Too much School?

It’s not a question of too much or little schooling, but one of of kind: we need to ask what it is we are after with the goal of schooling. It seems to me that there is much confusion about what this goal actually is and this shows up in our classrooms: is the goal to learn skills that are employable (I call this ‘training’) OR is the goal to learn how to think well to improve the quality of our lives (I call this ‘education’)?

Until we establish what the goal of schooling is, our classrooms become microcosms of publicly funded schizophrenia where we say we want the latter but test only for the former!

And school trustees are caught between a rock and a hard place trying to create a system that addresses both and fails equally well to achieve either!

And then there’s the industrialized educational system itself that manufactures standards for qualifications and certifications unrelated to functioning well in the real world but insists (subsidized by the public) that these are necessary precursors to functioning successfully in it.

How was maintenance organized and rent ever collected by apartment superintendents, for example, before community colleges introduced courses in ‘Property Management’ and corporate owners insisted that this certification become a prerequisite for the exalted position? Or how did a security guard ever figure out how to observe and report before certification in ‘Security Guard Training’ became an employment prerequisite? Once, long ago, these ‘skills’ were obtainable in minutes by anyone not socially retarded, educated enough to able to think cogently, read and write and speak at a fundamental level, and aided (Gasp!) by on-the-job training paid for by the employer prior to the age of the industrial education. Now, however, all of us are impeded by the high costs of certification for access to minimum skill level jobs. I expect a mandatory certification course shortly in ‘Food and Drink Safety and Preparation’ for working at the local fast foods outlet and bistro. It’s amazing we are still able to walk down a sidewalk successfully without a diploma in ‘Walking on Sidewalks’.

I see much of our schooling as nothing more and nothing less than a kind of corporate welfare industry, churning out graduates with basic skills masked to be reflective of ‘skills training’ they already possessed prior to ‘graduating’ and calling this travesty an ‘education’ equivalent to those who have learned how to communicate effectively, think logically, comprehend accurately, make creative and critical links between disparate areas of overlap, and who can understand why principle must ground practice and implement changes successfully to achieve goals efficiently. Once upon a time, this is what a degree represented. Now, it represents a sizable financial investment to earn a rubber stamp of ‘educated’.. whatever that now means. When one supports a system that tries to be all things to all people, one ends up supporting a system that does nothing well.

Real life is not like any classroom I’ve been in: first, you get the punishment, and then it’s up to you to figure out what the important lesson is. A good education should provide us the means to learn many of the most important lessons real life confronts us with one step removed from that hot stove and move us much further down this learning curve.

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