The Crisis In Education

Where to start defining the crisis?

Gorgias: I say we might start with education.

My wife said before we met, now don't let the discussion go too far without getting the education issues... and not just the university -- but the primary and public school education as well.

On the other hand, I don't just want to talk about the problems. I think sometimes it is useful to fastforward to the cures or solutions as well as the causes and go kind of back-and-forth between them because if we don't get the cure issue in early on, then we may not get to it. And the two are related in ways that might not be apparent. In talking about specific solutions you get a much better idea of the nature and intractibility of the problem. We must move back-and-forth.

Charmides: Thinking about the education sphere, it is pretty clear to me that every parent that I know thinks there is a problem with public education and with the middle school, in particular. I wonder how many parents have always thought that public education was a problem? So, I don't know how you'd really tell whether the education system is in crisis, or whether there is something approaching total breakdown in trust and system collapse.

Socrates: I'd like to pursue your question, Charmides, whether there was in the manageable past, that is when at least some of us can remember, a widespread discontent with the public schools? And I would have to say, granted the character of the Mid-west region in which I was born, that there was nothing like widespread discontent. It was assumed that public schools were doing their work, they had a limited franchise, so to speak, and this I think really bears, however weightily is to be determined, on the problem in education. The schools were there to teach. One of the things they were explicitly not to teach was how to be religious. In all my years in public schools in South Dakota and then a denominational college, I never once sat in a classroom the day it began with a prayer. My father, a Methodist minister, would have strenuously objected if he had thought that such that such a thing was happening. "I don't send my kids to school for any kind of a religious exercise... that is not the business of the schools.

Meno: I think parents are worried more about non academic matters.

Plato: It might help to divide the question between middle school and high school. In addition to teaching, in middle school one of the tasks was forming the citizen, by which that as you moved out of the primary system and away from the family and you dealt with strangers - not total strangers. You met people who had very different ways of life. And formerly middle schools socialized these people, helped them learn to live together, they really did that fairly well and the schools weren't torn apart.

But most of us then didn't happen to live in an area with a huge wave of immigrants. Now this has become a chronic problem in American life of another order. The problem of adjusting to situations where the backgrounds of children are so very different.

Then high school, it seemed to me, was a setting where two things were to take place. Education to provide the skills sufficient for most folks to move into the work force, and then a smaller group went into higher education. Skills sufficient to get into the work force for some; skills sufficient to get into college for others. And the other side was dealing with the hormonal tide and beginning to date and learn something about assessment of other people, learning to choose a mate in a reasonably stable and orderly social environment. But, formerly high schools could do both of those jobs. I think the feeling was, and I would agree with you that there was a basic satisfaction with the schools. There wasn't this radical, across the board sense that the schools were failing in their tasks and generally falling apart.

What I am getting at is that where the schools fail in their collateral tasks of socializing, the schools aren't a fit place for educating anyone. As a result, they fail in their educational mission as well.

Now, my sense is that the schools are like the hospital emergency rooms. They are two overloaded institutions in our society. That is where all the problems that aren't adequately dealt with elsewhere come to roost and these institutions can no longer do what they are called to do adequately.

Meno: One manifestation of the crisis then is whether significant segment of the school age population has been excluded from a standard of education that would bring them meaningfully into the work place and capable of finding jobs that would provide a basic standard of living.

Against this standard we clearly have a system collapse in almost every major urban inner city. In Washington, D.C., you know, everyday almost in the papers you are going to read about how things are deteriorating.

Pythagoras: Remember we were going to talk about cure, not just problems. On the other hand, there are some interesting things happening on the opportunity side that certainly suggests that there is a crisis by the Chinese definition of crisis.

Some very promising experiments with Chartered schools, some of you are familiar with, they are essentially private schools, but they are chartered under the state. Many are seeing this now as a way to bring about greater responsiveness of schools to parents. And, in fact, chartered schools require, many of them require obligation from a parent in terms of taking substantive interest in the progress of their children. It remains to be seen how chartered schools will do in terms of serving a broad spectrum of the school age population. But charter schools is the opportunity side of the education crisis.

Laches: I am going to say that we are talking about a system collapse and the system can collapse from the bottom up. From what we have heard there is a difference between now and 20-25 years ago and I think that you have to look at the evidence of how things have changed for the worse and the evidence is that there may be a system collapse in education. I don't think charter schools are an opportunity. I see them as a salvage operation.

Pythagoras: The jury is out.

Charmides: The first thing I thought when we were talking about the charter schools, is particularly the parental involvement. My experience with the public schools where we live, and it is a reasonably affluent area, is that you have a fair number of the parents who are already involved probably in the ways that the charter schools want them to be and don't require an oath or a special promise. I think you have a lot of kids coming into the system whose parents are not involved at all. Single parent families where they are highly stressed, parents with two jobs and where the parents don't have an educational background of their own to make the sort of commitment or to even think that they ought to. And so, it does strike me in one way that the charter school thing might be an equivalent of a salvage operation, or the equivalent of the "security" communities in terms of education, I don't know.

Laches: Is the collapse that you are talking about, the collapse with respect to the traditional things that were being taught, reading, writing and arithmetic, or their modern day equivalent, or collapse with respect to the socialization experiences that were referred to, it seems me that part of the collapse is the two tier educational system which has in a sense always been there.

Pythagoras: Right. It wasn't perceived that way is one what is collapsing is the idea that we ought to have a common life, a collapse of the expectation directed at the schools. Technically and technologically one would suppose the schools are in better shape than they have ever been in terms of the kind of thing they can bring to bear on what the students are supposed to do in terms of reading, science and mathematics.

Parmenides: Is there some variation for class, still in perceptions of the educational system?

Pythagoras: That is a very good point.

Parmenides: I grew up in Illinois, and was exposed to a very progressive educational system... that was very successful. It was at the cutting edge; it probably still is - that would be my guess. But, it is a very affluent community. I have read that the public schools are not in terrible disarray -- sure there are problems -- but not terrible disarray where you've got affluence and financial success. Precisely because the student bodies aren't that different, the educational expectations are geared to chances out there in the job world and so on, and the affluent areas still feel public education is .

With the lower groups in the society, and probably that body is increasing in numbers, the frustrations in the economic arena, declining prospects for work and lower caliber jobs with little chance of a career, etc might make school seem less relevant. These perceptions have begun to impinge and they affect the educational systems. There is no expectation that education leads somewhere and parents and kids begin raising serious questions about the capability of education to do anything at all.

I am just saying, isn't the decline in education rigged to this point that we were raising about Brazilianization, of the emergence of a lower class and an overclass? So that for some groups, the educational institutions are doing quite well, they are not a problem, but for a large majority they probably are not trusted at all.

Charmides: There is also the intrusion of the "market effects" in the lives and minds of the students. The schools used to be, along with the church, and to some degree the family, where you got the "socialization" messages that you were going to get -- whether it was citizenship or how to get along with people, what sort of jobs or life partners you were going to seek.

I think as we have indicated, television and other media influences are where these "socialization messages" come from now. Television whether it is four or six hours a day as some polls show or only a couple hours, that is where an important part of the education, of the socialization is taking place.

I am sure the average school teacher must feel very frustrated if that person has any expectation of having any control whatsoever over what is happening with respect to broader socialization.

Pythagoras: And I think that the intrusion of the market is part of this is a new phenomenon that did not afflict previous eras with respect to public education.

Also, I think that over a broad strata of parents, even in affluent systems, there is the concern that the school system, in contrast to a former era, introduces adverse aspects of socialization such as sexual promiscuity and drugs, for example, and other influences that parents are concerned about.

This is the basis of the legitimate concerns of the religious right.

Plato: Curious convergence here, as the schools break down, at least in some part because of the backdrop of the changing economic arena and the decline in life prospects, which are concerns of the economic liberals, the schools increasingly become venues for "negative socialization" which is the concern of the political conservatives. These two problems may be linked together in ways that might suggest common political solutions.

Meno: The challenge is to think of a way to get people to make some sacrifices in the direction of the common good to insure that our young people are getting a positive academic and social experience, no matter what the economic prospects might be. Holding school out as the way to economic success may be a mistake. Education must be seen as a good to be pursued for its own sake.

Gorgias I want to pick up on that issue... Is one of the weaknesses of the shchool system now the failure to see that while we want to recognize diversity and don't want to be promoting religion and having prayer, that we do want to be promoting certain kinds of liberal values, a civic culture, that is part of what it means to be a human being.

Parmenides: Which was the old idea of what it means to be a good citizen?

MenoAnd a concept of the public interest? An affirmation that we share these values?

And here we have a kind of problem because we as a society don't have a clear vision of what we mean by Liberalism anymore, we don't know what values we share. We don't know what kind of values of civic culture, of civic virtue, to hold as a society and so we don't teach our kids these values.

Civics class is how a bill becomes a law. And that may have been all right when the religious institutions were still pretty strong in people's lives and when you didn't have television and all the negative media images of civic culture.

And remember, television wasn't always a negative. Think of the television heroes of the 1950's and the theme songs, Roy Rogers "faith, hope and charity, that is the way to live successfully" and Superman "Truth, Justice and the American way" Hopalong Cassidy, "I need a man to lean upon to teach me right and wrong", etc.. The Lone Ranger, Davey Crockett, the list goes on and on.

Laches: So we need another set of positive images for children?

Gorgias: It might not hurt. But my point is that drawing the historical comparison in regard to citizenship education helps get to what might be the real issue, which is the crisis in education is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis, a crisis in Liberalism as a political philosophy.

Comments on any point are welcome but the following points are particularly important to furthering the dialogue: