Mythconceptions about the purpose of schools

May 22, 2011 By Michael E. Lopez 8 Comments

(The mythtake would be thinking that these puns ever get old…)

So there’s this new, poorly argued, platitude-ridden, bit-o-pablum opinion piece by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post this morning: “Five Myths about America’s Schools”.   Consider the source and the title and the article can probably pretty much write itself in your head.  I had initially intended to blog about the article, but I got sidetracked by something I found myself writing.  Part of Farhi’s argument about why Charter Schools aren’t great runs thusly:

Credit for (the academic success of some charter schools’ students) may rest solely with the students, however. Charter school students are among the most motivated, as are their parents, who sought an alternative education for their children and mastered the intricacies of admission.

And siphoning off those better students through choice may create the same disastrous effect as de facto segregation through the geography of poverty — it leaves behind those least able to advocate for themselves and most susceptible to falling through the cracks.

Now in the first place, Farhi’s not thinking clearly.  Credit for something as complex as a student’s learning outcomes cannot — pretty much by definition — go solely to the student.  Even if the student learns to duck from walking into doorway, the doorway deserves a little bit of the “credit”.   So let’s stop with the “sole” responsibility bullcrap.

But this really got me thinking about “credit”, and about necessary and sufficient conditions for learning outcomes. It may be that schools not only don’t deserve sole credit (which seems obvious), but even that they don’t even deserve chief credit.   What is the purpose of a school, after all?

“TO EDUCATE STUDENTS!” is the universal reply.

And it’s probably true, but only at an extremely general level of description.  What’s the purpose of a carburetor?   “TO MAKE THE CAR GO!” might be the response.  And that’s true, too, as far as it goes.  But the purpose of the carburetor is, more properly, to create an admixture of air and fuel in preparation for combustion.

The education of students is no less a complex thing (and may be more complex) than the operation of an automobile.   The role of the school in this process (and here we’re talking solely about the “learning” side of schools, not the containment or the certification side) deserves some elaboration, I think.  One way to think about this is to identify the components of the process:

The school (that is, the teachers, the buildings, the various media, and the administration)The studentThe student’s support network: family, friends, etc.The student’s physical resources: his home, books and other media, school supplies, etc.Widespread social pressures and customs

That may just be a partial list.  I was trying to aim for “broad” components: there’s no need to discuss every screw thread in the carburetor, after all.  I’m also only including the parts of a successful education, a functioning education.  Education (like most things) can go wrong in two ways: internal failure or external attack.  A car can break down, or it can get invaded by cable-eating engine weevils; a student’s education can break down internally due to component failure, or it can be destroyed by incessant bullying.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t think about the external things that can interfere with education, I’m just not dealing with them right now.

So what’s the school’s role in all this?  I want to float the idea that the purpose of the school is to create a fully supportive environment in which learning can take place, and to exclude external threats.  This does NOT mean that the school is required to fix the other parts of the process that go wrong, although perhaps it can attempt to mitigate their failure, just as a properly functioning steering column can mitigate the disaster of a brake failure in some situations.

Education can take place with the following sufficient conditions:

Student wants to learn.Student has access to a book with the stuff he wants to learn in it.Student can read.Student has time to read.Student actually chooses to read.Student understands the book.

It’s not clear to me, though, that any of these are really necessary conditions, except maybe the last two.  And they aren’t necessary in their specific forms, but in terms of more general principle:

The student chooses to learnThe student understands what he has attempted to learn

That the other conditions aren’t necessary seems obvious.  You can learn without wanting to, for instance.  I learned about how to handle the death of a small child in the family a few years back.  I didn’t want to learn that.   Had I been given a choice, I would have walked away immediately, saying “Screw this.  I don’t want to know this.”  But there it was.  So desire isn’t necessary to learning.  We taught unwilling recruits how to be soldiers all the time back in the day, and people have been doing it for centuries.  And you might think, based on these examples, that there’s no way to gently teach someone who doesn’t want to learn, and so that our schools do require a desire to learn if they are to avoid resorting to extremely unpalatable methodology.  Maybe.  But that’s not really my point.

My point is that if you take the things that are actually necessary to education, and you ask yourself, “What role does the school have to play in these?”, it seems that the lion’s share of the “credit” for education belongs to the student.  The school, it seems, exists primarily to provide facilitation for learning.

And if that’s the case, then we might have really excellent schools doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing in order to create the conditions of successful learning, but whose students are nonetheless failing to learn, but through no fault of the schools, just as every non-functioning car isn’t the result of the engine’s going out.  Sometimes the ignition system doesn’t work, sometimes the wheels get stolen, sometimes the tranny falls apart.

Apropos of the Whitehead discussion below, I think that part of a school’s job is probably to accentuate the ways in which education is “relevant” to the students’ lives; it is in this way that I think schools can influence (though in no way take “credit” for) whether a student actually chooses to learn.   You might also think that student desire can be influenced less subtly than through full-blown coercion: gold stars, certificates, displays of love and affection, etc.   But that sort of cajoling isn’t really education — it’s just part of what goes into establishing one sufficient condition, and it has its own moral problems as well.

Anyway, I think we pretty much stink at that — at making education relevant, at bringing out desire.  Schools pretty consistently fail at this, and it’s for many of the reasons that Whitehead (and Rousseau, and Dewey, and others) describe, not least of which is that it’s fundamentally up to the student to decide what he or she wants to do.

But maybe that’s just not a school’s job.  Maybe we expect too much.

-->Filed Under: Children, Culture, Education About Michael E. Lopez
CommentsDiana Senechal says: May 22, 2011 at 11:32 am

You make a very important distinction between “wanting to learn” and “choosing to learn.” Two very different things, frequently confused.

Stuart Buck says: May 22, 2011 at 12:13 pm

Charter school students are among the most motivated, as are their parents, who sought an alternative education for their children and mastered the intricacies of admission.

I wonder about people who say stuff like this. My children have gone to a public charter school, and are currently at the traditional public school down the street. In both cases, the “intricacies of admission” were exactly the same: filling out a paper form. That’s it.

Stuart Buck says: May 22, 2011 at 12:16 pm

And the “motivation” argument (one of Ravitch’s favorites) is without evidentiary support. On average, kids come into charter schools with scores the same or lower than their public school peers (we know this from multiple studies). There is no evidence that charter school students overall are “motivated” in any sense that would give the charter schools an unfair advantage, as anti-charter ideologues want to suggest.

Cal says: May 22, 2011 at 12:42 pm

My comments are random; my response to the post as a whole is good lord, get over yourself. You’re either wrong, obvious, or obviously wrong.

Even if the student learns to duck from walking into doorway, the doorway deserves a little bit of the “credit”.

What moronic drivel.

And in fact, most education isn’t “relevant” to kids without the cognitive ability to manage it. You can’t genuinely make the quadratic equation “relevant”. Schools didn’t use to have to make learning relevant, because kids who didn’t care could leave. It’s not school that has changed, but the population. Which means you took a whole bunch of words to state the manifestly obvious–when you weren’t spouting drivel, that is.

It’s not clear to you that the ability to understand isn’t a necessary condition? Good god.

And a whole post on schools and students without a single mention of cognitive ability.

In fact, the point of schools is to educate those who can’t or won’t learn by themselves. And we could do it much better if we understood how much cognitive ability plays a part in outcomes.

CarolineSF says: May 22, 2011 at 1:22 pm

I have to make the same rebuttals as usual to Stuart Buck’s same misleading claims.

At least in my district and I believe in most, students are enrolled in a school by default. My district is an all-choice district, which means that families may choose a public school (and be in a lottery for the spot if there are more applications than openings) — but even if they don’t apply for any schools or hit the lottery for those they applied for, the family will be assigned to a school in the district by default.

The charter schools set their own admissions criteria, essentially overseen by and accountable to no one. The most successful charter high school (actually the only successful charter high school) in our district has a 13-page enrollment application that requires multiple essay-length answers by the parent, an essay from the student, teacher recommendations and more. The other charter high schools just have a brief application — but I know a family whose daughter had been expelled from a private school, and one of those charter high schools refused to accept her application until threats of complaining to the school board appeared. That’s just one that appeared on the public radar. They do what they want.

So, students are assigned to a public school by default, even if the family does nothing at all. Families must learn about a charter school and specifically decide to apply, and then jump through whatever hoops the charter school operator wants to impose, because charter operators are free to impose hoops, and they do so.

If students come into charter schools with lower scores than their public school peers, that makes sense, as the scores of their public school peers include those who are doing well in public school and are uninterested in seeking out a charter. By definition, in many cases, families are seeking out charters because they are not satisfied with the current schools. However, the low-scoring students whose families are not equipped or motivated to seek out a charter are not going to apply to the charter. The low-scoring students who apply to charters are those whose families were equipped and motivated to seek out the charter. Those are two different subsets of low-scoring students.

Stuart Buck says: May 22, 2011 at 1:46 pm

OK, so now we know that charter enrollment can be very different, as is public school enrollment (no one in my state is enrolled “by default,” whatever that means — you most definitely have to fill out forms, prove that your kids are immunized, prove that you are a resident of the zone, etc.). Until someone does a systematic survey, there is no basis whatsoever for claiming that the charter school enrollment process is any different from other public schools (on average).

And if kids are coming into charters with lower scores, what’s the point of all the incessant griping about some sort of unfair charter school advantage? (“Oooh, I’m so peeved when a school gets to educate the better of the below-average students, as opposed to a mix of bad and good students.”)

tim-10-ber says: May 22, 2011 at 3:53 pm

I call the the zoned schools “default” schools as those are the schools students are put in who have no choice. My district will soon be all choice.

Second, the vast majority of kids in our charter schools are one or two grade levels below the grade they are “in”.

The charter school parents realize the default schools have failed their kids — either the teachers did not care, could not figure out how to connect, the curriculum was weak or all of the above…

The default schools become the schools where kids lose hope as they know all that could have left…have left. This is where teachers need to step in and make learning exciting and the kids believe they can excel…

Soon our district will be all choice — at least the high school will be –hopefully the elementary and middle will be too.

Making a choice to attend a school seems to help with the ownership of education…at least that has been my experience…

CarolineSF says: May 22, 2011 at 4:10 pm

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in my community on that, Tim-10-ber — the neighborhood schools advocates say that going to school close to home promotes more ownership; the choice advocates say that choosing a school promotes more ownership. I went into it without a strong viewpoint either way, but the fact is that our SF schools have improved in myriad ways during the time the district has been all-choice, so the reality has been clear.

Stuart, sneering doesn’t really make your case. I think it’s quite valid that a school will “do better when it gets to educate the better of the below-average students, as opposed to a mix of bad and good students.” in your words. To be clear, however, the charter that “gets to educate the better of the below-average students” is leaving the really problematic of the below-average students at the public school, to which it then proclaims itself superior, for which it is further rewarded with showers of money.

If all this could be done in the open instead of being shrouded in constant dishonesty, and if the public schools weren’t harmed by it when they’re the ones accepting the more challenged kids, that would be OK. But it’s not, because of the constant deceit.

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