Schools as Fiction
Interesting article: Against School. John Taylor Gatto How public education cripples our kids, and why The comments from Gatto immediately reminded me of the old explanation of how the Polish people described communism: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
Translation to the US school system as seen by Gatto: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”
What Gatto describes, on the basis of 30 years of teaching experience sounds like a system that has become hopelessly dysfunctional. The teachers are bored. The students are bored. The parents and taxpayers are not bored. But they do seem to be quite unhappy.
Gatto speculates about the reasons for this situation. Without serious disagreement with his speculation, I prefer to cite a more general interpretation. For any organization, the Prime Directive is to preserve the organization. I think of an organization as the modern equivalent of the tribe or clan. What clan members used to do was to preserve the clan at all costs.
Educational institutions, of course, have goals assigned to them by the larger society (the taxpayers). It is essential to the clan (I mean the institution) to be seen as pursuing those goals. Notice that phrase: to be seen. Not necessarily to pursue. And certainly not necessarily to reach. But to be seen in pursuit.
Gatto asks whether we really need school. He means, of course, do we need the current schools system. I recently heard a valuable talk by Clayton Cristensen in which he spoke of customer “hiring products to do a job for them.” What is important, he said, is to know what that job is. If you understand the job, you can figure out how to satisfy the customers. If we apply that question to the school system, we first have to identify the customer. In the free market, the customer is the person who chooses to buy the product. In the school system, it is less clear who is choosing to buy the product. The parents are using the product, but they are hardly choosing. They are complying with the law. Unless they have substantial financial resources, the have no other viable option. The taxpayers are paying for the product, but they have only indirect control over the relevant choices. The school boards are making the actual choices, but they may not have the experience to make choices independent of the professionals running the school board.
Dysfunctional system under ineffective management. It is a situation asking to be destabilized by innovation. But to thin about how it would be destabilized, we need to go back to Christensen’s question and understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system.
But I need a while to think about that. So I will leave that as a quest question for now.
Translation to the US school system as seen by Gatto: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”
What Gatto describes, on the basis of 30 years of teaching experience sounds like a system that has become hopelessly dysfunctional. The teachers are bored. The students are bored. The parents and taxpayers are not bored. But they do seem to be quite unhappy.
Gatto speculates about the reasons for this situation. Without serious disagreement with his speculation, I prefer to cite a more general interpretation. For any organization, the Prime Directive is to preserve the organization. I think of an organization as the modern equivalent of the tribe or clan. What clan members used to do was to preserve the clan at all costs.
Educational institutions, of course, have goals assigned to them by the larger society (the taxpayers). It is essential to the clan (I mean the institution) to be seen as pursuing those goals. Notice that phrase: to be seen. Not necessarily to pursue. And certainly not necessarily to reach. But to be seen in pursuit.
Gatto asks whether we really need school. He means, of course, do we need the current schools system. I recently heard a valuable talk by Clayton Cristensen in which he spoke of customer “hiring products to do a job for them.” What is important, he said, is to know what that job is. If you understand the job, you can figure out how to satisfy the customers. If we apply that question to the school system, we first have to identify the customer. In the free market, the customer is the person who chooses to buy the product. In the school system, it is less clear who is choosing to buy the product. The parents are using the product, but they are hardly choosing. They are complying with the law. Unless they have substantial financial resources, the have no other viable option. The taxpayers are paying for the product, but they have only indirect control over the relevant choices. The school boards are making the actual choices, but they may not have the experience to make choices independent of the professionals running the school board.
Dysfunctional system under ineffective management. It is a situation asking to be destabilized by innovation. But to thin about how it would be destabilized, we need to go back to Christensen’s question and understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system.
But I need a while to think about that. So I will leave that as a quest question for now.
posted by Selby Evans at 12:57 PM
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