I recently helped a kid who had never been to school get into a college kinesiology program. Shortly into my pitch, the admissions counselor stopped me and said, “She’s 19 right? Everyone over 19 is a mature student and accepted regardless of their academic background. Then it’s just sink or swim.” I paused: “You’re telling me you don’t need high school to get into college here?” “That’s right.”
I’m fond of this story because it underlines the point that a high school diploma – or a university degree for that matter – isn’t essential to pursue a dream career or enjoy future success. And personally, I see the compulsory state schooling paradigm collapsing in on itself. First described by Plato, but never attempted until the 1800s in Prussia and arriving in North America in 1852, compulsory schooling is tightly bound with the rise of the modern nation state. So, in changing how we understand schooling, we are necessarily changing our understanding of social organization and citizenship.
Schools are sites of both social replication and creation: that is to say, they reflect and define how we organize and understand ourselves. If children spend the vast bulk of their lives in anti-democratic institutions where they have little opportunity to make real choices, direct their learning, spend time doing things they value, or take independent initiative, how can we expect anything other than a docile and compliant citizenry?
I think the real question is this: is spending six hours per day, five days a week, ten months a year for twelve years, confined to an institution in groups of thirty the optimal way for children to thrive? If not, then what the hell are we doing?
Yet we can’t just retreat into individualist, everyone for themselves answers. Schools are a social problem that demand social answers and social institutions in their place: we have to build better places for kids and better conceptions of childhood. But there can be no systemic answers. Like Colin Ward said "We need a mass of answers, not mass answers."
Kids grow up right and thrive according to an infinitely complex and constantly shifting response to culture, time, place, predilection, circumstance and thousands of other local and individual factors. It is crazy to attempt to describe what all kids need, or how all kids learn best. We have to respond to the kids in front of us, not the abstract kids of theory: our children, our neighbors, our friends, our community. our community.
Home learning is great and I do think that encouraging everyone to simply drop out of school is excellent advice, but it can only be part of the solution. We need to build new institutions that are commonly available, especially for the least privileged in our neighborhoods. We need to take what is available and use every possible resource.
These places will, and should, be profoundly different from one another: reflecting and recreating the local diversity that economic and cultural globalization is so eager to extinguish. Learning centers, small schools, free schools, community centers, homeschooling can all be part of the answers: the key is locally-controlled, democraticallyrun institutions that respond to the needs of participants, not the reverse.
Let’s look to libraries and community centers and parks for inspiration. Schools would do well to reconstruct themselves with these in mind: genuinely public, voluntary, non-coercive, commonly available for a wide array of uses, and sitting at the heart of healthy community life.
We have to start with the idea that no one wants to grow up to be stupid or ignorant: everyone wants to be smart, competent and skillful. Begin with people’s exuberance and desire to learn, their passions and interests and go from there. Trying to force a person to learn something they don’t care about is futile.
Look to the community and make institutions semi-permeable. We need local institutions: individualist answers fall short. People require places to gather and to generate culture. If we do not pose counter-institutions in opposition to what exists, dominant culture will flow in: TV and shopping, video games and virtual life. Most kids need places to go during the day, and those places have to be building something new. People are capable of so much even with severely limited resources. Let’s free the unbelievable amounts of money and resources that state schools are hoarding/wasting and return them to communities and families.
Matt Hern runs the Purple Thistle Centre and edits Crank magazine. His new book is Field Day: Getting Society Out of School.
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