[O]ur society conveys decided ambivalence about the role of schools and the value of education. On the rhetorical level, of course, there is little disagreement. Education is vital; schools are central. Presidents wrap themselves in the mantle (and the argot) of education. As if to endorse this viewpoint, the well-to-do spend huge sums of money on private school and universities, in order to purchase a margin of advantage for their children in later life.
And yet the extent to which education is genuinely valued in our society can be doubted, and in fact it has been called into question for many decades. America is a country where one can achieve virtually unlimited success without formal education. It is also a country where it has long been prudent to hide the extent of one’s education and to honor those who embrace an anti-intellectual or even an anti-educational stance. Lessons on the street and in the media are decidedly nonscholastic: “Street smarts” are more important than “school smarts,” professors are absentminded, students are spoiled, book-learning won’t get you anywhere. At the very least, those growing up in our culture receive decidedly mixed messages about education. [Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991, pp. 256-257]
Anybody in our culture who suggested that we did not love our children would be hated; and in harmony with our love of children we want them to have the best education available. Of course, it has to be the best education available for the money we are willing to spend, and we all know that in calculating the amount of money we are able—or rather, are willing—to spend on education, the family standard of living comes first. That is to say, after we have calculated expenditures for food, drink, entertainment, the kind of clothes that will present us and our children to the world in conformity with our class position … I say, after we have calculated all these expenses—not to mention taxes to state and federal governments—we are willing to give our children the best education to be bought with the money that’s left over. Obviously not much is, and the continued defeat of one school bond issue after the other is witness to the contradiction between educational goals and the living-standard. Thus education, the very phenomenon that made a rising living standard possible, is being undermined by it.
Let us put it even more clearly: as far as education is concerned, war, a good time and the living standard eat up so much that, in their education, the kids get the crumbs that fall from the table. Educational crumbs can only be educational incompetence. On the other hand, in a deeper sense, our children get the best education compatible with a society that requires a high level of stupidity in order to exist as it is. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, pp. 21-22]
Americans spend 0.2% of their income on all reading materials, barely more than $100 per family per year. … Today’s American’s spend about four times as much on tobacco and five times as much on alcohol as they do on reading. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 245]
The educational system that any country has will be the system that country wants. It will be, in general, adapted to the needs and ideals of that country as they are interpreted at any given time. …
You may be sure, therefore, that the American educational system will be engaged in the cultivation of whatever is honored in the United States. Its weaknesses will be the weaknesses of American ideals. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 48-49, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
We probably have as good an educational program today in this country as we deserve, according to our cultural attainments and aspirations. … The reform in which I am interested must work against the tide, challenging the worst, and also the most obdurate, features of our national ethos—our materialism, our pragmatism, our modernism. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 78-79]
[T]he reigning values of our society are hardly congenial to [education] reform. … Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 314]
The intellectual tradition in which we live receives merely incidental attention. There is no particular reason for talking about intellectual development if what you are concerned with is financial success, for there is little evidence of any correlation between the two. I do not deny that the law schools have manufactured some very crafty fellows and that the engineering schools have graduated some smart mechanics. I do deny that either the public schools or the universities are devoting themselves to producing people who have had genuine intellectual discipline and who have acquired those intellectual habits which the ancients properly denominated virtues. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 56-57, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
Every teacher in a public school system, for example, knows that if he asserts his self the probabilities of getting a rise or even keeping his job are reduced. But behind the principal who makes this clear to him is a superintendent who can punish the principal; and behind the superintendent is a board of education, while behind them is a state department of education ready to punish them all. Behind the state department are the people. Now the circle is complete, for the people, after all, are interested largely in preserving their good names. Since so many among them have given up self-striving, why should they allow it to anybody else? Furthermore they are frightened about what might happen to their non-conforming children. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, p. 13]
The great problem of our time is moral, intellectual, and spiritual. With a superfluity of goods we are sinking into poverty. With a multitude of gadgets we are no happier than we were before. With a declining death rate we have yet to discover what to do with our lives. With a hatred of war we are now deeply engaged in the greatest war in history. With a love of liberty we see much of the world in chains.
How can these things be? They can be because we have directed our lives and our education to means instead of ends. We have been concerned with the transitory and superficial instead of the enduring and basic problems of life and of society. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 91-92, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
On the measure of academic engagement, the United States scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than anywhere else in the world.
On the measure of social engagement, the United States topped all four of these economic competitors except Germany.
In America, high school is for socializing. It’s a country club for kids, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. …
For all but the very best American Students … high school is tedious and unchallenging. … The majority of American high-school students say they are just going through the motions at school, calibrating their level of effort to ensure that they do well enough to stay out of academic trouble. One-third of American high-school students report that they have little interest in school and get through the day by fooling around with their friends. [Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, pp. 142-143]
The fundamental problem with American high-school achievement is not our schools. If parents don’t raise their children in ways that enable them to maintain interest in what their teachers are teaching, it doesn’t matter who the teachers are, how they teach, what they teach, or how much they’re paid. Without changing the culture of student achievement, changes in instructors or instruction won’t, and can’t, make a difference. …
High-school students from many Asian and European countries outperform their American counterparts mainly because the cultures of achievement are very different in these other countries. These cultures give rise to higher expectations at home and more support for achievement within the adolescent peer group. In addition, in many other countries, especially in Asia, parents demand much more self-control from their children at much younger ages. By the time children in other cultures have matured into adulthood, they have much stronger self-control than Americans do. [Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, p. 146]
Adolescence, as we have seen, is a time during which brain systems that process social information become more easily aroused, which is an especially strong liability in a school environment that places undue emphasis on peer relations, as is the case in the United States. At an age when the admiration of one’s peers takes on special salience, students in other countries benefit from a peer culture that respects academic achievement, rather than one that derides it, like that in most American high schools. [Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, p. 148]
The West has not accepted the proposition that the democratic ideal demands liberal education for all. In the United States, at least, the prevailing opinion seems to be that the demands of that ideal are met by universal schooling, rather than by universal liberal education. What goes on in school is regarded as of relatively minor importance. The object appears to be to keep the child off the labor market and to detain him in comparatively sanitary surroundings until we are ready to have him go to work. [Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 24-25, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
[K]eep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the “basics” anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made. [John Gatto, “The Psychopathic School,” 1990, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, p. 24]
A large proportion of the students and staff come from social groups in which the authority of the mind and its work is simply not accepted. From the arts they expect diversion and decoration; from the sciences the solution to technical problems; they demand these quickly and under all conditions without back talk. They have had no experiences of the arts and sciences as elucidators of life, and mishandle and emasculate them in such a way that their power to serve is impaired or destroyed. [Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, p. 96]
Behaviorism is as American as rewarding children with apple pie. We’re a busy people, with fortunes to make and lands to conquer. We don’t have time for theories or complications: Just give us techniques that work. … [I]f imposing a scripted, mind-numbing curriculum succeeds in raising students’ test scores; if relying on bribes and threats succeeds in making children obey, then there’s no need to ask, “But for how long does it work? And at what cost?” [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 171-172]
The rise of the Internet undercuts the Machiavellian line that intellectual force-feeding ultimately blossoms into sincere appreciation. Today’s adults are the product of over a decade of mandatory exposure to abstract ideas and high culture. If educational force-feeding worked well, most educated adults would adore these nerdy realms—and eagerly tap the Internet to revisit them. To understate, they rarely do. …
[T]he Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 260-261, 242]
No one is sitting on the free energies of youth, from atop positions of power and censorship in society, as did the rulers of eighteenth-century Europe, controlling publication and education, in the interests of keeping that power. No, no one is holding back the freeing force of liberal education from above. It is coming from much deeper—from down below: It is the collective anxieties of the masses of men against all serious change in their way of life; it is man everywhere joined in dedication to the habitual way of life, with its promise of continued survival and a modicum of pleasure … [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, p. 42]
If, as estimated, many children spend thirty hours a week in front of the screen and neglect homework (supposing they are given any), it is because parents are indifferent or feel powerless, but also because they have no clear idea of what a school can and should do. They are, after all, the products of that same, ineffectual, incoherent schooling. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, U of Chicago P, 1991, p. 41]
[W]ith best intentions, adults in recent years have been busy talking young people out of their natural idealism and into a posture of heightened material concern. Often this is done out of a sense of fearful expedience, for the sake of helping the young person get ahead in today’s competitive marketplace. Such a stance is shaky for young people not only because it is unnatural for their period of life but also because it has no sustaining conviction of its own. It is a timid and pessimistic stance that inspires neither wholehearted effort nor lasting allegiance. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, pp. 106-107]
The truth is that school cannot exist without some reason for its being, and in fact there are several gods our students are presently asked to serve. … [E]ach is incapable of sustaining, with richness, seriousness, and durability, the idea of a public school. …
[T]he first narrative … may properly go by the name of the god of Economic Utility. As its name suggests, it is a passionless god, cold and severe. But it makes a promise, and not a trivial one. Addressing the young, it offers a covenant of sorts with them: If you will pay attention in school, and do your homework, and score well on tests, and behave yourself, you will be rewarded with a well-paying job when you are done. …
[M]any parents … are apt to like the idea of school as a primary training ground for future employment, as do many corporate executives. This is why the story of Economic Utility is told and retold in television commercials and political speeches as the reason why children should go to school, and stay in school, and why schools should receive public support. …
One may well wonder, then, why this god has so much strength … I believe the reason is that the god of Economic Utility is coupled with another god, one with a smiling face and one that provides an answer to the question, If I get a good job, then what?
I refer here to the god of Consumership, whose basic moral axiom is expressed in the slogan “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins”—that is to say, goodness inheres in those who buy things; evil in those who do not. …
Devotion to the god of Consumership serves easily as the metaphysical basis of schooling because it is urged on the young early in their lives, long before they get to school—in fact, as soon as they are exposed to the powerful teachings of the advertising industry. …
One would think that our schools would … be in explicit opposition to such a god, since education is supposed to free the young from the bondage of crude materialism. But, in fact, many of our schools, especially in recent times, have allied themselves with this god in a most emphatic way. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 27-35]
Since what a man is in our society is so largely defined both by himself and by others in terms of what he does for a living, vocational education is in fact an indispensable part of liberal education …
What [liberal education] cannot do is serve students who are interested in the job purely for external reasons. … Any fundamental improvement in American education, therefore, depends on weakening the present total connection in the minds of both students and teachers between schooling and economic opportunity. … One of the most objectionable features of [our] society is precisely that it does lead people to expect nothing of education—and, indeed, to accept nothing from it—except assistance in getting on. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage / Random House, 1965, pp. 224-226]
Many parents have the wrong expectation of the profit to be derived from schooling. They think the only purpose of schools is to prepare their children to earn a living. While that certainly is an objective to be served, it is, in terms of human values, less important than preparation for citizenship and for leading a richly rewarding, good human life. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 313]
The speaker asked the audience what they wanted for their children. People said things like, “We want our children to be happy.” “We want our children to be healthy,” “We want them to have good relationships.” Then she told us that children say that their parents want them to have a big house, an expensive car, and the right high-paying job. There’s a real disconnect between what we’re … wishing … and the message that’s really being sent. We were at a point where we wanted integrity in every part of our life, and we realized that we needed to change everything. [Lisa Labon, homeschooling mother of four] quoted by [Ken Robinson, Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, Viking / Penguin, 2013, p. 171]
[M]any parents don’t explicitly talk to their kids about happiness at all. … [S]o kids form their impressions about it from listening to their parents emphasize the importance of grades and building a résumé for college. They supplement this with messages from their peers, teachers, or the culture around them, which, by and large, promotes materialism and photographic evidence that Hey! Look! My life is great! Kids get the message that money really matters, that happiness requires wealth and great career success, and that others’ perception of your wealth and status is crucial.
Many parents we meet share the view that the key to a good life is getting into a good college, no matter what, because that good college will lead to a good job, financial security, and happiness ad infinitum. …
The problem is that we tend to be very poor predictors of what actually makes us happy. We think that having more money, getting a big promotion, or buying new stuff will make us happy when, in fact, we’re happier if we prioritize having time more than things, giving more than getting, and appreciating what we have more than trying to get what we don’t. [Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Alfred A Knopf, 2006] So when we equate academic achievement and career success with happiness, we do so potentially at the cost of our kids’ well-being. Considering the marked increase over the last several years in incidence of suicide among high-achieving kids and young adults, it appears that depression and hopelessness have no respect for accomplishment. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, pp. 184-185]
Ask any audience of parents this question: “How would you define success for your children when they’ve grown up?” Without fail the responses are primarily internally cultivated qualities like independence, integrity, generosity, passion, self-confidence, and healthy relationships. A notably healthy list of attributes. But when children and teens are asked, “How will you define success when you grow up?” The answer is quick and inevitable—“Making a lot of money.” Now, I have no doubt that we are all sincere when we say that our most important goal for our children is for them to be emotionally healthy, responsible, and contributing members of society. Yet somehow our children are taking in a very different message. Making lots of money is fine, but as a definition of success it is likely to leave our children, and the adults they will ultimately become, disappointed and disengaged. Money buys many things, but typically not a sense of either authenticity or meaning.
Of course, we are not the only influences in our children’s lives. Messages about the importance of money are both explicit and implicit in our culture. … Americans have long been notoriously poor savers, predictably choosing to consume rather than save. And our recent financial troubles have underscored the relative invulnerability of the wealthy and the extreme vulnerability of the less well-off. Small wonder that our kids come to see money as the greatest indicator of success and security.
Although culture certainly influences our kids’ beliefs, when it comes to core values, parents generally exert a stronger influence. So why aren’t our beliefs about what it takes to have a successful life getting through to our kids? Are we sending mixed messages … ? [Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 248-250]
It was not money per se that impaired [my patient’s] development; rather it was a parenting style that emphasized the importance of external motivation while promoting materialism as a substitute for the hard personal and interpersonal work that adolescence demands. … [This] transmits poor values and leaves our kids in the lurch emotionally because it encourages them to forgo the development of internal motivation, keeping them dependent on others and on material goods for a sense of self. …
We don’t necessarily contribute to our children’s emotional problems when we buy them cars or expensive clothes or high-end vacations; we contribute when they believe, either by observing our behavior or our values, that these are the things that matter most in life. [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 45, 48]
The right kind of education does not depend on the regulations of any government or the methods of any particular system; it lies in our own hands, in the hands of the parents and the teachers.
If parents really cared for their children, they would build a new society; but fundamentally most parents do not care, and so they have no time for this most urgent problem. They have time for making money, for amusements, for rituals and worship, but no time to consider what is the right kind of education for their children. This is a fact that the majority of people do not want to face. To face it might mean that they would have to give up their amusements and distractions, and certainly they are not willing to do that. So they send their children off to schools where the teacher cares no more for them than they do. Why should he care? Teaching is merely a job to him, a way of earning money. …
We say so easily that we love our children; but is there love in our hearts when we accept the existing social conditions, when we do not want to bring about a fundamental transformation in this destructive society? And as long as we look to the specialists to educate our children, this confusion and misery will continue; for the specialists, being concerned with the part and not with the whole, are themselves unintegrated.
Instead of being the most honoured and responsible occupation, education is now considered slightingly, and most educators are fixed in a routine. They are not really concerned with integration and intelligence, but with the imparting of information; and a man who merely imparts information with the world crashing about him is not an educator. [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, pp. 94-96]
I have spent thirty years as a scholar examining the nature of democracy, and even more as a citizen optimistically celebrating its possibilities, but today I am increasingly persuaded that the reason for the country’s inaction is that Americans do not really care about education—the country has grown comfortable with the game of “let’s pretend we care.” …
How sanctimonious all the hand wringing over still another “education crisis” seems. Are we ourselves really so literate? Are our kids stupid or smart for ignoring what we preach and copying what we practice? The young, with their keen noses for hypocrisy, are in fact adept readers—but not of books. They are society-smart rather than school-smart, and what they read so acutely are the social signals emanating from the world in which they will have to make a living. Their teachers in that world, the nation’s true pedagogues, are television, advertising, movies, politics, and the celebrity domains they define. …
The very first lesson smart kids learn is that it is much more important to heed what society teaches implicitly by its deeds and reward structures than what school teaches explicitly in its lesson plans and civic sermons. …
We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we cherish success, and we commercialize the classroom—and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. …
Schools can and should lead, but when they confront a society that in every instance tells a story exactly opposite to the one they are supposed to be teaching, their job becomes impossible. When the society undoes each workday what the school tries to do each school day, schooling can’t make much of a difference. [Benjamin R. Barber, “America Skips School,” 1993, The Anteater Reader, 8th ed., edited by Ray Zimmerman & Carla Copenhaven, Pearson Custom, 2005, pp. 335-338]
The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated.
I am speaking here not of the unhappy, broken homes that are such a prominent part of American life, but the relatively happy ones, where husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them. But they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others. … People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life. …
[F]athers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon and Schuster, 1987, pp. 57-58]
Related:
– What do we teach via our character and the environments we create?
– What is motivation? How can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?