In recent years it has been fashionable to define the educational crisis in terms of global competition and minimal competence, as if schools were no more than vocational institutions. … The classroom, however, should not be merely a trade school. The fundamental task of education in a democracy is what Tocqueville once called the apprenticeship of liberty: learning to be free. I wonder whether Americans still believe liberty has to be learned and that its skills are worth learning. Or have they been deluded by two centuries of rhetoric into thinking that freedom is “natural” and can be taken for granted? [Benjamin R. Barber, “America Skips School,” 1993, The Anteater Reader, 8th ed., edited by Ray Zimmerman & Carla Copenhaven, Pearson Custom, 2005, pp. 339-340]
[W]hat is needed in America—as in most countries of the developed world—is not simply a renewal of the skills that make a country a better competitor in the world markets, but a renewal and reconsideration of what I have called “school culture.” … [When learning] is participatory, proactive, communal, collaborative, and given over to constructing meanings rather than receiving them—we do even better at teaching science, math, and languages in such schools than in more traditional ones. [Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, Harvard UP, 1996, pp. 83-84]
[J]ust as we shouldn’t justify a wonderful curriculum by claiming it will raise standardized test scores—first, because such tests measure what matters least, and second, because claims of this sort serve to legitimize these tests—so we should hesitate to defend or criticize educational practices on economic grounds. …
Is the main mission of schools really to prepare children to be productive workers who will do their part to increase the profitability of their future employers? Every time education is described as an “investment,” or schools are discussed in the context of the “global economy,” a loud alarm ought to go off, reminding us of the moral and practical implications of giving an answer in dollars to a question about schools. As Jonathan Kozol recently reminded us, good teachers “refuse to see their pupils as … pint sized deficits or assets for America’s economy into whom they are expected to pump ‘added value.’” [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 152-153]
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. …
The story tells us that we are first and foremost economic creatures, and that our sense of worth and purpose is to be found in our capacity to secure material benefits. … Goodness inheres in productivity, efficiency, and organization; evil is inefficiency and sloth. …
The story goes on to preach that America is not so much a culture as it is an economy, and that the vitality of any nation’s economy rests on high standards of achievement and rigorous discipline in schools. There is little evidence (that is to say, none) that the productivity of a nation’s economy is related to the quality of its schooling. (See the work of Henry Levin of Stanford University.) But every god has unsubstantiated axioms, and most people are content to let this one go unexamined. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 27-35]
[The student] must be taught to amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his power of contribution to the wants and needs of the state. … Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. [Benjamin Rush, 1786, signer of the Declaration of Indpendence, planner of Pennsylvania’s public schools] quoted by [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 45]
The nation is committed to greater advancement in economic growth, and recent research has shown that one of the most beneficial of all such investments is education, accounting for some forty percent of the nation’s growth and productivity in recent years. In the new age of science and space, improved education is essential to give meaning to our national purpose and power. It requires skilled manpower and brainpower to match the power of totalitarian discipline. It requires a scientific effort which demonstrates the superiority of freedom. [President John F. Kennedy in a message to Congress, 1963] quoted by [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, pp. 16-17]
[C]hildren do not exist for the sake of the nation; they should not be educated for its sake either. Education should make it possible for individuals to become the kind of people they wish to be. It should show them the virtue of thinking and learning. It should expose them to the things that are worthwhile knowing and thinking about. But it should not regard them as cogs in a great national economic machine. That is part of the reason the schools are in the mess they are in. [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 113]
Obsession with national power distorts people’s perceptions of the problems youngsters face in schools, and most reform proposals end up by leaving out concern for the quality of children’s lives. [Hebert Kohl, The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching, New Press, 2009, p. 294]
Writing in between the publications of A Nation at Risk [1983] and the statistical reassessments, [Lawrence] Cremin argued that the country’s schools were yet again being blamed for a loss of U.S. economic competitiveness when competitiveness is “to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy” decided in Washington, DC. “To contend that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform,” Cremin wrote, “especially educational reform defined solely as school reform, is not merely Utopian and millennialist, it is at best foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden on the schools.” [Popular Education and Its Discontents, Harper and Row, 1989] [Samuel Abrams, Education and the Commercial Mindset, Harvard UP, 2016, p. 23]
We have repeated to ourselves so much of late the slogan, “America must be strong,” that we have forgotten what strength is. We appear to believe that strength consists of masses of men and machines. I do not deny that they have their role. But surely the essential ingredients of strength are trained intelligence, love of country, the understanding of its ideals, and such devotion to those ideals that they become a part of the thought and life of every citizen. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 61, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
Revision of the teaching of science and maths will not help the child much because we are not improving his skills in maths and science in the interest of his inner self but in the interest of war and business. … The history of American education in the last hundred years, as set forth cogently by my colleague, Professor Callahan, shows that education has not considered the child’s interest but that of industry; and I am not yet convinced that what is good for General Motors is good for our children. Even less am I convinced that what is good for Missile Dynamics is good for our children, or what is good for the Pentagon is good for them. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, p. 23]
I am not enough of a nationalist to wish to keep in science the ardent and promising youngsters who leave it, nor even convinced that it would be in the national interest, whatever that may be, to do so. But it does seem to me that the experiences that drive them out have far less to do with the science as either a method or an epistemological system than they do with science as a social institution. Those of our best subjects who left did so because of the way scientists are taught and the way they are used; not because of what science essentially is. After all, it is our respondents who believe that science deals with deep and fundamental issues of being, who are correct. But undergraduates do not get much chance to get down to fundamentals.
It would seem that the sensible way for a nation to retain such youngsters as future scientists and engineers would be to try to improve the way they are taught and to modify the opportunities open to them in their later employment so as to provide a legitimate expectation of personal autonomy in work. But this is not the way our culture is actually going about it. Instead, subject after subject in our study complains that the way the high school led him into science confused him and made it much harder for him to see just how his career choice was going to affect his life and his image of himself. From an adolescent, considering what it is he has to do to grow up, this is a very serious charge against secondary education. [Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms, Beacon, 1965, pp. 115-116]
[D]espite the long history of poor performance on international assessments of the United States and some other Western nations in comparison to Eastern Asian countries, their economic performance remains strong and competitive (Baker, 2007; Tienken, 2008; Zhao, 2009, 2012, 2014). The lack of a direct link between nations’ long-term economic performance and international test scores suggests that what is measured by these assessments—mainly cognitive proficiencies in math, science, and reading—may not be as critical as the noncognitive skills that have been ignored. [Yong Zhao, “The Danger of Misguiding Outcomes: Lessons From Easter Island,” Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes, edited by Yong Zhao, Solution Tree, 2016, p. 5]
Healthy economies depend on people having good ideas for new businesses and the ability to grow them and create employment. In 2008, IBM published a survey of what characteristics organization leaders need most in their staff. They spoke with fifteen hundred leaders in eighty countries. The two priorities were adaptability to change and creativity in generating new ideas. They found these qualities lacking in many otherwise highly qualified graduates. Few if any of the abilities that entrepreneurs need are facilitated by the strategies that reformers value so much. On the contrary, standardized education can crush creativity and innovation, the very qualities on which today’s economies depend.
Unsurprisingly, as Yong Zhao [director of the Institute for Global and Online Education] points out, there is an inverse relationship between countries that do well on standardized tests and those that demonstrate entrepreneurial flair.
I have mentioned that the top-performing school system according to the latest PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] tables is Shanghai. Shanghai is less impressed by its own performance than everyone else seems to be. Yi Houquin, a high-ranking official in the Shanghai Education Commission, recently said that he was pleased but not surprised at how well their students had done. After all, the system is focused on drilling them in rote learning to succeed in just these sorts of tests. That is not the point. He said that the commission was considering stepping away from PISA testing at some point. “Shanghai does not need so-called ‘#1 schools.’” he said. “What it needs are schools that follow sound educational principles, respect principles of students’ physical and psychological development, and lay a solid foundation for students’ lifelong development.” [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 18-19]
What price is really being paid by students and teachers in this massive international effort to move up the PISA ranks? South Korea, for example, has ranked in the top five of every PISA program. South Korea spends about $8,200 on each student. This represents almost 8 percent of the country’s GDP, the second highest among OECD countries. South Korean parents spend thousands of dollars on after-school tuition. But the real costs of South Korea’s high performance on international tests is very much higher; the country now has the highest suicide rate of all industrialized OECD countries.
In the last forty-five years, suicide rates have increased by 60 percent worldwide. Suicide is now among the three leading causes of death among those age fifteen to forty-four. These figures do not include suicide attempts, which can be as many as twenty times more frequent than completed suicide. It used to be that the highest suicide rates were among elderly men. Suicide rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of both developed and developing countries. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 23-24]
[R]esearch and practical experience show time and time again that the critical factors in raising student achievement on all fronts are the motivation and expectations of students themselves. The best ways to raise them are to improve the quality of teaching, have a rich and balanced curriculum, and have supportive, informative systems of assessment. The political response has been the opposite: to narrow the curriculum and wherever possible to standardize content, teaching, and assessment. It has proved to be the wrong response. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 24-25]
Ironically … our efforts to be protectively pragmatic for the sake of our young have left them less equipped to deal with the complexities of today’s world. A short-term approach born of anxiety cannot foster the imagination and nerve needed to thrive in a highly dynamic contemporary society. Only a long view, fueled by energetic purposes, can build and sustain the capacities that will be needed. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, p. 109]
Today’s education reform movement in many parts of the world resembles the Easter Islanders’ race to erect stone statues … [C]ountries engaged in this reform movement have embarked on a race to produce students with excellent test scores—in the belief that scores in a limited number of subjects on standardized tests accurately represent the quality of education a school provides, the performance of a teacher, and students’ ability to succeed in the future—not unlike the chiefs and priests on Easter Island who believed that the statues represented the health and power of their clans, the performance of their members, and promise for a more prosperous future. …
Ultimately, just like Easter Island ended up a barren island filled with big statues, countries may succeed in raising test scores, but they will likely end up as nation of great test takers in an intellectually barren land; test scores do not count nearly as much as reformers believe for the success of individuals or nations. Moreover, great test scores can come at a huge cost. [Yong Zhao, “The Danger of Misguiding Outcomes: Lessons From Easter Island,” Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes, edited by Yong Zhao, Solution Tree, 2016, pp. 2-4]
[G]lobal competence is about holding a global perspective in life and work, having the skills and knowledge to live and learn across cultural and national boundaries, and having a positive disposition toward diversity. …
[The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages] identified five American needs that acquiring global competence can address.
1. Employees who can compete economically in the age of globalization. 2. Agents of diplomacy and national security. 3. Problem solvers for dilemmas larger than nations can tackle in isolation. 4. Inhabitants for a global village that trades discord for harmony. 5. Opportunities for individuals to grow personally. …
Global competence, like creativity, is an education outcome that has gained increasing recognition, but has not yet been integrated into practices of educational assessment. … Many efforts have been devoted to the development of the concept and its measures. Next, we need to make global competence part of our expectations of today’s schools alongside math and reading. [Michael Thier, “Globally Speaking: Global Competence,” Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes, edited by Yong Zhao, Solution Tree, 2016, pp. 117, 128]
Related:
– What is education for? What should the goals of education be?
– Do we really value education? Why do we value it?
– Why is there an imbalance between material progress and psychological progress?