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Measure
of Failure
Before
we can speak about the failures of modern schooling, in the West or anywhere
else, we should consider what it is that schooling has set out to do. This will
help us to consider whether or not schooling has failed at anything, or if it
has actually succeeded in accomplishing something. Without a clear idea of what
schools are for, in other words, we have no real basis for evaluating if
schooling has failed or succeeded. This question also needs to be considered in
historical context, because what may have been seen as the successes of school
at one time may have come to be seen as its failures, while what may have been
perceived as failures in one time may have later come be seen as its successes.
Therefore, the question of success and failure of schooling is bound up with
expectations of a given time and place, although those expectations have been
remarkably consistent.
Labeled
and Categorized
Despite
superficial differences in language and culture, what we are calling modern
schooling is for the most part global in its uniformity. A visitor to a school
in most any place in recent years will find the same type of facility, a
box-shaped concrete building resembling a factory (or prison or hospital),
divided into smaller boxes called classrooms, in which there are a number of
desks and chairs facing forward towards a larger teacher’s desk, behind which
is a blackboard and above that a clock. The placing of these items might differ
slightly, but the items are all there, from
Tokyo
to
Istanbul
,
New York
to
London
,
Karachi
to
Rio de Janeiro
. A flag or some other symbol of the nation, such as a picture of the current
head, is often present and may even be ritually saluted in some way, while a
national anthem is often played or sung at the beginning of each school day.
Students
move among these boxes according to strict timings, often announced by bells or
alarms, and the school day is divided into several periods approximately 50
minutes apiece, beginning at around
8 a
.m. and ending around 3 p.m., with a lunch break in the middle of the day.
School meets five days a week for ten months of the year, and this usually lasts
for 12 years. Students are classified and graded in many ways, most often
ordered according to age-based classes and categorized according to academic
grades. This grading and classifying gets ever more precise as students approach
their graduation, when each is then given a sheet of paper that certifies his or
her experience and performance.
Schools
were structured in this way for a reason. During the 19th century, beginning in
Europe
but soon spreading globally, it became necessary to acclimate the masses of
people to large-scale emergent social realities: industrialization and
nationalism. The routines of factory work required that young people be taught
the necessary skills and values—including uniformity, punctuality, and
efficiency—as well as gain the ability to withstand long hours of repetitive
labor. The industrial economy offered employment for those who succeeded in this
system. Similarly, the gathering of people into nation states required that they
see themselves as part of a single nation and that they learn respect for the
national symbols, such as the flag and the nation’s head, and be willing to
die fighting for those symbols, although often being contented with fighting
other nations in sporting events. Modern schooling has been remarkably
successful at achieving these goals, in a relatively short period of time, to
the point that most of us cannot imagine life without it.
Globalizing
of Modern Education
With
the phenomenal rise of
Europe
as an industrial and military power, schooling came to be seen as the key to
that success, so the European model of schooling was eagerly sought by those
desiring industrial and symbolic power in other parts of the world. The
Americans and the Japanese were among the first to adopt this new system of
schooling, although one can also find early adoptions of it in other places,
such as the Russian and Ottoman empires. Soon, it came to be seen as mandatory
by the colonial powers, namely
Britain
and France, who spread this system throughout their domains. By the early 20th
century, a global system of modern schooling was in place and it remains to this
day.
While
the structure of schooling taught its lessons of industrial standardization and
national adulation, there were of course various academic subjects taught as
well, mainly language and math skills. The modern nation state also required the
teaching of history and civics, to further the feeling that each nation was
somehow special and unique among others, and that its head men and political
systems were the best over the rest. Schools also began teaching the sciences
and humanities, though at first these subjects were reserved for the elite
private schools, where the rich and famous could sequester their children to
learn the “higher values” of science and literature and to maintain a
feeling of superiority and separation from the seething masses. But by the mid
20th century, most of the academic subjects that we see in most schools anywhere
today were being taught.
The
benefits and successes of the new system were not shared by all, in particular
the benefits of an industrial economy, because the Americans, Europeans and
Japanese greedily guarded their competitive edge in these areas, while the rest
of the world became the suppliers of their resources and consumers of their
industrial products. It is an irony that while most nations of the world adopted
the factory model of schooling, very few were actually able to develop
industrial economies. This could be seen as a failure of modern schooling, but
it would depend on which time or place one is examining. The success of modern
schooling in building a sense of nationalism has been more evident. In both
cases, either in building an industrial economy or national identity, schooling
was a process directed by those with a vested interest in one or another of
those new realities.
Becoming
Obsolete
By
the late 20th century, the recognition emerged that this system had largely run
its course or that it was becoming obsolete and in need of some sort of reform.
The main benefactors of this aging system—America, Europe, and Japan—fought
each other in horrifically violent wars, which were called “world wars”
because they involved the colonial spheres of influence of those powers, and
which spanned the entire planet. In addition, the
Third World
began to realize the ruse of the system, that they were playing by the rules
but still largely unable to reap any of the benefits of the game. The global
economy, in the meantime, had passed from national planners in the dominant
colonial powers into the hands of global corporations, and now all nation states
are coming under the sway of global rules of economic development, including the
once great state powers. Meanwhile, media have become the new teachers of
identity, though decidedly diffuse.
As
this new system changed, and in the wake of the World Wars, the industrial
powers began to quibble among themselves, at once envying and mimicking each
other’s national educational systems, in the hope of gaining a fleeting edge
in economic development. For example, in the 1980s, it was faddish for American
technocrats to bemoan the failure of the American educational system, in the
face of Japanese economic ascendancy, which was seen as due to its superior
educational system that created true adulation not only for the state but for
the corporate order. But that was put to rest a decade later with the virtual
collapse of the Japanese economy, and the rise of despair, depravity, and
suicide among Japanese youth. Meanwhile, a never ending stream of reforms
plagued the educational systems of the “developed” nations, with the
“developing” world waiting to see what their colonial masters would come up
with next. Faddishness continued to be the order of the day for an educational
system seeking a new sense of meaning and a new purpose for its existence, not
to mention a justification for the tremendous amount of money it cost.
It
is at this point that one can detect more clearly the failures of modern
schooling. After a century and a half of development, there is not really much
to show for this system. The so-called advanced democracies are mired in
political nihilism and cultural frivolity, at times rivaling that of the
decaying
Roman Empire
. Gangsters, murderers, liars, fascists, and bigots are elected to public office
with impunity. Meanwhile, most people are utterly unable to see beyond the
promises of unlimited economic growth, instead living blindly a consumerist
lifestyle that has time and again been denounced as unsustainable over the long
term. Ecological systems are in collapse, species are becoming extinct, and
humans have become one of the few organisms (other than pigs) that consistently
foul their own habitats. People still fight each other over trivialities, with
armies marching to murderous ends to defend lines on a map, madly cheering the
latest movie stars and football heroes.
Perhaps
it is too much to lay the blame for all this at the doorstep of school, to say
that the mess the world is in today is due to schooling. But it is equally
unrealistic to expect schools to fix these problems. Yet most efforts at
educational reform are still dancing to the same old tunes of economic growth
and national pride, with the few exceptions to this uniform pattern, such as
those feeble efforts at “environmental education” and “global
awareness,” merely serving to prove the rule. Once a problem is identified,
people turn to schools to solve that problem, if they have not already blamed
the problem on schools.
In
those nation states with expendable wealth, technocrats can continue to pour it
into their national educational systems. In such places, flashy consumerism is
replacing stodgy industrialism, spearheaded by the fun-loving Americans. Now one
can find the utter absurdity of schools in the rich nation states exchanging the
drab decor of factory schools for colorful Disney characters. Even where
there is not as much disposable wealth, one can find a “Disneyfication” of
schools, testimony perhaps to recognition that schools are indeed drab and
boring places, but also a testament of the failure to imagine any alternatives
other those images produced for the global entertainment markets. In the
impoverished nations, neither of these games is played. They never benefited
from the industrial system and don’t have the money to apply the latest
educational fad, so what one finds is a simple decay of colonial schooling.
While this is often decried by the United Nations and the NGOs of the wealthy
nations, it may also be a cracked mirror for the rest of the world to view the
decay of the industrial way of life and the nation states of modernity.
For
many people, this is too bleak to accept. They would rather devote themselves to
making schools better places. The argument is that as long as schools exist, we
should at least try to make them habitable and tolerable places. Others will
argue that schools are still one of the few places where people can get together
for some sort of intellectual activity, although this is usually reserved for
universities (equally in decay, but beyond the scope of this article). When
asked what they like most about school, many children, and those adults
recalling their childhood, will list the social aspects more than that the
academic aspects. Indeed, it is perhaps a success of schools that they have
become places for mass socialization, but at times this socialization has gone
against the grain of what parents and societies desire, at which point this
“success” can then become a “failure.”
In
fact, framing the problem of modern schooling in terms of success and failure is
in many ways a futile exercise. Nationalistic zealots and greedy corporate
leaders, particularly in the “developed” nation states like
America
, have consistently used a rhetoric of school failure to justify the imposition
of austerity and intolerance on diverse populations. The corporate chiefs and
their cheerleaders among the political elite in particular, eagerly applaud any
claims that schools have failed because it gives them another shot at raiding
the public coffers, since money spent on failed schools is surely money wasted
and it would be better spent lining their pockets and those of their cronies. It
is for this reason that one finds a spiteful impulse to maintain schools the way
they are, and not complain too much about their failures, in the hopes of
protecting one of the few public spaces left in the industrialized world today.
While this may be a valid argument in some places, in particular where there is
wealth to contest, for most of the world it is seen as an irrelevant luxury of
the privileged nations in search of meaning.
Whatever
the reason, when increasing numbers of people the world over have come to see
schools as failures, then this is an indication that there needs to be serious
discussions about what to do with them. This cannot be left to politicians and
corporate executives, nor can the problems (or solutions) of the wealthiest
countries be superimposed upon the rest of the world. It is in those places
where the vast majority of humanity resides that the most rigorous discussions
have to take place, where there is little to gain or lose. Before bulldozing all
the schools, or dressing them up like shopping malls, a concerted effort needs
to be made to truly assess what we expect of them, and this has to be a
collective endeavor. This must also include looking honestly at alternatives,
ranging from efforts at de-schooling and “walking out” to developing
vocational institutes and home education. Above all, the limitations of
schooling have to be recognized. As long as we aspire to gain wealth and status
through schooling, in a game that demands there be winners and losers, then the
“failed” system of modern schooling is unlikely to change very much, since
the foundations of the system are built on economic growth and social
ascendancy.
Please
join the Live
Dialogue “What Are Schools For?” with Professor Yusuf Progler on Monday,
March 21, 2005, from 7:00 to 9:00 GMT and in the meantime, participate in
the Discussion Forum: Education
for What?
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