Holistic Education Column

What we now know as “public education” faces severe challenges because the industrial-age culture that produced it is gradually giving way to a new culture that will understand the processes of teaching and learning very differently. It may appear to some that public schools will simply be replaced by private ones, run by entrepreneurs and corporations, but I do not believe we can picture the emerging educational system using images from the last 200 years. The entire concept of schools as knowledge factories running on tests, grades, and standardized curricula (whether they are public, private, or charter schools) is fundamentally incompatible with the more organic, “green” culture that is coming forth.

Schools as we know them reflect several core themes of American culture—guiding assumptions of the dominant worldview. One defining theme is nationalism. Teaching children how to be “Americans”—training in citizenship, loyalty to the state, and personal identification with the national heritage, mythology, and interests—has been a consistent purpose of public schooling for two centuries. State school systems were established in the mid-nineteenth century in large part because the rise of immigration seemed to threaten this national identity. In recent years, since the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, policymakers have charged schools with responsibility for guarding the very survival of the nation.

Another theme is corporate capitalism. Since the 1840s, when Horace Mann persuaded the emerging industrialist elite to support public education because it would provide a supply of dependable, sober, disciplined factory workers, schools have been used to cultivate a compliant workforce. The corporate system measures success in economic terms (profit, income, Gross National Product, etc.) and consequently defines education in terms of productivity. Young people are even referred to as “human capital.” The testing, grading, labeling and ranking of students reflect an economic system that is fundamentally competitive and concerned with efficient management.

Historically, the rise of capitalism was fueled by a worldview of reductionistic materialism. Complex, holistic processes in nature are reduced to their most basic components and discrete functions in order to give expert managers the powers of prediction and control. In the early years of the twentieth century, social scientists and educators began to apply this technocratic approach to social institutions, especially schooling. Intelligence tests, behaviorist psychology, “scientific management” and other techniques were developed and increasingly used to provide more consistent control of teaching and learning.

Ironically, American culture has simultaneously been shaped by a traditional religious ideology that opposes materialism. Maintaining a firm distinction between the natural world and the realm of the divine, this ideology sees humanity as essentially “fallen” or sinful; it views the child as an intellectually and morally empty vessel, needing careful instruction and firm discipline in order to properly mature. This influence pervades American education despite years of research on human development that suggests otherwise. In addition, ongoing political arguments over evolution and creationism, the role of prayer or Scripture in schools, or the teaching of morally controversial subjects or texts, as well as the stubborn persistence of corporal punishment in several states, demonstrate the more overt influences of this belief system.

Interwoven with these cultural themes is a limited ideal of democracy. The ideal, expressed in soaring notions such as “freedom,” “equality under the law,” and “government of the people,” is widely venerated, but its implementation has been irregular due to social, political and economic conflicts that have led to an inequitable distribution of opportunity and privilege, usually according to race, class, gender, ethnic or religious identity and other group distinctions. Public education has in part been conceived as a mechanism for equalizing opportunities for personal advancement, but throughout its history, democratically oriented policies and reforms have faltered against the biases and interests that perpetuate social divisions and inequality. Segregation of public schools by race and class, even when legally banned, has continued due to patterns of neighborhood settlement and distribution of property taxes.