EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!

EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007

"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrists."

H. L. Wayland (1796 - 1865), American educator

"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power."

Harry A. Overstreet, The Mind Alive (1954)


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It was bound to happen sooner rather than later that some researcher would study American education and conclude that it is little more than a factory, and that this factory of education is in trouble.

More than fifty years ago, the entering class with me my freshman year had 30 percent less students my sophomore year than started with me, and when it came time to graduate it had been reduced by another 30 percent, or around 40 percent actual stood the course of the four years to graduate.

Now, that was off the radar of public concern for many reasons. A college education was then something of a novelty for many of us of working class families. So, if we failed, it was no big deal.

Virtually everyone with a high school diploma from an Iowa high school was immediately eligible for acceptance into one of the land grant state institutions.

To give you a sense of the times, the US Selective Service Military Draft was on and many were pulled out of the university and drafted into the US Army to fight in the police action that never became a declared war known as "the Korean War."

Only six years before or 1945, WWII had ended and anyone that wanted a good job with only a high school education or less was set for the pickings. Indeed, in cities such as Detroit and Chicago nearby, you could get a good job without a diploma. You might find yourself working beside your mother or father, uncle or aunt, or even grandparents.

The factory became a cradle to grave economic institution especially for the "Big Three" in the automotive industry. My uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit in Detroit, and I saw this first hand as a boy, visiting him every summer, and playing baseball with kids from such families. They all had better homes than doctors in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, and few of their parents had finished high school.

It wasn't until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that all hell broke loose and education became totally a vocational experience from grammar school to high school and through college. The new math was born and the frantic of panic invaded education.

We had to compete with the Russians and we had to produce soldiers of the mind that were technically programmed to produce a finished product that could compete with and then surpass the Russians.

The purely intellectual aim of education to endeavor to make us see and imagine the world as it is without the distorting programming of a specific end product got lost in the shuffle.

Education, which at one time was the true analgesic to certain diseases the modern world engendered, such as stress and anxiety, has lost sight of the diseases so that all remedies are now superfluous.

So, it should come as little surprise that a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Bob Balfanz, has come to find U.S. high schools "dropout factories" and source of the social-cultural problem of our time.

In his study of 1,700 regular and vocational high schools nationwide, he found only 60 percent of the freshman classes graduated. In my state of Florida, it is less than 50 percent. I live in Hillsborough County, Florida where ten high schools are listed as "dropout factories."

What is not surprising but which has become typical of such studies is that there is much data on what and who but a shortage of data on why or the nature of the disease.

The study suggests the culprit being the draconian demands of testing, the concentration of students in metropolitan areas with large minority populations, poor tracking of racial, ethnic and other subgroups, and the lack of vigilance to the husbanding of such statistics.

The answers or solutions he proposes are ironic because they have the ring of the modern factory mentality:

· Make high schools report graduation rates.
· Get states to build data system to track students.
· Make states count graduation rates in a systematic and uniform way.
· Create progress reports.

We have had the program of "No Child Left Behind," and we have had our Florida schools from grammar through high school rate on an "A through F" scale, with those with "A" ratings receiving positive funding, and those with "F" ratings being punished with funding withheld, when clearly it might be best to have it the other way around, but that does not fit our factory mentality programming of motivating for positive performance through incentives.

Incentives, as I point out in my book "Work Without Managers" (1990), have driven workers from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency in the workplace, bypassing the culture of contribution. Why should it be any different in the classroom?

We still believe, and this is the factory mentality oozing out of our pores, that you can legislate passion and morality with the appropriate programming, when clearly we continue to fail on both fronts over and over and over again.

The spark of curiosity is in the soul of every child as it embraces its environment. Why is this so often killed before it takes a hold on a nascent life?

The student is not a box to fill with goodies. The student is a person with a soul and potential to approach the essence of his or her possibilities. This does not make us equal. This makes us unique. There is no satisfaction greater than finding the spark to energize our potential and then discover some small victory which has nothing to do with anyone else, but engenders the pure pleasure of feeling alive and good about ourselves. Everyone is born with this, but not everyone reaches consciousness before it expires.

We have lost the foundation of what it is to be educated in the liberal tradition. This has been understood more or less since the time of Aristotle. Education is not primarily utilitarian or sentimental; education is to be open to life in the pursuit of building a moral and responsible character. Edmund Burke stated it bluntly, "Education is the cheap defense of nations."

American high schools have become dropout factories because education has produced corporate soldiers that are programmed to march to the corporate song, and most students do not want to join that army or rat race. It is a terrible thing to see the problem of education reduced to being the student's fault or simply the failure of administrivia to track the product of its purpose with more acumen.

Why do you think students are bored in school? School has become boring. Teachers enter a war zones where survival from day to day is the most accomplished task of their purpose. Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," but what about the student respecting the teacher?

Emerson was speaking of the nineteenth century when the classroom was not a combat zone. He assumed something that cannot be assumed today. That education was a garden in which fragile seeds might be cultivated in fertile ground by accomplished horticulturists of the human heart.

What this Johns Hopkins University report tells us is that our garden is full of weeds in which only half of the planted seeds will mature into flowers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis used this metaphor with more than passing clarity when he said, "Instead of trying to suppress the weeds that can never be killed, they may be cultivated into useful and beautiful flowers. For it is impossible to conceive any impulse in a human heart which cannot be transformed into Truth or into Beauty or into Love."

Young people, all young people have the capacity to become weeds or flowers. It is a matter of attention and intention. They are far more aware than any cunning politician or educator might think. They know when they are being treated as statistics with this hidden agenda for building brownie points by having an "A" school rating, or turning the corner and having "more than 60 percent of freshmen making it to graduation."

This is not the place to go into it but as I've said repeatedly it is a problem with the problem solving. Linear logic is like the dog chasing its own tail, and this study, as well intended as it is, appears to be no different.

We know the harm we have done to our environment with synthetic fertilizers and insecticides to rid us of menacing pest. Now the bees are gone that pollinate our plants. Many fruits and vegetables are in jeopardy.

This is not an accidental metaphor. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as it is a nation's greatest resource. It is sad to report H. L. Wayland of the nineteenth century appears to have been prophetic, while Harry A. Overstreet of the twentieth century overly optimistic as quoted in this opening piece. What will the future be? It starts with each of us, as we are all students' first teachers.

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Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).