Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education/Chapter 1 Supplemental Materials/What is the purpose of schooling? 3
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What is the Purpose of Schooling? by Darren Ralston
What we believe
As a working teacher, I have heard many teachers tell their students that the purpose of going to school is so that students can get a better job and make more money. Yet what we tell students and what they believe are two different things. Of the two, the most important is what is believed. Students believe they are in school for job training. Quite frankly, in many cases, this belief renders the purpose of coming to school pointless, and the students are fully aware of this. The focus of the coursework for graduation is the core curricula of Math, Science, Social Sciences, and English. While these courses are all very important to the cultivation of intelligence, they do not address the direct job-interests of many students; however, we value these courses over the vocational studies many students would reap greater benefits from.
I am not suggesting we shouldn’t require students to take these core curricula, but who are we fooling? I cannot count how many times I’ve heard, “How am I going to use this in the real world?” I used to craft a reply using teacher-reasoning, only to be countered with “But I’m going to be a ________.” How would a landscaper, carpenter, or policeman benefit career-wise from learning about John Donne? I would love to see more policemen who enjoyed Donne’s poetry. It might make getting a speeding ticket more enjoyable. Unfortunately, policemen will probably never really need Donne, and receiving a speeding ticket will still remain a miserable experience.
The way we package our rationale to schooling is not consistent with its viability. What we teach in the core curricula is valuable, but not in a tangible, job-skills way. The core curricula which we so value is in fact a package of college prep courses, and the last time I checked, college is not a job. You pay the school for the privilege of attending. That is, unless you teach at one. Just because we believe we’re training students for employment doesn’t make it so.
Another belief is that we are teaching kids “to better them.” I’ve heard this phrase many times, and I still don’t get it. It has the implication of the teacher as the physician healing the sick. This might be closer to the truth, but at the same time, it supposes that the kids are wallowing in some type of collective misery that can only be cured by knowledge. Perhaps it is only the semantics of this type of thinking that I recoil from—seeing the student as a sub-creature that must be dragged out of the muck, hosed off, and hung out to dry into a squeaky clean being who has been “bettered.”
This point of view is one that leads to so many teachers feeling that the service they provide to their students, despite the sacrifice, goes unappreciated. Once anyone feels this way, they either quit, or stay and burn out, thus becoming ineffective.
The “Fair and Balanced” Truth
The original purpose of schooling was to teach students to become literate in signs and systems. It was not for everyone, and it cost money. Privilege was bred through tutelage. In the early years of the American school system, employment was not the main goal of schooling. What was important to the early schools was that students learn just enough to make them capable of signing their name, reading public postings and newspapers, and performing basic mathematic functions (Myers, 1996). Most children went to school for the primary years, dropping out to work on farms or in factories. The purpose was not to school for the workplace, but rather for the marketplace and for the purpose of allowing citizens to take an active part in the governance of their country (TIME, 1939).
But as time marched on and the American nation became more urbanized and we went from an agrarian economy to the corporate economy of today, more elaborate forms of literacy became necessary for consumers to navigate our increasingly complex marketplace and political landscape. Notice that the purpose is still the same, but the required level of literacy competency has been re-defined. In addition to this the workplace is, most often, away from the home, and is a place that children are not allowed to be. In the past, this wasn’t the case. Rural life was inclusive to children. For example, the reason we have the summers off, is because that is the active time for farming. Now that family farms are becoming more of a hobby, there’s no real reason to keep the summer break, but it remains a tradition.
With the workplace putting more and more demands on the average American, schools have become a sort of state sponsored childcare program, beginning with Head Start in 1964, whose stated purpose was to create “development programs which serve children from birth to age 5, pregnant women, and their families. They are child-focused programs and have the overall goal of increasing the school readiness of young children in low-income families” (Health and human services, 2006). This is for low-income families though, those who cannot afford childcare. Just as a side note, look at the Works Cited section, and you’ll see that the Head Start’s website is on the U.S. government’s Health and Human Services page, rather than education. Kids need babysitters. Why else do we schedule the school day to coincide with working hours and the work week? However, we believe they need to learn skills that will make them viable in the workplace. These needs are in fact contradictory, at least to me. Creating good employees should be a side-effect of a greater and more wholesome goal rather than the goal itself.
Besides, creating good employees seems to be a dishonest act, given the current data on careers and employee retention, “the average adult will change careers, not just jobs, three to four times in his or her lifetime” (Naisbitt & Arburdene, 1991). For someone to consider the possibility of moving up from the ground floor in a company is naïve at best. Are we teaching this to our students? Are we preparing them for these eventualities, and are we giving them the tools to adequately handle them? We still want students to become savvy consumers, and competent citizens, and we definitely still want them to be literate in the signs and systems of our culture, so how do we reconcile the truth of schooling with our desire for making that schooling worthwhile and valuable to the student?
| A very true to life cartoon |
Some of my Realizations
I would like to address the perspective of “student bettering.” Teaching has to be reciprocal. Teachers have a lot to learn from students, and the day a teacher believes he knows everything there is to know about students, that is the day that teacher has given up. I have found that I have become a better person along with my students. You don’t “better students,” instead you teach them how to identify those aspects in their own lives that they can approach and tinker with to get them to their liking. At best, the teacher should enlighten students with possibility. No one will “get bettered,” unless they do it themselves. Or as Neil Postman puts it in his book, The End of Education, “schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves” (Postman, 1995). I no longer tell my students that they come to school so they can get a better job. So when they ask me how they could ever possibly use something from my class, I tell them that it is not about the material that they are working with, but how they are working with it. The classic example in English is that of Shakespeare. The idea is not the text itself, but how a student goes about solving the puzzle for its meaning. Once they get to the bottom of these mysteries, they’ve just created another tool they can use to understand the world around them. This approach, I’ve noticed, even if it doesn’t result in a rabid interest in everything Shakespeare, at least allows the student to see another aspect of why we do what we do.
Essay Question:
The etymology of the word “education” is ex ducare, from Latin, meaning to lead out or draw forth. How does this correlate to Postman’s claim that schooling is a way to allow the young to find reasons to continue to educate themselves?
Multiple Choice Questions:
1 The author of this essay claims that the purpose of our core curricula at present is primarily to _________.
a. allow students to get better jobs b. “better” students c. prepare students for college d. provide students with a good cognitive toolbox
2 The author of this essay claims that the role of the teacher as a physician can lead to _________.
a. teacher burnout b. unexpectedly high results c. failure d. delusions of grandeur
3 The original purpose of schooling was to....
a. discipline children into the proper codes of behavior b. harvest intelligent and meaningful self thinkers c. teach students to become literate in signs and systems d. provide parents a break from the duties of parenthood
4 The average American is expected to change careers, not jobs, how many times?
a. 1-2 times b. 2-3 times c. 3-4 times d. 4-5 times
5 What does the author of this essay tell students when they confront him with the “how will I ever use this in my life?” question?
a. That everything is important and interrelated, whether you can believe it or not. b. You probably won’t, but do it anyway. c. You may be surprised at what is useful ten years down the road, since many people change careers. d. It’s not what you are studying or learning about, but rather how you go about learning it that is helpful.
Answer key: 1) c 2) a 3) c 4) c 5) d
Citations:
Naisbitt & Arburdene qtd. In Northeastern Junior College, Sterling, CO (2006) . Counseling and Advising page http://www.njc.edu/counseling/Myths.html
Myers, Miles (1996). A study on the development and history of literacy, Changing Our Minds 39-62 published by National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana IL
Author unknown (1939). The importance of education as a means toward citizenship [Electronic version 800.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,762683,00.html]. TIME Magazine
Brief explanation of Head Start Program (2006). Retrieved September 20, 2006 from. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/hsb/about/generalinformation/index.htm
Postman, Neil (1995). A study on the purpose of schooling, The End of Education published Vintage, New York.
