In many situations, people or organizations seem to go out of their way to hurt others. It is very tempting to interpret this as a malicious conspiracy. I suggest the following rule: Never believe in malice when stupidity provides a sufficient explanation.
Government-run schools are a good example. Almost no-one would argue that they meet the needs of the modern world. Parents blame teachers, teachers blame principals, principals blame school boards, school boards blame lack of funding and government mandates, governments blame teachers' unions, and so on. A teacher analysis of the situation is http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm.
I find it difficult to see how the malicious conspiracy he describes could be developed and sustained. The people who would have to implement the plot do not benefit from it in the way he describes. I just don't think malice is a reasonable diagnosis.
I think that in general people decide what to do based about 80% on their own immediate comfort, 10% on their long-term self-interest, and 10% for altruistic reasons. Every now and then there is a big scandal that people running a charity are taking money that was supposed to help the unfortunate, and using it on private planes, playboy bunnies, or whatever. No doubt they went into the non-profit field with altruistic motives (one decision) but once there most of their day-to-day decisions were consistent with their own comfort.
I think schools are the way they are because each participant is making decisions that add to their own comfort. A class is easier to run if all the children sit quietly awaiting an initiative from the teacher, so children's natural curiosity must be erased. A young teacher who questions the killing of the most delightful quality the child possesses is told 'you are too inexperienced to have an opinion worth listening to. If you still believe this in thirty years, come back and talk about it.' Wanting to keep her job, she shuts up. If she tries to avoid damaging the children in her classroom, she will be reprimanded for failure to maintain 'proper control', and will face the hostility of older teachers for passing 'undisciplined' children on to the next class. If damaging children continues to upset her, she will leave teaching for some less painful job. Therefore, almost all experienced teachers will agree that children must be made to conform.
The argument that this conformist style of schooling was just what the industrial revolution needed in its early stages does explain how governments were persuaded to fund schools, but does not explain how the schools were told to crush initiative, or how schools which failed to crush initiative were brought into line. No. A few schools were founded philanthropically, they began to crush initiative for their own convenience, and then factory owners found that initiative-free adults made the best factory workers, so they persuaded governments to fund more schools.
The really sad thing is that none of the participants in the current school system benefit from it. I have had ample confirmation that the link above is correct in saying that most teachers do not enjoy their work. I enjoy mine because I know that my clients have chosen to pay me because I provide real benefits to them, and then are delighted that I provide even more benefit than they expected.
Schoolteachers entered the field to educate children. They are constrained by a bureaucracy to do things they can see do not work. When they fully accept the system, they are promoted into positions in which they help constrain the next generation of teachers to destroy the children. No wonder they long for retirement.
Bill Gates is now funding initiatives to improve education, purely philanthropically as far as I can see, but his efforts do not address the fundamental problem that I am describing, so I predict that the schools will accept his money, produce various reports that promise 'progress', and keep on suppressing initiative as before.
The only way to persuade schools to change the way they operate is to convince the decision-makers that change will be less painful than continuing to do what they are doing. This requires the credible threat of severe pain for not improving their performance. The 'no child left behind' act was carefully thought out to try to achieve this effect. First, the educational establishment was asked to define goals that they were confident they could reach. Once these goals were defined, they were given rewards for meeting them, and warned that school principals who did not meet them would suffer pain. At first, the educational establishment absorbed the rewards without too much complaint. But then the time by which the educational experts had promised results began to draw near.
On Tuesday, Feb 6 2007, the Washington Post printed a letter from Paul D. Houston, the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators, that illustrates perfectly the attitude of the school bureaucracy. To be completely fair, I provide the complete letter as printed:
Regarding the Feb. 1 Metro article "Va. is Urged to Obey 'No Child' on Reading Test" and the Jan. 30 editorial "Left Behind":
The No Child Left Behind Act is illustrative of what happens when those who know little about a topic create rules and regulations for those who must do the work. The educational amateurs on Capitol Hill and the bureaucrats at the Education Department created a law that, whatever their intentions, has proved to be unworkable at the classroom level on nearly every front.
The assumption that schools were not addressing issues related to learners with limited English skills before No Child Left Behind is as insulting as it is wrong. Educators have faced waves of immigrant children, from many countries and circumstances, and they have created programs to help assimilate those children into American culture. Forcing such students to take tests that do not measure what they know or that overlook their English-language development is illogical and impairs the progress that everyone wants.
Fairfax County and the other districts in Virginia have not given the law "no regard" as the editorial stated. They have been facing the challenges with determination and dedication as to what is best for children.
Let us analyze this carefully.
The No Child Left Behind Act is illustrative of what happens when those who know little about a topic create rules and regulations for those who must do the work. Paul Houston knows perfectly well that the rules and regulations were created by people who were approved at the time by his organization as the most qualified to create them. He carefully avoids denying this directly, because he knows that some of his readers know the truth, and also because some of the rule creators are his friends and he does not want to insult them, but he wants to mislead the common herd. When the educational establishment created these rules and regulations, they regarded George W. Bush as an accidental president, and assumed that by the time their failure to meet their promises became obvious, the democrats would have returned to power and the act would have been repealed. That did not happen in time for them, and now they are outraged that they are being asked to meet the targets they themselves set. (The act merely required Paul Houston's friends to write down the rules and regulations they thought best.)
The educational amateurs on Capitol Hill and the bureaucrats at the Education Department created a law that, whatever their intentions, has proved to be unworkable at the classroom level on nearly every front. The law is only unworkable in the sense that it would require Houston's association members to accept responsibility for results, rather than merely following the tried and true traditions of the bureaucracy, and they are unwilling to accept such responsibility. Notice that his wording subtly suggests that if anyone has to make greater efforts it is the classroom teacher. In any navy, if a ship is steered onto the rocks, the first assumption is that the captain is at fault, not the crewmen who were obeying his orders. It is a testament to the lack of leadership within the educational system that a representative of school principals would blame classroom teachers for the results of school disorganization.
The assumption that schools were not addressing issues related to learners with limited English skills before No Child Left Behind is as insulting as it is wrong. Notice that he does not even suggest that anyone in the educational establishment was doing anything effective about that problem or indeed any other problem. Certainly they were 'addressing' memoranda promising that if they were given enough money then in some unspecified future time somebody would solve the problem in a way that could not possibly be explained to 'educational amateurs'. Ford Motors is no doubt 'insulted' that more people prefer to buy Toyotas. Does Paul Houston think that the best way to encourage Ford to make better cars is to pass laws forbidding people to buy Toyotas? Or equivalently, to tax Toyota more to fund a subsidy for Ford?
Educators have faced waves of immigrant children, from many countries and circumstances, and they have created programs to help assimilate those children into American culture. Forcing such students to take tests that do not measure what they know or that overlook their English-language development is illogical and impairs the progress that everyone wants. Again, Paul Houston knows perfectly well that the tests were designed by educational professionals to measure how well educational professionals had met criteria that educational professionals had promised could be met. These criteria took full account, said the educational professionals at the time, of the limited English possessed by these children before they had the enormous benefit of being instructed by educational professionals. Bilingual education would uplift these children, and any 'educational amateur' who expressed concern was treated with exactly the same contempt as Paul Houston shows in this letter. When the 'educational amateurs' were proved right, and Paul Houston's promises were shown to be hollow, this is the bluster he puts up to try to hide the truth. As long as students are not tested, educational professionals can reassure parents that their children are doing fine. His complaint is in fact that the test is successfully measuring what the students know, and they know far less than Paul Houston's friends, the educational professionals, promised that they would.
This wording also betrays another destructive attitude, that a good test contains only questions that all students can answer correctly. Educators often refer to such questions as 'fair'. The best questions are thought-provoking, giving the student the excitement of realizing that the material he already knows is more useful than he realized. Of course, some students will not have mastered the material well enough to respond this way to such a question, which leads educators to label such questions as 'unfair'. In fact any question that separates out those students who have not mastered the material is 'unfair'. Could this be because such a question highlights the limitations of the teacher and the school?
Fairfax County and the other districts in Virginia have not given the law "no regard" as the editorial stated. They have been facing the challenges with determination and dedication as to what is best for children. Paul Houston has shown consistent determination and dedication to two principles:
1) No School Administrator should be asked to do tomorrow anything he was not comfortable doing yesterday.
2) All School Administrators should be paid more tomorrow than they were yesterday.
P.S. Fairfax County later gave the students the tests, because they wanted the federal money. The whole bluster above was just an expression of embarrassment about the results they knew they were going to get.