century Transition Sara Salyers, (Instructor) DSPW Class Discussion Paper, 2011

...the aim of (compulsory) public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else, (H. L. Mencken, in The American Mercury, April 1924, quoted in Gatto).

Until the second half of the twentieth century, the economy of the United States demanded a very large, semi-skilled labor force to service its manufacturing and industrial bases. From its inception, the American public school system was designed to provide that workforce by preparing the largest section of the American population, the 'blue collar' and lower middle classes, for a lifetime of unskilled or semi-skilled employment. And it has done this decade after decade and generation after generation. How do we know this? The original purpose of our compulsory education program was never a secret, even if it has now slipped from our collective memory. For instance, addressing the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson expressed succinctly what would be the continuing educational policy of successive administrations: "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education, and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." In other words, a minority of the population, either through wealth, position or exceptional aptitude, would receive the 'liberal education' that the many had to forego. A liberal education is designed, as the Latin verb 'educare', implies, to "draw out" qualities of reflection, self-expression, ingenuity and initiative, to challenge as well as to inform. Those to be thus liberally educated would be self-selecting by virtue of being able to pay, or to obtain funding, for the privilege. And from this self selecting class, would be drawn those who would

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meet the - proportionately tiny - social requirements for the intellectual, the analytical and the expert, the managerial, the directorial and the gubernatorial of society. The large, unskilled and minimally educated majority, on the other hand, would provide the labor base that drove the economy while the wealthier, better educated and relatively tiny minority directed the social, spiritual and commercial life of the nation. There was, in fact, a kind of pride evident in those who designed and instituted the mandatory school-to-workplace education program - a pride both in the worthiness, (as they saw it), of this massive piece of social engineering, and in the sacrifices that would be made by the majority of the American people. (Though we ought to note that those who expressed that pride were in no danger of sacrificing anything themselves, nor of asking their own children to undergo the conditioning imposed upon generations of workers to ready them for a place in the American coal mines, steel mills, ship yards, assembly lines, power plants, check out stations, packing plants and warehouses.) Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials [children] are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in manufacture, and a large variety in output, (Cubberley 388). For over a century, public schools have trained the population in good citizenship, basic numeracy and literacy AND in: the ability and willingness to accept spoon-fed information without question, the ability to memorize and repeat that spoon-fed information the ability to memorize, repeat and follow instructions and the ability to tolerate the high boredom levels associated with repetitive, drill-and skill based tasks. These, teaching stratagems - along with the monotony, the sense of oppression and the loss of personal identity they inevitably entail - are among the defining elements of a traditional, public school education. This much can be corroborated by anyone who has experienced public school. They are experiences familiar to millions upon millions of Americans; perhaps it is their very familiarity that prevents us from seeing them for what they

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so obviously are, the means of preparing an entire class of human beings to "fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." For what do we really gain by memorizing lists of facts or mathematical formulae that are forgotten as soon as school is over? Only this, that when we have done so, we will have become the passive and obedient, ideal candidates for the (closed), factories, the (dead), steel works and (empty), warehouses of the twenty first century. Educating the masses has proved to be an extraordinarily successful piece of

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engineering. It has been so successful that many, (or even most), educators and students today view unconscious, mechanical repetition, the uncritical repetition of information and acute boredom, as an unavoidable part of getting an education. (And this is despite all that we have learned about the human brain and the way that true learning takes place!) It seems that our ability to swallow propaganda is such that we can be taught to see as necessary evils those things that actually kill the ability to think independently or imaginatively or courageously. This, then, was the educational model that served the economic life of the nation as a whole and served it well, or at least effectively, until the end of the 20th century. There were, of course, casualties. For the program also, consistently and unremittingly, failed the many students who were too bright, too individual or too intellectually idiosyncratic, (different from the 'norm'), to learn by rote and repeat without understanding, to retain large numbers of unrelated facts or blocks of information and to absorb, uncritically, whatever material might be presented to them. Then It All Changed In 1956, the number of white-collar jobs exceeded the number of blue collar jobs for the first time in the history of the United States (Naisbitt J. Megatrends). The end of a two hundred year era had arrived; the Industrial Age, along with its economic and social models, was dying. Though computer based technologies were still in their infancy, manufacturing and heavy industries had begun disappearing to be replaced by 'soft', or service industries. The industrial age pyramid, with all of its hierarchical demands and endowments, had begun to collapse. At the time when the US Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, fully 90 percent of all employment in this country was in agriculture. The great majority of people lived and worked on farms... At the end of World War II, the United States led the world in its industrial manufacturing capabilities. In the years immediately after this war, manufacturing industries grew so that well over half of all jobs were in the manufacturing category. This is no longer the case... At the current time, only about 2% of the US workforce is directly engaged in agricultural jobs, and fewer than 16% of the workforce hold industrial manufacturing jobs (Moursund, David).

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In the 1980's, computer technology finally arrived - a technology that had been dawning since the 60s, when it filled the popular imagination with robots and space cars and

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an increase of leisure time in which workers would enjoy the reduced hours and higher incomes of an automated work place. But instead of spreading the wealth and the leisure, as anticipated, automation merely increased the numbers of the unemployed amongst the unskilled, laboring or blue collar classes and drove down wages. A new labor market, however, was beginning to take emerge and this new market evolved so rapidly that within two decades, the former, pyramid-shaped social model was completely reshaped. There have been dramatic changes in the structure of employment in many countries in recent years. A key aspect of this has been the upskilling of the workforce as employers have shifted their demand requirements to employ more workers possessing higher educational qualifications and with higher skill levels. A by now large academic literature has documented the changing demand for skills in many countries and has looked at the key factors underpinning the observed changes. Some of this work uses evocative phrases like 'collapse in demand for the unskilled', 'the deteriorating position of low skill workers' and 'rapidly rising wage gaps between the skilled and unskilled', all of which are in line with the notion that very large shifts have occurred. What is interesting, and by now well known, is that, despite their increased numbers, the wages of more skilled workers have not fallen relative to the less skilled. In fact the opposite has occurred and wage gaps between graduates and non-graduates rose in both countries (UK and USA) albeit at a faster rate in the US (Machin, Stephen).

In practical terms what this means is that the good old days, when a single wage from one unskilled or semi skilled worker could comfortably support an entire family, have been replaced by an era in which the traditional, (the unskilled or semi skilled), worker faces uncertain employment, low wages, hardship and possible poverty while the new, "upskilled" worker requires a higher level, and indeed a different kind of education from that provided by grade school. Going from high school to the workplace today simply isn't a rewarding, long-term option. The idea that 'schools have not been doing their jobs' is both untrue and unfair. For hundred years and more, the public education system has excelled at educating workers for a specific role in the economy of the nation. That is exactly what they were designed to do. Now, however, the role for which they were designed to train the population is rapidly becoming

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extinct. Thus the present crisis in public school education reflects a system that simply cannot adapt nearly fast enough to the sudden about face of its political mandate. What is true is that schools have not been doing what we need them to do now - what we have been merely pretending that they were supposed to do for the past one hundred years. If we are unable to substantially close the existing skill gaps among racial/ethnic groups and substantially boost the literacy levels of the population as a whole, demographic forces will result in a U.S. population in 2030 with tens of millions of adults unable to meet the requirements of the new economy (Kirsch, Braun, Yamamoto & Sunu 24). History, it seems, is not without a sense of irony, for the future of the nation now

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depends on providing that very class once denied a liberal education, with precisely the kind of education it was "required to forego". And in the dawning light of this new paradigm, at least one naked emperor stands revealed. This is the absolute, mutual incompatibility between the qualities essential for unskilled workers and those that represent the ideals of a liberal education. Habituation to boredom, drill and skill memorization, subordinated and uncritical thought cannot coexist with creative, reflective, critical, independent and original thinking. Training in either will inhibit or destroy the other. 'Watch, repeat do!', and, 'Listen, repeat, do!' are not just mind-numbingly boring approaches to education. They are the antithesis of what education really is. They really teach just two things: how to tolerate the boredom that any alert, imaginative thinking child ought to feel and how to give up control of the learning process and become completely dependent upon an authority figure (the teacher) for a set of arbitrary and quickly forgotten 'right answers'. The incompatibility between education and indoctrination should be as obvious as that of fire and water and yet, while educators and politicians extol the ideals of liberal education, the common practice in grade schools continues to be the drill and kill routine that destroys the ability to learn actively, which is the only kind real learning there is. In post secondary education the need to articulate this incongruity is pressing, since it speaks to a situation now faced in community college classes across the nation. The college students today who fume with silent hostility, who demand in outrage that we simply tell them which book and which page to go to for the right answers, who want to be shown step by step, the process that will allow them to arrive at the right answer, (the teacher's - answer for there are not and never have been any such things as their answers), who want to know what to write so that they can write what you want, these students are crippled thinkers.

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They have been crippled systematically, in the same way and for much the same reason that

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farm birds have their wings clipped. The job of the community college begins with recognizing and then helping to heal that damage. ...the greatest danger to the survival of civilization today is not atomic warfare, not environmental pollution, not the population explosion, not the depletion of natural resources, and not any of the other contemporary crises, but the underlying cause of them all--the accelerating obsolescence of man (sic)... The only hope now seems to be a crash program to retool the present generation of adults with the competencies required to function adequately in a condition of perpetual change (Knowles, Androgogy Versus Pedagogy

! Works Cited Cubberley, Ellwood P. Public School Administration. Boston 1916 Gatto, John Taylor, Against School September 2003, Harper's Magazine, New York. Moursund, David 'Information Age.' IAE-Pedia Jan. 2009. Web Dec. 2009 <http://iae-pedia.org> Kirsch, Braun, Yamamoto & Sunu, 2007, cited in The Creative Community College.p10 Knowles, Malcolm S., The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy, 1970, Houston, TX: Gulf Machin, Stephen. 'The Changing Nature of Labour Demand in the New Economy and Skill Biased Technology Change', Jan. 2002 London School of Economics (Revised). Naisbitt, J. Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. 1982, New York: Warner Books. Roueche, John E. and Roueche, Susanne D. The Creative Community College: Leading Change Through Innovation 2008, Washington DC: American Association of Community Colleges.

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