Deborah Meier on Education

          May 2006

Kids need to be keeping company with knowledgeable, skillful, interesting and strong-minded adults. They can only learn about grown-upness in the company of grown-ups. It all seems so obvious—and has been the basis for human civilizations as long as human society existed. No one ever imagined otherwise. Until recently.

Over the past half century we’ve invented something new. While the family has retreated as the educator of its young, the teacher of the habits of a lifetime, schools have replaced them. At least so we claim.

Meanwhile we’ve invented schools that occupy more and more of children’ lives, but in which adults are largely superfluous. Kids come to school to meet and mingle with their peers, plan their after-school social lives, exchange notes and gossip. The well-educated adults in school are merely passing anonymous entities—whose expertise rarely impresses the young. What it means to be a life-long learner becomes, as a result, largely rhetorical. Some kids are willing to play the schooling game and ostensibly do well by school, others lose interest; but almost none use the school to learn to be adults.  They simply don’t run into adults in ways they can learn from—unless, perhaps, they want to be teachers. A tiny enviable minority connect with the school’s adult community through after-school clubs, teams and seminar-like AP courses.

Meanwhile, another educational force—the world of advertising and the mass media—are engaged in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of the young, to help them become life long consumers. They have far greater resources—time, energy and drive—to influence the tight peer packs that our kids form—the small adultless “schools” they are immersed in. Even schools are increasingly part of the commercial market place. There are actually schools in this country that consider it their duty to curry favor with the world of commerce—in order to raise an extra buck. A 15 year old in Connecticut was expelled for challenging a McDonald’s representative on the quality of their food, another was suspended for wearing a t-shirt advertising a competing company. Menus sent out by the Boston public schools to all families are paid for by advertisements for junk food. Textbooks are covered by advertisements, courtesy the local school. The kids learn about the news of the world, sandwiched between Channel One advertising. A generation’s culture and values are being shaped. Fast-paced and reactive but rarely thoughtful.

Until we fix our schools, so that they are places where the elders are able to connect with the young in ways that can engage their hearts and minds, they are almost irrelevant. Kids are thus doubly abandoned. While parents need time to be together with their young, and the courage to drag them kicking and screaming along with them—they are often helpless to do so. They’re too busy surviving – and too intimidated by the media and the schools to rely on their own best judgment.

Parents (like teachers) are more and more asked to follow expertly designed scripts, to supervise rather than design the work kids do at home (as in class). We need to remember that we—as adults– are sufficiently expert at a whole lot of stuff that kids need—even those of us who are poor or disadvantaged. We need to remember that parents are not defective educators. Nor are educators defective learning machines. We just have our limits—re expertise and time. We shouldn’t imitate at home the didactic practices of schools. Quite the opposite—schools should be more like the home or like the familywhen we have the time and expertise to connect to our kids, one by one.

We need, in short, both strong schools and strong families—working together Because we have something that the world of advertising doesn’t have—us. Real versus virtual reality wins out if we give it a chance.

Filed under: 2006 Posts |