Another reason for the inertia that operates against real change in our educational system has to do with the massive, entrenched nature of the educational establisment. In the United States, 6.8 million people currently make their living as teachers (U.S. Census Bureau). Contrary to popular belief, teaching pays better than does the average white-collar or professional job (Greene & Winters, 2007) and offers many other benefits, including, usually, job security, excellent pension plans, and lots of vacation time. Schools of education, which prepare teachers for conventional schools, comprise a huge portion of the higher educational establishment. The textbook industry is also massive and lucrative. A radical change in our system of education would upset all of this. Such a change would abolish our need for teachers, as presently defined. It would also abolish our need for schools of education and most if not all of our need for textbooks.
Many people in our culture have an economic interest in not just retaining but expanding conventional education. The more hours and years we require young people to go to school, the more teachers, school administrators, education professors, and textbook authors and publishers we can employ. The education business is just like every business; it is constantly trying to expand for the benefit of those who profit from it.
The education industry thrives on small changes and fads. New ideas about how to motivate children, new courses, and new ways of teaching old courses (such as the "new new new math") all provide jobs for education professors and textbook publishers. But fundamental change of the type I have been talking about in previous postings of this blog would upset everything.
Gradual Change Doesn't Work
Another barrier to the kind of change in schooling that I have been talking about is that it cannot be done gradually within a school or school system. The change requires a paradigm shift, from one in which teachers are in charge of the educational process to one in which each student is truly in charge of his or her own education. You can't do that a little at a time. As long as teachers set a curriculum, no matter how many choices they offer within that curriculum, students will see it as teachers' jobs, not theirs, to decide what to learn. As long as teachers evaluate students' progress, no matter how they do so, students will see that their job is to meet teachers' expectations, not to establish and meet their own expectations.
In fact, the addition of choices and of less clearly defined means of evaluation within the conventional schooling system can make students' lives even more stressful than before. After such "liberal" changes, it becomes each student's job to guess what it is that the teachers want them to do and to guess at the real, unspoken criteria for evaluation. School becomes an exercise in mind reading. My own belief is that within the conventional school system the most benign way to teach is to be as clear as possible about the requirements and criteria, so students can meet those requirements and criteria with minimal fear that they may be studying the wrong things.
You also can't, within the conventional school system, expect to eliminate evaluation gradually, one course at a time. Suppose you introduce into the curriculum one course in which students will not be graded. What you will find is that most students won't do anything in that course, even if they want to. In a system where other courses are graded, the ungraded course is understood as irrelevant. How can a good student justify devoting time to a course that is not graded if other courses are graded? In order to change that mindset, the whole system has to change.
How Change is Occurring
Fundamental change in education is, nevertheless, occurring outside of the traditional school system. It is occurring among groups of families who decide to "unschool" their children (that is, to home school them in a free way, where there is no curriculum or evaluation) and among people who start non-school schools, such as those modeled after the Sudbury Valley School. People in these movements establish among themselves new sets of social norms, which allow them to overcome the barriers to behaving in ways that seem abnormal to others. Their observations of children who are educating themselves lead them to perceive education in a new light, as something to admire and enjoy in children but not to control. They begin to see many examples of people who have educated themselves freely and happily, outside of the conventional school system, and have gone on to successful lives by every meaningful definition of success, and so the self-fulfilling prophesies of conventional schooling are understood for what they are.
We have no reason to be discouraged about the future of education. We just must realize that real reform is not going to occur within the established school system. It will continue to occur outside of that system. The gradual change that will occur is that more and more people will opt out of conventional schooling. To permit that to happen, we need to be sure that people have the legal right to opt out. On a political level, that should be the highest priority for those of us who look for a world in which children can develop freely and happily, with the full experience of democracy and the rights and responsibilities that democracy entails.
