Education seems to be an area where the lines between liberal and
conservative are a bit hard to follow unless you belong passionately to one
camp or the other. Even in my generation we're not at all sure how ideas
get labeled as conservative or liberal, other than by who backs them. My
students, I think, are a bit fed-up with the notion that there are only two
political possibilities in the entire universe of human meaning.
I remember meeting and talking to Ivan Ilych when I was student, as well as
reading De-Schooling Society a long time ago. I thought then that he made a
pretty good case; my memory of high school was still pretty fresh at the
time. I also remember leaving a large-group 'dialogue' with him -- in a
student lounge, he was not letting himself be cast too much into the role
of a teacher, though he was treated as a 'guru' by many -- and commenting
to a friend, "What he's saying is that libraries are freer places for
learning than schools." For some students libraries _are_ better places to
learn than schools. Still better, I think now, and for more students, would
be learning communities without curricula or compulsion, where, as in a
library, or on the net, you can go to explore knowledge and find answers to
your questions, but where in addition you collaborate with others in
learning projects --- when and as you and they wish --- and where you also
have contact with adults who can introduce you to ideas and questions you
might not have considered on your own, and finally where the lines between
learning and living are not so tightly drawn -- where your learning
projects can become, or start as, action projects in the common world of
kids and adults.
If we really want to critique the notion of schools as they have turned out
since the late 18th century, maybe we should begin not with their
educational failures, or with their anti-intellectual and compulsory
curricula, and not even with their stifling of creativity and pervasive
boredom, but with the basic notion that it is intellectually, morally, and
emotionally unhealthy to segregate everyone from the age of 5 to 18 from
the common public sphere.
Untimely as it is to say this, I would consider someone justified in
killing rather than allowing themselves to be forced to be a high school
student. I'm a peaceable sort myself, but if anyone tried to force me into
that position, I would react rather violently. One of the problems I have
in my career as an educator is the terrible feeling in my gut that I get
whenever I set foot in a high school and begin to empathize with the
students. I just hope it doesn't feel as bad to them as it does to me; when
I was a student it certainly didn't, but then I was an extra-ordinarily
lucky student in many ways. Still, I think that I was socially and
emotionally crippled by being locked away for all those years from normal
contact with the rest of the adult world and from doing any sort of
socially valuable or productive activity.
For every kid who blows up a school, there are thousands who'd like to. Why
should we doubt that they have good reasons to feel as they do?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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