As with all generalizations, exceptions are significant: there are good public schools, and they are very rare.
A serious critic of the system will “not belittle practical usefulness as a criterion in devising a curriculum, but a school program which teaches little beyond how to fix a fuse, drive a car, set the dinner table, and enhance your personal appearance, isn’t useful enough if your aim is the development of maturity and intelligent citizenship,” as Mortimer Smith writes.
A more current version of Smith’s summary might omit the fuse, the car, and the dinner table, but include “social emotional learning” and “anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.” Indeed, emotional fragility seems to be simultaneously a goal, a virtue, and an essential part of the curriculum in contemporary government-run schools.
The passion for social engineering has even crept into private schools.
The standard response by the educational establishment, when its flaws are noted, is a non-reponse. It is rather an ad hominem attack on those who would point out the uncomfortable facts about the system. Those offering commentary on the flaws of modern public schooling are painted with the usual mix of adjectives: reactionary, narrow-minded, insensitive, and so on.
Those who analyze the American educational establishment and find it wanting aren’t simpletons who “believe our schools are hotbeds of communism,” and they are not “out of touch with the cultural realities of the times.” Those seeking something better than the current public education “don’t begrudge the amount of taxes spent on schools” and “do not believe parents can run schools.”
Attacks on public education are intellectually rigorous. Defenses of that system, when they aren’t simply deflections, amount to slogans rather than thoughts.
Behind the ever-declining amount of curriculum and content offered to students, “there is an influential group of educators, the so-called reconstructionists, who advocate the use of the schools for indoctrination in behalf of a new political, economic, and social order (their own, of course).” Mortimer Smith notes that “we often get short-changed by inadequately, or foolishly, prepared teachers, and that too often a disproportionately large amount of our investment in schools goes for non- or extra-educational purposes.”
It’s worth noting that Smith absolves the teachers. They are victims as much as the parents and students are. A new teacher, the product of four years spent in the so-called “schools of education” in the country’s universities, has been surrounded exclusively by the establishment’s groupthink, and has been isolated from meaningful commentary on the educational system — or has been taught to ignore and ridicule such commentary. It would be unjust to heap anger or blame on such teachers.
He goes on to indicate that
Citizens ought to resist current claims of professional untouchability and the implication that all educational matters are not on a mechanical plane, like buildings and bond issues.
The managers of the educational establishment preside over processes which are, they claim, “too esoteric for lay comprehension.”
The insiders who operate government-run educational systems see themselves in a role similar to the role of the rare literate person in a society filled with people who can’t read. They are the keepers of wisdom, knowledge, and insight, and the general population is supposed to revere and respect them.
The assumption of those who direct governmental education is that they have understanding which the rest of society does not, and cannot, have. The role of those outside the inner circle of educational specialists is politely to submit and never to question.
Some segments of the educational establishment justify their privilege by analogy to the natural sciences and to healthcare professionals, as Mortimer Smith notes:
Currently educators seem to have an urge for playing the role of the exact scientist which causes them to give diagnostic tests and organize educational clinics and workshop laboratories. The constant use of terms borrowed from the medical profession makes one suspect that the educator harbors a secret picture of himself clothed in white uniform, applying his stethoscope with unerring accuracy to the educational heart-beats of American youth.
Other segments of the establishment head in a different, almost opposite direction, and fancy themselves to arbiters of ethics. The moral and quasi-spiritual language includes references to “justice” and “counseling,” in the process of “healing” a student’s mental being — a process in which educators are “heroes” who demonstrate “courage” and “love.” Students are encouraged to explore “mindfulness” and “meditation.”
The words within quotation marks in the preceding paragraph are pulled from standard-issue publications for educators. Dozens of similarly devotional words are used.
Neither extreme — the educator as empirical scientist or the educator as ethical guru — offers much help to the process of learning content and curriculum. Neither moral socialization nor pseudo-scientific social engineering assist a student’s acquisition of skill — knowing how — or acquisition of information — knowing that.
Indeed, in parsing knowledge into “knowing how” and “knowing that,” it becomes even more apparent that the contemporary public school is generally good for neither.
