Winston Churchill gave democracy only a modest passing grade but, nonetheless, viewed it as the best form of government humans have managed to put together. Since then, democracy has achieved a higher global rating, increasingly tied to education and the making of a good society. The essentials of a good society are a wise and healthy people and a supportive culture. All else is derivative. The renewal of this culture requires a democratic people.
The Founding generation of the United States of America saw the necessity of this reciprocal relationship and the role of education in sustaining it. But they wrote nothing about schools. Are we to assume that they viewed education as the near-ubiquitous context comprised of family, church, and school for developing a unique human being? In effect, that we the people would build and sustain a nationwide moral ecology of communities in which freedom and responsibility would be both studied and practiced?
There is today a chorus of discontent and anticipation of fundamental change in the conduct of our affairs: political, social, economic, educational, organizational, institutional. We heard President Obama’s stunning speech last November in a Chicago park and around the world about his commitment to widespread change and his expression of hope. Almost in unison came the response: “Yes we can.” But already, from right and left, comes the criticism that his preoccupation with big problems and big ideas is mere abstraction lacking the necessary specifics. Are we forgetting the WE?
I turn now to schooling, an enterprise driven more by ideology than knowledge and evidence. Unless we get above the endless bickering that has kept our system of schooling stranded in the deep structure that hardened into place many decades ago, we will find ourselves only tinkering with school reform one more time. Enough already! There are children here.
There are some obvious improvements to be made that will arouse little controversy, such as upgrading the infrastructure of schooling and providing high-level equity in instructional and curricular learning and teaching resources. And there is a rich array of ideas that have been briefly implemented in innovative school programs that were not brought to scale and sustained. Their stories are readily accessible but have been virtually ignored by policymakers, even by federally appointed committees such as the National Commission on Excellence in Education that in 1983 produced the influential report A Nation at Risk. In all probability, some of these will be rediscovered, funded, not brought to scale, and fade, largely because of the ideological differences embedded in our multilayered system of schooling.
Over a period of sixty years, I have taught in a one-room school and school for delinquent boys, taught in every grade from the first through graduate school, been a dean for sixteen years, and studied in depth and breadth educational change, schooling, the education of educators, and more. I now look back in wonderment, anger, and near-despair at the stark reality of we the people scarcely murmuring for eight years over the imposition of the No Child Left Behind Act on our PUBLIC SCHOOLS. No powerful intellect is required for coming to the conclusion that we the people are grossly undereducated in what education is and negligent in the informed care of our irreplaceable asset, the public school. Where art thou, Horace Mann, arguably its founder, who proclaimed over 150 years ago that “the public school is the greatest discovery made by man”?
I have concluded that we will never have the schools our democracy requires until their well-being is a major priority of local communities. And we will not have them until policymakers, business roundtables, educational organizations, teacher-preparing institutions, and community leaders agree on what all schools are for. The challenges are enormous and, unless we take them seriously and begin the necessary learning now, our century-old tinkering with schooling will continue.
These are not tasks to delegate to national commissions. They are for all of us—the “yes we can” people, the young and the old, and everyone in between. We can start with Renaissance cafés, coffee klatches, book clubs, symposia, debates, and of course, common readings.
The time is ripe for us to stop tinkering and do three things:
1. First, we must provide ALL communities with the material and human resources they need to ensure that their schools will become places of learning and joy.
2. Second, we must generate in all communities a richly comprehensive conversation about what our schools are for and how we help them do it. Perhaps the introductory topic should be about what education is. Let the conversation begin.
3. Third, we must identify the unresolved, formidable issues that have plagued the reconstruction of our schooling enterprise for many years, cultivate the mandate, progressively provide the human and financial resources, and begin the great turning of forging a system of uniquely different schools ever-renewing one by one. And what are they for? The essential educating not being done well elsewhere – or at all.