When I pass many modern public schools, it is often hard to know if I’m looking at a corrections facility or a school. Ugly buildings surrounded by high fences, with inmates or students bussed in and out. Some schools even have metal detectors and guards at the entrance. Recess and time periods are on the bell.
Why are these students here, and what is the goal of their education? As Dr. Scott Postma says in We’ve Been Schooled the goal of modern education is “…to produce a society of both consumers and cogs—citizens that participate efficiently in a producer/consumer economy for the stability and success of the modern industrialized state.”
In the modern era, education is institutionalization.
A modernist education proponent such as Matt Greenfield of Rethink Education and former professor of English, would positively state it this way “The goal of the American public education system is to prepare students to be responsible, healthy, engaged, self-aware citizens and experts in the performance of a socially useful task.” (source)
A socially useful task. The form matches the function. Next time you pass a public school, you can accurately turn to the person next to you and say, “oh look, an institutionalization factory. Look at those soon-to-be socially useful people.” Ironically, the failure rate on even that goal is high.
True Education.
What is the alternative? For the classical educator, education is not institutionalization of individuals for the purpose of a socially useful task. Rather, education is the formation of human souls for their purpose, which is the worship of God.
As Chesterton put it, education is the “soul of society as it passes from one generation to the next.” It is the receiving and transmission of an inheritance. The motto of Roman Roads Press is “inherit the humanities” because we believe we are heirs of a great cultural fortune. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is to receive that inheritance, and grow up into it.
Form and Function.
The purpose of education will affect the form. If your school looks like or functions like a prison or factory, it may be because in some sense it is.
Our modern five-day school system that runs on segregated grades, periods, and classes didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of the Prussian model. Watch We’ve Been Schooled for a quick history.
Over the past two decades, millions of American families have challenged this model not only in theory (classical education as an idea), but in practice, through the restoration of truth, goodness, and beauty as a guiding principal of forming humans. Even those schools that kept the five-day, class-period model are doing so in ways influenced by homeschooling, university models, and one-room schoolhouse approaches, pushing back the advance of utilitarian modernism.
In Part III, I will talk about three ways this is happening. Through Classical Recitations (or “flipped-classroom” approach). Through hybrid or university model schools. And through mastery-level approach vs age-segregated classrooms.