Possible Lives

by Guest Blogger Mike Rose

About halfway between the first President Bush’s convocation of the nation’s governors at Charlottesville – the 1989 education summit–and the passage of Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000, I began a journey through our nation’s public schools to document good work, visiting classrooms judged to be effective and decent places by those closest to them–parents, principals, teachers, students–places that embody the hope for a free and educated society that has, at its best, driven this extraordinary American experiment from the beginning.

It was a remarkable experience.  I stayed with the teachers I was observing, squirreled away in a spare bedroom or a converted den, or I stayed in motels by the schools I was visiting. I was taken through neighborhoods, went to civic meetings, local entertainment, the corner restaurant or bar.  I consulted historical societies.  I met a lot of parents.  The journey was both geographical–recording actual classrooms and communities across the United States–and philosophical, trying to gain a lived, felt sense of what public education means in a democracy.

The result was a book called Possible Lives.  Now a dozen years after its publication, I spoke again with some of the teachers I visited and wrote a new preface for it, for the same kind of reflective journey is more needed now than ever.  In the midst of the culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious, intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions; and the testing, testing, testing–in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the broader purpose and grand vision of the common public school.

This larger vision is present in the Forum’s “Democracy at Risk,” and the document couldn’t come at a better time.

Think about it, when was the last time you were moved by a policy or political speech about education?  My guess is that it’s been quite a while.  We seem trapped in a language of schooling that stresses economics, accountability, and compliance.  These are important issues, to be sure.  But they are not the stuff of personal dreams and common vision, not a language that inspires young people to think gracefully and moves young adults to become teachers and foster such development.

In our national discourse about schooling, there is some mention of the traditional purposes of education­–intellectual, civic, and moral development–but not much.  The economic motive looms large.  Policy discussion is also driven, and increasingly so, by various systems of standards and assessments that have consequences for how schools are rated, run, and even financed.

The economic motive has always been a significant factor in the spread of mass education in the United States, and as someone from the working class who has achieved financial mobility from schooling, the importance of the link between education and economic well-being is not lost on me.  Furthermore, there is an argument to be made for combining this economic theme with measurement technique, especially when considering a system of mass education as vast and complex as ours.  It is crucial to have some means of quality control, and to be able to bring to light the significant numbers of young people who don’t do well in school, who are glossed over, who get lost.

But this economic focus, blended with the technology of large-scale assessment, can restrict our vision of what school ought to be about: the full sweep of growth and development, for both individuals and a democratic society.

There’s not much public discussion of achievement that includes curiosity, reflectiveness, uncertainty, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder.  And how about accounts of reform that present change as alternately difficult, exhilarating, ambiguous, and promising–and that find reform not in a device, technique, or structure, but in the way we think about teaching and learning?  Consider how little we hear about respect, decency, aesthetics, joy, courage, intellect, civility, heart and mind, skill and understanding.  For that matter, think of how rarely we hear of commitment to public education as the center of a free society.

Yet, as I traveled, these were the kinds of things I heard from teachers and parents alike.  Of course parents wanted their kids to be prepared for the world of work.  But the parents I visited wanted so much more: for their children to be valued, their talents encouraged, their limitations addressed.  Parents wanted their children to learn how to get along, how to be fair and respectful of others.  Parents wanted their kids to know things, to get involved in subjects and learn how to learn.  Parents wanted their children to apply what they learn, make good judgments.  And so it went.

All this was specific, grounded, referring to an individual child in an individual place.  It was real and immediate.  But when I heard it in home after home, town after town, I couldn’t miss how widespread it was, from California to Nebraska to New York to the Deep South.  Measurable achievement and economic security are absolutely at the center of parents’ concerns.  But there is more that they want from school or, maybe a better way to say it is that economics and accountability are webbed in a number of other deeply felt concerns.

This is the richer national conversation we need to have about education.  It is the kind of talk I heard throughout my journey.  It underlies “Democracy at Risk.”  I hope we will start to hear it on the campaign trail.

Mike Rose is the author of The Mind At Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker and Possible Lives: the Promise of Public Education in America.  His blog on education can be found at http://web.mac.com/mikerosebooks/Site/Welcome.html