The Curious Course of Education

The education of a child is not a process of teaching. It is a process of discovery. It does not depend upon the talent of the teacher, though a teacher without talent may stifle the process. It does not depend upon the tools provided, but the child without the tools with which to build with must overcome a high barrier to learning, It does not depend upon the quality of texts, yet a school without a quality library is not a functioning school. The road to education lies within the curiosity of the developing mind, it is not a straight line drawn upon a map of the human intellect. To a large extent the President has hit upon a truism when he has said that crisis in education has more to do with the subtle bigotry of low expectation than with the overt bigotry of unequal resources. The President’s initiative to make educators accountable for their stewardship by tying the Federal contribution to achievement standards has been positive, even though it was first proposed by his predecessor as Project 2000 and reviled by the right wing. Its flaw in the present program is in its leaving the standard making to the States. Math is no different in Mississippi than it is in Massachusetts. Science does not change between Huntsville and Hartford. Literature sings as loudly to the souls of both Lubbock and Ludlow.

Education is the loom upon which the fabric of society is fashioned and its function is the same regardless of its locality. The framework of the machine is curiosity and the boundless curiosity of children is satisfied only with an equally boundless access to information. Curiosity confined by conformity to a creed is crushed and discarded as waste. When information is inhibited by ideology there is no education but only indoctrination. We cannot solve the crisis in education by throwing money at the system nor can we improve it by politicizing parochial schools while withdrawing resources from the public school system.

In the last half of the 20th Century we sought to minimize our investment in children. We sought economies of size by consolidating smaller schools into larger and larger institutions. We developed a whole new and highly paid profession, not of teachers but of educational administrators whose mission was to control costs and, as the concentration of the student populations became greater, to control children and to not educate them. That compulsion to control has fallen most strenuously upon the child most easily isolated by the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, the shape of his eyes or the accent of his speech. The subtle bigotry of low expectations has functioned to efficiently isolate the different child from his own curiosity and the magnificent process of discovery.

We are not going to find a solution to the crisis with voucher schemes to weaken an already weakened system of free public education. We will only find it in true institutional reform; reducing the size of the schools and classes in a system of de-consolidation. We will only find it when the most important, respected and compensated members of the educational establishment are teachers and not administrators. We will only find it in new Federal contributions to the development of personnel and replacement of infrastructure devoted to education designed not to throw money at the schools but to equalize the resources of the States and localities to a national norm.