Onboard the Scan, Scribble and Tally Express

August 3rd, 2008 Posted in Education

The supporters of social institutions always claim a greater gathering of our basic biological tendencies than they actually sweep-up. Marriage does not entirely corral sex and reproduction; the restaurant does not monopolize feeding and eating; hospitals and accredited medical doctors do not treat all diseases and injuries. And formal schools and teachers are not the only sources of education and learning.

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With socialization (the process of learning the ways of one’s people) the contrast of the formal and the informal is clear. The school is the established and officially supported way and the teachings of family and friends proceed without public notice. The biologically derived need to induct our infants and immigrants into our joint culture (and to maintain this unity for ourselves) is not solely a function of the schools.

The two ways are different and even opposed, yet possibly interdependent. They are not brought together in ordinary discourse. The established institution is thought normal and the other ways insignificant, quaint and without direction. There is some recognition of the role of the family on the infant’s preparation for the later formal schooling. But the informal way continues on parallel to the school and continuing past the school. It is part of the life process.

The school takes the plural way. We enter as a group just past infancy and as a class proceed through its several levels. Our childhoods pass in the process and we emerge as young adults, certified as having attained a certain level of skill in reading, writing and arithmetic. In the final step when we are called out one by one to receive diplomas our individuality is permitted to peek through, but just barely. We wear the same uniform (the ritual cap and gown) and look exactly alike. For our final act after years in the anonymous process, we, in unison, throw our hats (figuratively or actually) into the air and cap our final social action together before we disperse into our regained separate individual lives.

The school is formal, plural, with a fixed rationalized and uniform content (the curriculum). It strives to be objective, cold in emotion, fair, uniform. Educators may claim concern for the individual but in the process formed by the method all major acts are social. The students, considered as a mass, and categorized into age and achievement classes and grades, march onward very much in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin in the assembly line sequence of the movie “Modern Times.” The school is the factory and we are both its workers and its products

The informal system working through family, kin, friends, gang and such forms of togetherness has a different emphasis. The individual is paramount and recognized and valued. There is no fixed curriculum, no test, no promotion, no grades and steps upward, no certification, no bureaucracy. But information and knowledge are imparted. Whether it is congruent with the formal way is problematic. They may supplement or contradict each other or be non-intersecting.

But the informal way is local and limited. Uniformity and certainty of content are not assured. Around the edges it is brittle. It breaks and disintegrates in larger groupings. The unity of identification and loyalty of the citizens of the modern nation-state can only be reproduced among the mass of the people by the formal unified way.

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The school is an invented social form with a long and varied history. The transitional forms (of tutor, of scholars gathered around a respected philosopher, of the artisan-craftsman with his apprentice) all can be haphazard, unexpected associations of the informal variety or they can become formalized into known, established forms supported by a larger community.

The school can exist without literacy. Pre-literate tribal youths are trained to become warriors in group settings. An approximation of this experience for us would be the training in outdoor lore and athletic skills in summer camps. But more usually the basic elementary instruction in our civilization now is in the skills of reading, writing and calculating. The whole academic career of twelve to twenty years turns on, and follows, the grasping of these codes under whose lock so much of our information and communication are secured.

Up until quite recently these codes were not widely distributed. In the system of dictatorial monarch the peasants were denied literacy. Early in the industrial revolution the workers, especially the unskilled, were kept unlettered. For most of human history most of us have been unschooled.

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Public school education of inner city youth in the U.S.A. has been a persistent issue. A portion of students fall behind in grade level skills for basic language and mathematics. People spend years in elementary and high school without any appreciable effect on their intellectual lives. Graduates from high school and college are as illiterate as new born infants. School is a gigantic social project that seems to fall short. Meanwhile the job opportunities in the USA in the global economy are shifting toward high technology fields. The knowledge that these young people do not achieve seems to be exactly what is required.

The opportunity for our society to resolve decisively the residue of past ethnic abuses, oppressions, and discriminations is thwarted. The children, finally exiting (even escaping) the failed educational system, can not find their way to the social mobility and middle class success that appears to define equal status.

One difficulty: the educational institution has contradictory functions beyond the training of the children. The system is a sinecure for political hacks–people unequipped either in training or emotional commitment to their assigned jobs. Part of the educational bureaucracy and the teaching cadre itself are simply time servers who collect pay checks and either do not contribute to the educational task or move against it. They do not provide the necessary text books and equipment, do not provide a warm, secure environment, do not establish a can-and-want-to-do energy. They are supported by politicians and boards and unions in this negative space and set a high hurdle for any child who might want the educational value that the system is supposed to offer.

The old sociology encouraged the search for and analysis of functions. Beyond what people say they are doing is what is actually done. Beyond the conscious aims of a project are what outcomes are actually reached. Training students means hiring of lots of people. So a second function of the system is the jobs and the incomes it generates. The functions are not necessarily congruent. The one can frustrate the other.

This is not news. Many of us have experienced this for ourselves. A friend of mine spent his childhood in such an environment many decades back in Philadelphia and can appreciate why the young scholars might fall behind in their studies. He still remembers reaching high school and finally understanding what a sentence is after all those dreary years when he did not even know that a sentence existed. He was drafted into the army still not sure enough to write a coherent one.

I understand that the mayor and the superintendent of schools in Washington DC are engaged in a struggle to get top flight staff and bureaucracy in place. They realize that they have to bend the jobs to the primary objective. We are more likely to build a house with skilled carpenters and bricklayers. It is a first necessary step.

We have to notice that even with a drag-ass, rag-tag bunch of time serving teachers and blundering clericals and custodians some portion of the students do win through: they pass the official tests and are even prepared to take on the technical life and opportunities ahead.

It appears, I am trying to suggest, that the students themselves play an independent part. That apposed to the Dickensian squalor of the school plant and the creepy class-minder called teacher there is the pure young scholar and his purpose. What he may want, his cultural and ideological goals may also count, may be part of the action sequence of the real, operational school.

Once the school is reformed, cleaned up and made efficient; and once the ace-teacher is in place up pops the student and the informal system that has carried him from infancy to this moment in early childhood. Will he demand the real educational goods, gobble up the alphabet? Will he, like the straw man in Oz, suddenly and decisively break the codes?