David Lentini writes, after reading Dr. Martin Luther King’s words on the purpose of education:
Thank you and your reader, Diane, for sharing these quotes. I’ve often complained that the most critical element in our debates and arguments over education policy–the very definition of “education”–has been ignored almost completely. Instead we seem to treat education as something that teachers “do”. And we seem to treat what teachers “do” as a matter of technique, not substance. So, for modern Americans the meaning of “education” has degenerated into a pointless argument over pedagogy.
I call these pedagogical arguments pointless precisely because we won’t discuss what we want an educated American to look like. Sadly, most people I’ve talked to about this issue get stuck on such simplistic slogans as “job-ready” or “college-ready”, as if they have any idea what those terms mean. I’ve rarely heard anyone mention education in terms of preparing ourselves to participate in a democracy or have a good chance of living a full and happy life. Perhaps that’s not surprising, since most Americans historically have rejected education in favor of received wisdom.
Dr. King’s vision of education is soundly in the Western tradition of inquiry and discussion. His words echo the arguments of the classic thinkers and the original humanists of the Renaissance, and his fears can be found in the speeches of educators like Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and other social critics like Christopher Lasch, Erich Fromm, and more recently Chris Hedges. We should use their works as a guide to build a curriculum for a modern democracy. Only then can we debate the most efficient means for education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo!
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Yes! Let’s find our way back to the purpose of education. We’ve been lost so long, it may take awhile to get there. This kind of discussion will help us do it. Thanks for your insight. Gives me hope.
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We’ve been lost so long…
See: Chapter 2, “Sixty Years without a Curriculum” in Making Americans
“… the one book I would recommend to every legislator and school board member.” -Diane Ravitch
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The purpose of education has always been contested, but the idea of education as about democracy used to at least get a passing nod. Now it is all 21st century skills and the global workforce. Fitting with the dominance of capitalist frames–see Obama’s speech about opportunity, but not about economic justice. At the bottom of every conversation about standards, testing, teacher qualifications, teacher education, is a question about the purpose of education. Our purpose must live in our process. Thus, if we want critical questioning, creativity, voice, listening, empathy, caring, community, dialogue: democracy–we must have it in all of our processes. That the liberal elite has bought into the imposition of standards and technocratic accountability at all or various levels speaks to their abandonment of the democratic ideal. As Lois Weiner notes in her new book, democracy is messy and requires trust. Standards and accountability regimes–at every level–are about efficiency and mistrust.
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21st century skills … technocratic accountability … abandonment of the democratic ideal … democracy is messy and requires trust
Isn’t “technocratic accountability” the predictable result when the nation’s largest teachers’ union violates trust and abandons democratic ideals via their “21st century skills” bait-and-switch?
Diane Ravitch and AFT leaders called Ken Kay’s “partnership” out–were teacher preparation faculty paying attention?
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Teacher educators are as complicit as anyone. That is why I speak to the process mattering. As a teacher educator who used her voice and lost her job, I know about the complicity of our so called ‘leaders.’ All the more reason we need to speak up and demand democratic dialogue.
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For a number of years I have argued that what is wrong with American education is that we have not had a serious discussion of its purpose. By default we have allowed those who imply that it is to be first in international comparisons and who define it in narrow economic terms to have their framing dominate the discussions. Think back to the explicit language in Goals 2000, which I remind people was a product of the National Governors Association when Bill Clinton chaired that organization, which declared the goal was for the US to be first in the world by the date in question in science and math.
How about ethics?
How about creativity?
How about aiming not for being last among developed democracies in economic inequality?
When major institutions involved with K-12 education have bought in to the “reform” framing of education, as seems to be the case clearly with the Harvard Graduate School of Education (check the partners for their prestigious freed Ed. L. D. program) it becomes increasingly difficult to get the media and the nation to listen to those of us who like the little boy in the fable are pointing out the emperor of educational reform is naked.
Citizenship in an increasingly diverse nation should require that people learn outside the echo chamber of their own narrow beliefs, be those beliefs economic, political, or religious. Yet instead we are seeing tax dollars transferred through vouchers and many charters to institutions that do not expos their young people to our real diversity and in some cases even teach intolerance and outright hatred.
Meanwhile our policy discussions are increasingly dominated by the voices of those who profit from the corporatization of aspects of education, or who because they are very wealthy are able to squeeze out any voices that dissent from their approaches.
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check the partners for their prestigious freed Ed. L. D. program…
Doubtless some are on the “official enemies list,” but not all:
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville Maryland
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
The Posse Foundation
Which is worse–Ed. L. D. or Broad Academy? Where in the nation are educational leaders trained to fulfill the common schools vision of Horace Mann?
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“How about aiming not for being last among developed democracies in economic inequality?”
What a novel idea! You would think our leaders would be upset that almost a quarter of our children live in poverty. We have let capitalism strip the U.S. of the jobs that supported a strong middle class and allowed people to hope for a better future. And why, since the corporations have already overhauled healthcare, do we lag in so many measures of quality healthcare? How can we tie quality healthcare to nonexistent jobs and/or benefits? We are so frightened of each other and our own government that we insist on the right to arm ourselves to the hilt. A sense of community and shared values for which we are all willing to sacrifice is disintegrating. The disregard of these social issues really speaks volumes about the ethics of current leaders and our own apathetic acceptance. Being first in the world on some science and math test really pales in comparison to the dismal record on social issues we choose to accept.
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Tonto’s words, as the old joke goes, come to mind …
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When Did We Forget the Purpose of Education?
Sometime between 1870 and 1947, if Grant and MLK are right:
Ulysses S. Grant
March 30, 1870
… A measure which makes at once 4,000,000 people voters … is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.
Institutions like ours, in which all power is derived directly from the people, must depend mainly upon their intelligence, patriotism, and industry. I call the attention, therefore, of the newly enfranchised race to the importance of their striving in every honorable manner to make themselves worthy of their new privilege. To the race more favored heretofore by our laws I would say, Withhold no legal privilege of advancement to the new citizen. The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people. The Father of his Country, in his Farewell Address, uses this language:
Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
In his first annual message to Congress the same views are forcibly presented, and are again urged in his eighth message.
I repeat that the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life. The change will be beneficial in proportion to the heed that is given to the urgent recommendations of Washington. If these recommendations were important then, with a population of but a few millions, how much more important now, with a population of 40,000,000, and increasing in a rapid ratio. I would therefore call upon Congress to take all the means within their constitutional powers to promote and encourage popular education throughout the country, and upon the people everywhere to see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the Government a blessing and not a danger. By such means only can the benefits contemplated by this amendment to the Constitution be secured.
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Eric,
It must be later than that or people my age would not remember that education has a higher purpose that being “college- and career-ready” and preparing to be “global competitors.”
It survived when I was in high school in the 1950s.
It survives even now in the hearts of millions of teachers and principals and superintendents, who know what is happening today is wrong.
Diane
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Thank you. The answer depend on who “we” are:
Education thought leaders?
Southern segregationists?
On page 39 of Making Americans, Hirsch cites Left Back, and places the erosion of curriculum in the 1930s to 1950s. So for the following decades, “we” might have remembered the purposes of education, but we lacked curricula to realize those purposes. The forgetting would be complete as those students became teachers.
The MLK quote from 1947 sets the date too early because King is making the point that segregationists have not received a proper moral education. (Did Southern schools ever embrace the goals promoted by President Grant?)
Perhaps a last vestige of the citizenship goals for education appeared in Goals 2000. Of course, the courts (and Justices O’Connor and Souter) have never forgotten. Perhaps they will question why state legislators have allowed federal dollars to shout down the states’ goals for public education.
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BTW, having my sloppy thinking called out by Diane Ravitch makes for a good day. Thanks again.
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I think we have to look at the first wave of reforms in the 1890s, as I’ve posted on this ‘blog earlier. Just as today, those reforms were pushed by the business and financial elites who wanted to shape education in their own vision of business and industry. The same is true today, although they now use modern business jargon and demand that computers be the centerpiece.
Diane, I know you’ve been super-busy (although I thought you were on vacation this week), but I hope you’ll start posting on the history of reform and the key figures involved in shaping public education over the past 120 years. I think when the public sees the history and sees how the same groups and mindsets have tried to control education, they’ll be much more skeptical of our current crop of “reformers”.
Also, by looking at the history of reform, I think we’ll see just how we’ve lost sight of our democracy. Many of the reforms over the past century have really passivated our children into becoming consumers, rather than positive political actors in their own country and future. Our failure to keep our democratic culture as the guiding star of our political lives has lead to the great foreign policy quagmires and catastrophes of the past 120 years, starting with the Spanish American War.
Strange how the start of our quest for global domination that began with capturing the Philippines started with our great education reforms.
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Our failure to keep our democratic culture as the guiding star of our political lives has lead to the great foreign policy quagmires and catastrophes of the past 120 years, starting with the Spanish American War.
This might be outside Dr. Ravitch’s area of expertise. Google books has Left Back, and a search shows “Spanish” refers (mostly) to language instruction. Searching finds no references to the Spanish American War.
A search for “civics” in Left Back suggests over a century of antipathy toward that subject.
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For all the Atomic Anxiety, Bomb Shelter Mania, Cold War Neurosis, ICB Missile Gap, Red Scare, and Sputnik Inferiority Complex of the 50s into the 60s — maybe even because of it — my teachers in that New Deal Democratic Lone Star State Of Texas made it their mission to impress on us the essential bond between democracy and education, the dependence of religious freedom on the separation of church and state, and the difference between deliberative government and any fashion of economic system, capitalist or communist or whatever.
If they could do all that under those conditions, what the devil is the problem now?
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Have you looked at Texas’s education policies today? Over the past 20-30 years? Have you seen the latest report on Texas’s education from the Texas Freedom Network? Whenever Texas taught the curriculum you described, it was a long time ago.
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FYI:
http://www.alternet.org/texas-public-school-teaching-kids-jews-practice-flawed-religion-and-blacks-are-descended-ham?akid=9951.1116377.uIZYgA&rd=1&src=newsletter781097&t=5
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… latest report on Texas’s education from the Texas Freedom Network …
That report speaks to isolated over-reaching in public school Bible classes, likely due to poor professional development.
Making Americans speaks to the other end of the political spectrum undermining the core mission of public education throughout the nation, due to widespread deficiencies in teacher prep programs.
While the Fordham/Stern report criticizes Texas on some (politically motivated) specifics, at least those specifics are historically accurate–moreso than the left-wing counterparts in other state standards.
Overall, Jon’s critique stands. “The problem now” is the aftershock from UCLA’s involvement in history standards, described briefly in Death and Life.
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I know it is not this simple, but here on the West coast, I was educated to be a teacher of social justice. I finished my undergrad degree in 1985, my master’s degree in 1993. I went in to teaching thinking that I had a moral/ethical responsibility to expose my students to more than one viewpoint; to teach them to be critical thinkers and questioners; to foster a love of learning over “job readiness” in order to help them be ready to roll with the vagaries of life. I saw it change – drastically and dramatically – after 9/11. Like so many other things, that was the doorway that allowed these people to get a foothold.
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Ellen, believe it or not, I was educated the same way here in the deep south. It is the reason I too became a teacher. I felt a strong urge to embrace diversity, to create a love of learning, and encourage exploration and discovery. I eventually went back to school to become a special education teacher bc I wanted to be a part of the great things going on in special education, and then In early childhood educatio, and then early intervention. After a couple of degrees and finally finishing grad school my husband begin asking when I would finally get tired of being a college student ( age 44). You are so correct. After 9/11 the radicals took over and the polarizing began. I feel sorry for students today who are not exposed to the love of learning for the sake of discovering something they didn’t know. Job ready. That’s the goal, so corporations can exploit and get rich off of the working class.
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Its heartbreaking. I am glad to hear your experience was the same as mine, Bridget. I was responding to an earlier comment that suggested that was not the case – but I am now choosing to refuse to buy into the negative press on teacher ed programs as well. Yes – we have all taken classes as part of our degree that were…silly. But I have suspicions that this attack is part of the overall attack to discredit teachers. I KNOW there are teachers out there who were inadequately prepared for the job – be it mentally, physically, emotionally – but that is true in any field. It has NEVER been my experience, in 27+ years of teaching, that that is the majority. Maybe in one or two instances. We need to stop tearing down our colleagues as well. We need to not buy into the myths. And that is not the same thing as not recognizing reality.
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In the mid eighties Reagan and Bennett halted real history and government classes which were standard. We are now reaping the effects of this with a public which has no histroical perspective or understanding of how government works and believe me it is twisted. However, when you study anchient governments and politics what is going on now is very low level in complication to other times and cultures. If students had this perspective through time and cultures they would understand how mickey mouse what they are doing now and how easy it is to see through it and their arguments. This is what critical thinking with a factual base for that thought and decision making is important.
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In the mid eighties Reagan and Bennett halted real history and government classes which were standard.
Somehow Dr. Ravitch (who is “equipped with unparalleled knowledge of American public education”) missed that in Death and Live.
Have you any citations to share?
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I like how the writer mentioned Hutchins because he was for studying the classics. When it comes to “preparing to participate in a democracy,” I think of Dewey. Yet Dewey and Hutchins had their differences to say the least. But I’m for considering our educational history instead of constantly reinventing the wheel while disregarding the past.
Frankly, I’m a big Eisner fan! His article “What Does It Mean to Say a School is Doing Well?” makes some good points.
Click to access Eisner,%202001.pdf
You should read the article for the details, but here are some of the questions he asked.
1. What is the intellectual significance of the ideas students encounter?
2. Are students introduced to multiple perspectives?
3. What connections are students helped to make between what they study in class and the world outside of school?
4. What opportunities do students have to become literate in the use of different representational forms ?
5. What opportunities do students have to formulate their own purposes and to design ways to achieve them?
6. What opportunities do students have to work cooperatively to address problems that they believe to be important?
7. Do students have opportunities to serve the community in ways that are not limited to their own personal interests?
8. To what extent are students given the opportunity to work in depth in domains that relate to their aptitudes?
9. Do students participate in the assessment of their own work? If so, how?
10. To what degree are students genuinely engaged in what they do in school? Do they find satisfaction in the intellectual journey?
11. Are teachers given the time to observe and work with one another? To what extent?
12. Are parents helped to understand what their child has accomplished in class? Do the parents come to understand the educational purpose that was served?
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Those of us who wish to exercise leadership in education must do more than simply accept the inadequate criteria that are now used to determine how well our schools doing, Mr. Eisner warns.
One might also include the adequacy criteria from state court rulings.
Overall, many of these suggestions (especially regarding Robert Maynard Hutchins) argue for options like Great Hearts.
When will Nashville parents have access to a public education that Hutchins could endorse?
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Well, there are literature magnet schools. Besides, it’s not as if Great Hearts is the only option for literature. Also, I read a lot of Eisner. When he talks of inadequacies, he’s talking about overzealous standardization, narrowing the curriculum by making everything about the test, etc. When it comes to the three curricula all schools teach (per Eisner), I’m not sure whether or not Great Hearts would make the cut.
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… Dewey and Hutchins had their differences …
This is particularly stark in relation to the proposes of education recognized by U.S. presidents. Horace Mann institutionalized the vision of Washington, Adams, and Jevverson; Dewey betrayed Grant’s request. Hutchins would meet the hopes of all those presidents and add metaphysics for good measure.
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