We Need Less School, Not More - Part 1
I just finished Dumbing Us Down, and I am hoping to get the rest of my commentary up today so that I can return the book to the library and allow someone else to learn from it 
Chapter 4 addresses the current trend towards solving school problems with more school. Good stuff.
Much of the chapter compares and contrasts networks and communities. He says that Aristotle spoke of the differences by saying:
…that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human… What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one’s own volition
Therefore, a true community is when there is a collection of real families who perform acts of participation. They are participating, but not functioning in narrow parts. They are fully human.
By contrast
Networks, however, don’t require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If… you function in a network, it asks you to supress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part… In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the purpose of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity
So then, by definition, schools, corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals, etc. are not real communities. They are networks. He proves part of this by the fact that we don’t forget people who are our familiy, and yet how many have experienced
Even with college dorm “communities,” those most engaging and intimate simulations of community imaginable, who among us has not experienced the awful realization after graduation that we cannot remember our friends’ names or faces very well? Or who, if we can remember, feels much desire to renew those associations?
So he goes on to say that even though it is not fully understood yet, the “caring” in networks is somehow feigned. Its not due to malicious intent, but it happens. Another common place for it to happen is in sports teams, where you can experience a high and a closeness together, and then never be close again.
Since we’ve now established the differences between community and networks, we can see why more of a network will not fill our needs. Children (and all of us) need more real connections, we need to be used and appreciated for our whole, not just a part. Although networks will efficiently meet their end goals, they will not meet our needs for connection and meaning. They will leave us feeling empty.
Schools limit the use of the full human by isolating people based on age and ability. This means that the whole person is not used or valued. They are just stuck in a slot.
If performance within these narrow confines is conceived to be the supreme measure of success, if for instance, an A average is considered the central purpose of adolescent life — the requirements for which to take the most time and attention of the aspirant — and if the worth of thie individual is reckoned by victory or defeat in this abstract pursuit, then a social machine has been constructed which, by attaching purpose and meaning to essentially meaningless and fantastic behavior, will certainly dehumanize students, alienate them from their own human nature, and break the natural connection between them and their parents, to whom they would otherwise look for signification affirmations.
Wow. Yes. How did I get sucked into believing this? When my son was born, I immediately started thinking of how smart he was, how well he’d fit into this “meaningless and fantastic behavior” and how he would not be a “failure” because he could certainly get many A’s! Perhaps more than any of his peers! So what?! What does that teach him about life? Where does the value lie?
Just months before my son was born, I had gone through a real slump upon leaving the workforce and leaving college. My whole life worth had been built upon “successes” like straight-As, skipping a grade, starting college at 14, regular promotions at work, working 3 jobs at a time, and when I no longer had those external measures of my worth, my self-value plummeted. I felt useless. I felt unworthy. I felt like no one noticed I was special anymore, and therefore I wasn’t. If only I had known that the reason I felt this way was because I had been trained to feel that way. Its only natural that I felt that way. Natural, but sad.
Just as we have left behind real community for networks in our education and work, we’re even leaving it behind in our neighborhoods.
…”Community in cities and suburbs is a thin illusion, confined to simulated events like street festivals. If you have moved from one neighborhood to another or from one suburb to another and have quickly forgotten the friends you left behind, then you will have experienced the phenomenon I refer to.
Yes. I have felt that. I am feeling it right now. We are in the process of selling our home and buying a new one, and much of what I want from a future neighborhood is a real community. A community where the whole of the person is used. Not just an artificial community where staged events make us appear close. This is nearly impossible to find.
And so why do schools exist if they are not teaching adequately and are not forming real communities?
Nearly a century ago a French sociologist wrote that every instution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has normally staked out for itself.
Of course. This was lesson #1 in my Operational Management class last semester.
It was this philistine potential — that teaching the young for pay would inevitable expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students — that made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece.
We’ve all heard the stories of teachers who can’t be fired… My mom is a teacher, and she’s told me dozens of stories like this. Back when I was in high school, our assistant principal was found engaging in s*xual activities with young men in a public bathroom. He was arrested. Rather than being fired, he was just relocated though, because he was under contract of the union and couldn’t be fired. The children were not protected… he was.
So if schools aren’t looking out for students first, are they at least preparing them for their lives (even secondarily?). We have long been told that…
…Good education = good job, good money, good things. This has become the universal national banner, hoisted by Harvards as well as high schools… Interestingly enough, the American Federation of Teachers identifies one of its main missions as persuading the business community to hire and promote on the basis of school grades so that the grades = money formula will obtain, just as it was made to obtain for medicine and law after years of political lobbying. So far, the common sense of businesspeople has kept them hiring and promoting the old-fashioned way, using performance and private judgment as the preferred measures…
My dh and I were talking about this the other day, because for the past 8-10 years, there has been a huge boom in certifications for tech jobs. Since we both work in the tech industry, this matters to us. The problem with hiring someone who is certified is that you end up getting someone who knows all the right book answers, but can’t figure out the problems in real life. Even though I’m a Mac girl, I was forced in a previous job to go through the MCSE certification classes. 
I learned tons about the way that Microsoft expects Windows servers to work. The only little problem is that they don’t work that way at all 
The training was useless.
Now certifications are losing their importance again. The market is correcting itself. How did I realize that certifications were useless and yet I still thought that traditional compulsory schooling was fabulous?
Well, this one is getting super long, so I’m going to go make a PBJ and come back and finish the chapter as a “Part 2″ post 
Happy reading!