On why we don’t get what we don’t know enough to want
Let’s discuss Chesterton. In examining the great English public schools (think Eton, not the American definition of ‘public school’), Chesterton expressed significant doubt about the ultimate value of their aims, but none at all about their ability to achieve those aims.[1] He explained that the public schools were successful on their own terms because “the managers of our public schools did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they got something; instead of going to work in a broad-minded manner and wanting everything and getting nothing” (197). We may not have much to do with English public schools, but the principle outlined here is most applicable to the crisis facing NYC in particular and urban schools in general.
What Chesterton means here is that being a stereotypical English gentleman may or may not have been a good thing and producing English gentlemen may or may not have been a useful aim—but there could be no doubt that Eton and Harrow did, in fact, produce stereotypical English gentlemen. They produced them because they knew ‘what sort of boy they liked’. They had a clear and articulable vision of the ideal Etonian; they knew how such a boy would speak and how he would carry himself. They knew what such a boy would like to read and what sort of society he would frequent. They knew what sort of moral principles he would own, even if he did not always live up to them. They even knew how he would dress for dinner and could gauge the precise degree of his enthusiasm for sport. Whether or not their ideal Etonian was a good man or a good citizen or a good Christian was almost beside the point; they had an ideal, that ideal was evident to and broadly supported by their students’ parents and their broader society, and so they were able to, in many cases, achieve their ideal.
Our NYC schools, by contrast, have no such ideal. Quick, tell me – how would the ideal graduate of a NYC school dress for dinner? You don’t know and neither does anyone else. To use an example more immediately related to our purported aims—what would the ideal graduate of an NYC school like to read? You don’t know that either. What sort of career will the ideal graduate of an NYC school pursue? You don’t know that either. No one knows that, because NYC schools have consistently and firmly refused to settle on any coherent and concrete set of desired outcomes. We don’t want to tell our students what they ought to be or what they ought to do or how they ought to act and, therefore, we have little to no influence over what they become.
We don’t want to limit our students, or impose our own judgements on them, or try to make them conform to our standards. We refuse to tell them which books are good and which are not, and so they read whatever they like or nothing at all, as they like. We refuse to tell them which moral principles are good and which are bad, and so they end up with whatever principles they can scrape together from other sources or, as often as not, none at all. Our intentions in all this may be laudable; we may adopt this refusal to make definite judgements or set definite aims out of a liberal-minded desire to let students develop along the paths that seem best to them. But we cannot, then, complain if the paths that seem best to them are not at all like the paths that their teachers and principals might have vaguely and silently envisioned.
But, Mrs. Gradgrind, (I imagine you saying) don’t we have standards? Doesn’t the Common Core give us a set of concrete and desired outcomes? Yes and no. Those lists of standards do give us guidance as to what students ought to be able to do; it gives no guidance whatsoever as to what they ought to be. We shouldn’t confuse the two; doing a particular writing task in response to a set reading passage is not the same as being a voracious and curious reader. Furthermore, those standards are almost entirely free of any sort of context or ultimate aim. We may tell students that they need to be able to ‘cite textual evidence to support their inferences’ so that they can pass a test on citing textual evidence, but we never tell them how being able to do this particular task or pass this particular test will help them become anything good or valuable. We never tell them because we don’t have any clear conception of what it is good or valuable to be. We are, therefore, unable to convince our students that acquiring these skills is at all important. It’s rather like telling our students that they need to practice their skills in playing checkers, so that they can pass a test on playing checkers. Unless they have a burning native desire to be professional checkers-players (which they probably do not) they will simply roll their eyes and wonder why the adults around them seem so fixated on checkers. Forgive the rambling simile, dear reader—the point is that all these standards are just signposts on a path leading to nowhere, because they are not directly connected to any end result. Their only purpose is to measure the progress of students; they say nothing about the sort of man that a student should become, and so they, on their own, will never be enough to give real purpose to our schools.
But, Mrs.
Gradgrind, (you are probably saying, as you shake your head at me) we have
other goals! What about college and career readiness? What about success? What
about good citizenship? Don’t these things give shape and purpose to our
schools? Again—yes and no. In future posts, we’ll take these purported aims of
our schools system one at a time and we will see why they are far too amorphous
to be meaningful outcomes.
[1] G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910, pp. 195-6.
Aye Carranza! 