Public Education on the Defensive

...Illich would de-institutionalize and reorder society around what he calls "learning webs...

...In the past two years, Ivan Illich and Christopher Jencks have become prominent among those rattling the foundations of the American public school...

...Both seek far more radical changes than do most idolaters of the public school, and both are for that reason much harder to rebut from the perspective of conventional liberal social reform...

...His fundamental point, that schools aren't very important - and never can be - in terms of the things he considers fundamental, is at heart an argument for assigning schools a lesser role than they have grown accustomed to...

...And bookstore patrons know that every shipment of new works contains a choice sampling of volumes by ex-teachers who retired to Vermont after a year in the ghetto to pen their bitter-but-loving memoirs of oppressed children and oppressive bureaucracies...

...No reasonable person could think otherwise...

...For the past ten years," Daniel P. Moynihan writes, "the proportion of Gross National Product expended on elementary and secondary education has risen at a rate almost half again that of the GNP itself...

...Those who risk the turgid pages of the professional journals regularly see stronger, if less lucid, responses...

...The one sequence that schools are least experienced with and least able to withstand is the hypothesizing of a large instrumental purpose for the schools followed by careful measurement to see whether the results justify the hopes...

...They come at their subject from different perspectives, and they engage in wholly different modes of criticism, yet they end at much the same place: we can't expect very much from schools, so those who seek much from man and society had better place their bets elsewhere and concentrate their energies and their treasure in more promising pursuits...

...No licenses are involved, and nothing is obligatory...

...And although American society is notably tolerant of institutions enlarging their share of the nation's wealth while the facade of altruism remains intact, we have never been much impressed with visible greed in any part of the "public sector...

...Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America by Christopher Jencks and associates Basic Books, $12.50 Do schools matter...

...As befits a work by the director of something called the "Center for Inter cultural Documentation" in Cuer-navaca, Mexico, this is a bold little volume, unconfined by the borders of any one nation, in which "schooling" serves as metaphor for all the "bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state...

...That is the basis for its steadily expanding share of the GNP: it has had a steadily expanding set of missions...

...Illich's wry observation that "Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them," is so obvious that one is astonished not that he says it but that it wasn't until the monumental "Coleman Report" of 1966 that people began questioning whether education is adequately gauged by the conventional criteria of schooling - money per pupil, student per teacher, books per library...

...He does not, however, drop the other shoe and suggest that we might spend less on schools, or reduce the amount of time people are obliged to spend in them, or even close some of them altogether...

...Predictably, expenditures have soared...

...Jencks and Illich both jump, the one not quite admitting it, the other shouting it all the way...

...Surely the source of the new unease is something more than compulsory lunchroom duty or hostility to the new math...

...and elects to punish its failure by abolishing it altogether...

...Instead, he is "for equality," and chooses to gauge society's progress toward equality in terms of adult status and income distribution...

...Chester Finn...

...Instead he urges a more existential treatment: begin to view schooling "as an end in itself rather than a means to some other end...

...In what Weaver calls a "crashing non sequitur," Jencks then turns to drastic income redistribution - socialism - as the likeliest means of effecting equality...

...It is their acceptance of an output standard that brings both authors - and a handful of other contemporary critics - to the judgement that schools are not very effective...

...Illich appears to share the radical egalitarianism of the counterculture, in which everyone has something to teach and - with becoming modesty much to learn...

...As Paul Weaver has summarized Inequality's message in these pages, "Its key conclusion is that, within the range of school quality in America today, this effect (of schools) is negligible...

...The occasional "free school," open high school, Montessori classroom, rural commune, or experimental college already proceeds on principles not too different from these...

...These linkages - Illich calls them "learning webs" or "opportunity networks" - amount to a kind of Whole Earth Catalog of learning resources combined with a switchboard and arrangement for bringing one who wants to learn something together with someone who already knows it...

...It offers a false promise of equality, a redistribution that benefits only the already-favored, a set of barriers masquerading as opportunities...

...A handful of recent volumes is jolting the educators right down to their learned marrow...

...Schools are overrated...

...He reviews the major studies of the past decade in search of evidence that schools in particular, and education in general, are potent means of insuring a fair allocation of job prestige and dollars, and finds that they are not...

...The society should facilitate, certainly should not impede, the creation of linkages that bring incipient Aristotles together with aspiring Platos...

...At bottom, Illich sees schools as ill-disguised agencies of social control which perpetuate inequalities, give formal sanction to exclusivity (as in degrees, teacher licences, and the like), and foster cultural homogeneity...

...like the Navy or the automobile industry, the schools have changed, albeit in a leisurely and somewhat random fashion, tending over time to keep up with the expectations of their critics, their customers, and, most importantly, their taxpayers...

...Illich and Jencks partake of the growing tendency to judge society's processes in terms of their results, rather than simply setting goals, providing resources, and taking outputs for granted...

...Once at the lip of that precipice, one either edges along, looking for changes within the schools that may somehow, someday make them more "effective," or one jumps over in search of different instrumentalities...

...The assertion that schools, even schools at their best, are not very important to society, is a devastating charge, for it is the one claim that the institution itself cannot rebut without appearing wholly self-interested...

...It is here that the common strands in Illich and Jencks begin to appear...

...And if school inputs cannot even be certain to produce .such a direct outcome as "learning," what of such ambitious goals as social mobility...

...For a central theme with him is that the poor and downtrodden are the chief victims of contemporary schooling...

...But Illich would not confine his notions to the elite - or far out - fringes of society...

...Neither will tinkering with it, spending on it, or blindly believing in it have much effect...

...Neither can abide the deception of an equalizing institution that not only fails to lift the poor out of poverty, but also bestows its rewards (and its payroll) in sectarian fashion on its own annointed, while diverting huge chunks of the nation's tax revenues from other, less cramped purposes...

...It would be so much simpler if they were child-haters or budget-cutters instead of social revolutionaries...

...His title indicates a certain skepticism about the role of schools in society, and his text sustains the tone...

...Illich puts the school to a similar test - how much good or bad does it do the poor...

...Whether the providers have secretly shaped the expectations of the consumers is not terribly important...

...Regular readers of Albert Shanker's paid column in the Sunday Times are treated to the best-placed and most readable sample of an educator taking it seriously enough to spend a fair chunk of his membership's hard-earned dues to answer it...

...For a half-century, schoolmen have been accustomed to reading that schools don't work as well as they should, that this reform or that innovation will bring them closer to realizing their great mandate...

...Neither writes off education, but each despairs of making it correlate with other, larger purposes such as equality of income, status, or personal happiness...

...Could it be muggings in the classroom...

...Symbiosis has been the norm...

...Possibly...

...They, too, are counter-attacking, seeking to prove that the only thing that keeps schools from mattering more is their own management...

...The new critics menace that relationship that earlier generations tended to reinforce...

...The education establishment has responded in the fashion of any large and well-entrenched institution...

...Yet the recent paranoia among schoolmen suggests that the silly question is getting asked altogether too often...

...He would have us reform schools into pleasurable places of intellectual stimulation, personal growth, and social awareness instead of learning factories...

...Public relations is one thing, but what need has such a sturdy fortress for a militia...

...Of course they matter, if they have enough money, enough talented (and well-paid) humanitarians in the classroom, a renovated curriculum, and a comfy building...

...Among the more literate segments of the teaching population, however, the more likely answer is that they are fighting against books...

...On the face of it, this recommendation will please most schoolteachers and reformers, for it meshes with their liberated view of the learning process and frees them from the need to justify their work with those damnable achievement tests...

...It is in this quest for correlation that the new critics differ from their predecessors...

...Weary citizens voting down bond issues...

...Jencks is not "against schools...

...Illich is more direct...

...At minimum, one leaves them with a growing suspicion that the teacher is not always right, that the teacher's union has reason to be worried, and that questions about the effectiveness of schools are not silly in the least...

...It isn't necessary to agree with their choice of landing spots to share their unease with the old school verities...

...Polemic indeed...

...Silly question say the teachers, The New York Times, and the aging devotees of the Great Society...

...Heretofore the relationship was taken for granted, indeed schooling was assumed to correlate with practically every honorable goal the society could devise...

...A student who goes to a 'good' school does not, on average, learn more, or earn more as an adult, than he would have if he had gone to a 'bad' school...

...Jencks simply says we should recognize the limitations of school, make the best of it, and work toward equality through other means...

...Educators with a somewhat longer view, however, realize full well that this is building a classy new schoolhouse on a bed of quicksand, for Jencks' analysis could as easily lead us in quite different directions...

...The American public school - now so obsessed with self-justification - employs nearly three million people to tend the waking hours of some fifty million youngsters at an annual cost to the taxpayers of nearly $40 billion...

...Those "false public utilities," the 'schools, are made out to be monopolistic, elitist, coercive, inherently unequal, pedagogically ineffective, largely trivial, and destructive of the creativity lurking in every man...

...Written by social scientists and social philosophers, they dare what few previous critiques of the classroom have attempted: they suggest that perhaps schools are not very important: that the cherished institution is, if not the creator of social problems, at least not the solution to many...

...Jencks turns to socialism to ameliorate the ills that schools can't cure...