There is literally so much misunderstanding packed into the original Slate article, it would take hours to unpack it and air it out. I wish more people would want to know about the history of how this institution developed in American and in other countries around the world. I've taken a fairly deep look at the American system and am currently looking into the British/Colonial system based on some professional interests of mine.
Anyway, what it all comes down to is that public education is a tool of State power. The basic system we use now arose in Prussia and spread throughout Europe and moved overseas to America and Asia. The assumptions behind public education are that all children need to be forced into schools six basic fundamental can be inflicted upon them. The six functions are:
1) The adaptive function (schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority the bells, the trivial rules, and rewards and punishments are nothing more than a Pavlovian training method designed to accustom students to a life of top down instruction).
2) The integrating function (this might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. Standardized testing is the epitome of this function. Every unit will be strictly controlled for quality like a McDonald’s cheeseburger).
3) The diagnostic and directive function (school is meant to determine each student's proper social role. The numbers and letters that we assign to bits of knowledge and acts of behavior are to be used to determine a student’s future despite the assumptions that went into their assignation).
4) The differentiating function (once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. Development of the mind beyond that which is required for basic instruction in social roles is not only waste of resources, it is dangerous for social order).
5) The selective function (schools are meant to tag students with poor grades, remedial placement, and other diagnoses in order to identify the “unfit” for further intervention. This is a eugenics program as defined by Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and whose ideas spawned a program that was funded in the United States by John D. Rockefeller. We used to direct these “tagged” individuals into forced sterilization programs, now we cram them full of pharmaceuticals and deny them opportunities for social advancement.
6) The
propaedeutic function (the societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. School trains students for managers. The etymology of the word pedagogy comes from the Greek word
paidagogos, who were a class of slaves whose responsibility it was to guide students through the lessons of the masters. Students will learn fixed habits of reaction to authority, how to shift from one person giving instruction to another, and how to obey without question and without the weight of troubling ethics).
Even private schools will have a difficult time not structuring their environment so that these six functions are avoided. This is because of the accreditation process that most private schools need to pass so that they can get the fancy paper and prove to "educational policy wonks" that their school is an actual "school" (in other words, that it meets the above criteria).
There is a good chance that this author knows nothing about this. I would love to have a 30 minute discussion with her so see what she thinks.
Anyway, so she wants to have a moral change where more parents stop sending their kids to private school and put them into public school, but she doesn't understand that the basic structure of schooling itself is preserved in both public and (most) private schools. Still, I get the general idea of what she is saying, even if it completely lacks any historical context and is only repeating the untried assumption she was taught in her own admittedly mediocre schooling.
She would like to have parents invest more of their time and money into the public schools so that all children can be "lifted up" and the whole of society will be improved. A question I would like to ask is who exactly are improving the society for?
“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Oh yes, my Liberal Slate writer, aren't you a tool.
