In his excellent collection of essays, Why School?, Mike Rose writes, “If we are a nation divided, we are also a nation yearning for new ways to frame old issues, for a robust language of schooling and civic life…. And we are in desperate need of rich, detailed images of possibility.”
As a friend reminded me recently, it’s easy to identify the problem; figuring out the solution is the hard part.
Past utopian visions of the future (which would take us up to right about now) more often than not envisioned a world in which technology would make our lives easier. Technology would offer great convenience, more order, less stress, more leisure time. We would have greater peace throughout the world. We would all be well fed, well informed, well loved. We’d also have jetpacks so we could zoom around at will. The irony, of course, is that, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated technology, human life — indeed, all life on Earth — has gotten more complicated, more stressed, more at risk. In some ways, the dystopian views have turned out to be more accurate. There is more hunger and more war. The social divides have broadened. We have stressed out the natural environment to the point where we’re driving hundreds of species to extinction every year. And, of course, our hunger for fossil fuels to feed our peripatetic and consumer-driven lives has heated the planet to the breaking point. Bill McKibben describes the latter problem and offers some general solutions in his frightening and hopeful book Eaarth. Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding in The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, seconds McKibben’s views. “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice. We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model.” Optimistically, he adds, “We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”
In schools, the overarching question is this: What is the point of a precollegiate education now? Do we simply continue to prepare students for college as best we can — and, in so doing, leave the bigger questions of what is important in education to the colleges and universities? Or do we reflect on what students need to know in order to not only live individually fulfilling lives in and beyond college, but also what they need to know in order to contribute to the human community? Author Daniel Pink, whom everyone quotes these days, has made a cogent argument for the latter. Schools can continue to focus primarily on sorting students (through grades and tests and tracks of increasingly difficult course content) simply to identify who the school-smart among us are, who should attend the elite colleges, and who should land in positions of great power in this nation and the world. Or they can consider the problems of this world brought about by our behavior, and think about the educational scaffolding needed to prepare students to be… well, better adults than we generally are today.
When it comes to the pace of change in schools, there are those who advocate revolution, and those who advocate evolution. This issue carries both viewpoints. What struck me, however, is how both viewpoints aim toward a very clear goal — that education for humanity’s sake is, in fact, our shared goal.