misdirection miscarry

Public school: what is outwardly the education of all has in fact become the education of a very few, who must in part educate themselves working around the system and who are in part helped by the good teachers that may be found, and by the old spark in many mediocre teachers that is uncovered when they see a student who actually cares.

The majority are not educated but at best prepared, at worst processed. The clever learn to work within the system and stretch its bounds and creep into its blindnesses, they get the best grades possible while learning as little as possible, and this is all excellent preparation for the word of work, where results and not craftsmanship, and certainly not ethics, are what matter. The dull and unambitious and lazy soon discover that they can in fact go beyond the bounds of the rules and make not the least actual effort or even pretend to do their work, and they will still be shunted along to the next grade so as not to be left behind their peers and made to feel bad about themselves.

We are talking here about the express purpose of school—of course I do not mean that outside the classroom the academically unambitious might not be very socially ambitious, or that the clever liars might not be very trustworthy as well as interesting in their personal relationships, or that the educated few are in any necessary concatenation from that education made into good and interesting people, because they may know much of schoolwork and little of life, know much and be unable to apply it.

But even the express purpose of school seems to have shifted—in some ways it can perhaps even be said to be more honest now about what it has really been doing all along. Because if education was once the express ideal, few ever did live up to it. For this reason, and for the caveat mentioned, that education must go beyond books and be the improvement of life, it would make sense for people over time to become disillusioned with the ideal handed down to them.

So instead of education for a full, thoughtful and active, human life, a good life, the goal has become preparation for a job. Again, in some ways this is all it has ever really been, especially in America and in the public school. The goal of preparation is much more widely attained, and it benefits the interests of business and government in such a way that they will concern themselves with it rather than with the high old ideal; it has the further benefit that it may be tested, proved, and advertised, when the good life is as hard to recognize as it is to live, inconspicuous as it lets itself be. And it is not that the preparatory goal of schools precludes one from learn to live the good life, but it does constantly exert itself in trying to persuade one to give it up.

Nor does it deter one from seeking out greatness; indeed this may be said to be the new ideal it has substituted—the life of wealth, fame, danger, glamor. However, like the good life, but by definition now and not merely the difficulty involved, few at any given time may become great, so there is still an element of delusion in this more practical, honest school.

It must also confess, which it does, though somewhat like Phineas in A Separate Peace, who felt ‘everyone always won,’ that not everyone will be prepared for public service and private business, some will be simply floated along and come out unfit for any but the most menial jobs—and this is good, because those jobs after all have to be done; it makes sense for them to be done by those who by their own choice and aptitude have shown themselves undeserving of anything better. The new preparation-model has no problem with these jobs being predominately filled by minorities, because it has the statistics in its briefcase to show that is has done nothing unfair. That is not good enough for people, and it is just one way the preparation-model is failing, hemmed in by statistics showing other nations’ superior test scores and teaching to tests which its students still bungle. It can flail around and redefine its curriculum and tests and start to show progress and leave no child behind, but until the definition of education is brought back around to something like the old idea of real education, a new public school will never so much as be given a chance.