And More Education

Firstly, a correction. The Official Bro-In-Law of The Consistent Fool writes in to say that he only attended Montessori schools for preschool. I refuse, however, to take back the nice things I said about him.

Matt writes about vouchers and the DC public schools. He makes the eminently sensible point that it might be worth waiting to see what effect the program is having on educational outcomes before declaring it a rousing success or miserable failure.

However, I come at it from a totally different perspective (with all respect due to Daniel Quinn and My Ishmael.) I think that the educational outcomes have absolutely nothing to do with the relative success or failure of the program, because they have nothing to do with the success or failure of the school system as it is designed.

If you think about it, it seems quite obvious that the design of the modern school system has absolutely nothing to do with its nominal goal, which is to prepare students to function in the outside world. My evidence for this rather outlandish claim is the fact that many, if not most, people leave 12 or 16 or more years of schooling with no obvious job skills. They enter the workforce doing the same grunt, entry-level labor that was done by HS dropouts 30 or 40 years ago. Then they gain skills and go on to often rewarding and enjoyable lives.

So what was the point of that 12 or 16 years of school again?

Now, of course school is not entirely useless. You learn to read; very important. You learn math skills; equally so. You even learn some critical thinking abilities, the ability to read a text and pull the relevant information out. Plus, freshman year of college is one massive bender of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and late-night philosophical bullshit sessions that everyone should partake in at least once. But you also spend a whole lot of time learning things, like the function of acetylcholenesterase and the name of the evil daughters in King Lear which is, you know, nice to know, but not exactly vital to your ability to be a good stockbroker, or real estate agent, or HR manager.

And realize, please, that this plea comes from a person who is absolutely in love with the concept of information. I love knowing about acetylcholenesterase and King Lear. Even for someone who revels in the concept of trivial knowledge, I felt like about half the time I spent in school, pre-college, was wasted. For someone who isn't so inclined to care about all manner of trivial topics, the figure must approach 80% or more! Is it any wonder we have high schools with 40% graduation rates?

Fundamentally, our system makes the same mistake that so many of our bad policies do: it substitutes hope for how people could or should be for actual understanding of the way we are. It would be great if everyone loved Shakespeare. Most people won't, and to force them to read it is only going to piss them off and make them hate learning.

My point, I think, is that any school 'reform' which keeps doing this, trying to improve on people rather than trying to improve for people, is doomed to ongoing failure. That's the best thing I can say about the Montessori Schools, or Waldorf, or anything else. They're giving people freedom to explore the space of what works for them, and what they are interested in.
And, most importantly, they're just trying something different. They're inventing. What they try may or may not work, but it's a pretty well understood fact that when what you're doing isn't working, the solution absolutely is not to keep doing it, only harder.