Education isn't a problem:
Jr, David R Carlin
OF SEVERAL WIMPS David R. Carlin, Jr. EDUCATION ISN'T A PROBLEM IT'S MORE LIKE A MYSTERY merica's education problems were once again put on the national front burner for a few days in late...
...To say, as we do nowadays, that the United States suffers from grave educational problems is not of course to say that solutions to those problems are easily discovered or cheaply paid for...
...If you gather the governors to meet with the ghost of Jefferson to talk about schools, that's OK...
...But I believe they are far more intractable than we normally give them credit for...
...Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and he had both the virtues and the defects of the Enlightenment mentality...
...In his time he realized that cultivation of the nation's character and intellect depended on more than schools, though it depended on schools as well...
...To describe something as a problem is to imply that a potential solution exists...
...It was Thomas Jefferson, an "education president" if ever there was one, who founded the university and designed its original campus, the loveliest academic quadrangle in America...
...Oh, the reformers of course acknowledge this as an abstract proposition...
...We may not be facing a "mystery" exactly, but we are facing a difficulty that cannot be discussed intelligently within the framework of conventional education discourse...
...but please call it a "schooling summit," not an "education summit...
...But to abstain from confusing education with schooling is not simply a matter of truth in labeling...
...Fair enough...
...All we control are schools...
...Instead it published newspapers, journals, books, encyclopedias...
...that it's largely a question of national will and priorities...
...and for good measure it threw in the American and French revolutions...
...you don't have to be a believer in ghosts to feel his presence hovering over the campus...
...Neither member of the pair makes sense without the other...
...Jefferson would understand...
...it suppressed monasteries and Jesuits...
...hence all we talk about are schools...
...When it wanted to reform the world's education, which was its principal ambition, it didn't tinker with the schools...
...But we need more than blessings to solve America's education problems...
...When I listen to our political and educational leadership discuss their solutions to the sorry state of American education, I sometimes have the odd feeling that I'm present at a convention of Dr...
...that we can put those solutions into effect if we are ready to pay the necessary price...
...For instance, our education reformers almost invariably talk as though schooling and education were the same thing, as though, in other words, schools are society's only agencies of education-forgetting that families, peer groups, TV, record albums, churches, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, the Y, and so on, are also agencies of education...
...that if we can put a man on the moon we must be able to put knowledge that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 into the head of every college senior...
...The last thing I want to recommend is anything quite so cataclysmic as a reprise of the eighteenth century...
...Thus the celebrated Problem of Evil: to Dr...
...No more than anything else does schooling exist in a vacuum...
...For one thing, the word "problem" itself is problematic...
...He called such difficulties mysteries...
...But when they come down to cases, when they talk about the shortcomings of American education and how to remedy them, it is always the school they focus on, not the family, the peer group, etc...
...like everything else, it lives and moves in an environment...
...Pangloss it was a problem, hence a difficulty admitting of a solution...
...Problem" and "solution" are complementary terms, like "up" and "down," "father" and "son," "cause" and "effect...
...it created salons, clubs, libraries, academies...
...and so forth...
...Nonetheless, otherwise intelligent people, who would never dream of discussing diplomacy, for instance, without situating such a discussion in its military, political, and economic context, do not hesitate, when they put on their educational reformer hats, to discuss schooling as though the social-cultural context were far less complex than the context of diplomacy, almost as though schools had no social-cultural context at all...
...Perhaps this explains why three out of every four school reform proposals turn out to be crackpot ideas, which, when implemented, leave the last state of the school worse than the first...
...Considered from a symbolic point of view, the site of the summit, the University of Virginia, was perfectly chosen...
...At Charlottesville, nearly as much as at Monticello, not far away, you can almost touch Jefferson...
...The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel suggested that there are certain difficulties which are not susceptible of solution, though they may be given a response that is something other than a solution...
...EDUCATION ISN'T A PROBLEM IT'S MORE LIKE A MYSTERY merica's education problems were once again put on the national front burner for a few days in late September when President Bush hosted an "education summit" for the governors...
...Thus his great concern with a free press, with democratic political structures, with a proper balance between agricultural and urban occupations-all these, along with schools, were elements, as he saw it, of a system of national education...
...If the ancients were right in their belief that the genius loci can confer blessings, then the education summit must have been greatly blessed...
...But I strongly suspect that our "problems" in education have gone well beyond, the point where school-reform "solutions" will any longer do the job...
...This mentality had its blind spots (Jefferson, for instance, had no use for Plato, and Voltaire thought Shakespeare was talented but crude, not so fine a writer of tragedy as Joseph Addison), but it was never so blind as to imagine that the education of society is provided through schools alone...
...I am not arguing that our educational difficulties are quite so intractable as the mystery that faced Job on his dunghill...
...But to discuss this question in terms of problems is to say that we can find solutions if we look hard enough and long enough...
...What good does it do," they will object, "to focus on these other agencies of education, since as public policymakers we have no control over them...
...Such confusion makes it impossible to talk intelligently about schooling, makes it impossible to give a realistic estimate of what can or cannot be accomplished in the narrow field of school reform...
...Whether education will stay on the front burner is another question, and whether it makes any real difference if it stays there or not is another question still...
...But please, then, don't advertise your discussion of schools as a discussion of education...
...cation discourse...
...Panglosses, or that I'm listening to a dramatic reading from one of Voltaire's less witty satires...
...but to Marcel, as to Job, it was a mystery, a difficulty that demanded a response, but that response would hardly constitute a solution...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 19
