The Education Gospel and the Pandemic
Students only spend 15% of their waking hours in school. Do we expect too much?
Most educators I know put their heads in their hands from time to time and ask, “Why am I doing this?” This question usually occurs after a class has finally revealed itself to be a satanic cult, when you’ve been directed to “spruce up” your bulletin board, or after a particularly infuriating conversation with a parent has finally settled the nurture vs. nature debate. Fortunately, little more than a kind word from a student or a glass of wine can, if not precisely answer the question for you, then at least render it unimportant.
Most educators I know have also put their heads in their hands from time to time and ask, “Why are we doing this?” “We,” as in “America,” and “this,” as in “providing a free and compulsory education for literally everyone between the ages of 5 and 21.” This question usually occurs during those rare opportunities when you’re able to step back and take in the full result of what you and your colleagues have been so indefatigably working toward every day for months, or years. School, as I’ve said before, is pointillism by committee; imagine how dispiriting it is when you thought everyone was painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” only to discover it’s just a dumb black square.
I had such a moment recently.
My school was looking to hire a few school aides. School aides are one of the many unheralded but indispensable positions in a school, and the most excellent are porters, concierges, IT support, subs, and deans all in one. We tend to use former graduates to fill the position and so before the year started, we invited five in for interviews. Each was as conscientious as a young adult as they had been as a student, and all five were willing to accept the position.
Until it came to the vaccine requirement.
One was already vaccinated (we hired her), but the other four were not, and said they had no plans to get vaccinated, even if it meant no job. That the vaccines were proven safe . . . that all of them, just by virtue of being public school students, had been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, poliomyelitis, hepatitis B, varicella and meningococcal . . . that all of them were either unemployed, underemployed and/or not in college anymore, and with few other immediate options, none among them paying $25/hour with full benefits . . . that other vaccine mandates and passports would soon foreclose other employment options and curtail their movements among civil society . . . that up to that point 670,000 Americans had died, a disproportionate share of which were from their own racial group and socioeconomic class . . . these were reasonable points all of them listened to politely but ultimately shrugged off as if we were warning them not to swim 30 minutes after eating. When, during the last interview, our Holiness Alumnus III evoked “the mark of the beast,” I was done.
What the hell? These had been our students. We had taught them well. Very well. In fact, as a school, we had done everything we were supposed to have done, everything we had been told would result in students who were, to use the term du jour, “college and career ready” and prepared for the “duties of citizenship in a democracy.” Our advisory system had instilled in them the importance of community. Plus, they had taken my class - they knew enough about logical fallacies to dismiss the idiocy of Nicki Minaj (in the very least.) Where had we gone wrong? My gloom deepened when I considered that if four out of five randomly selected alumni had refused the vaccine, then what were the chances that many of their fellow graduates had gotten vaccinated? My gloom turned to panic when I considered the 10+ million students who had graduated from high school during the last few years — how many lacked the critical thinking skills and ethical framework to make the right decision, precisely when it mattered most? (At the time of this writing, only 55% of 18-24 year olds had gotten vaccinated.)
I was demoralized. We had failed. School was stupid. Waste of time and money. I walked back to my office in a sulk.
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One of the crummiest side effects of working in education is guilt. No one talks about this. You feel bad when a lesson doesn’t go well. You wake at 3 a.m. reliving the moment you lost your temper with a student. You watch a student reach the outer limits of her own capability and tell her Good job but you know it’ll never be good enough. Part of that guilt is predetermined: even the childless among us who find pictures and stories of friends’ children the pinnacle of dullness possess an evolutionary prerogative to protect and nurture the young. Working with kids automatically activates this impulse.
Part of that guilt, too, is a byproduct of the narrative that schools and teachers are capital “I” Important. I’m sure I’m not the only educator who both appreciates and resents the response I usually receive when I tell people what I do for a living. It’s a gratitude inflected with bewilderment. There’s typically a note of Better you than me, pal. I also can’t be the only educator for whom every other headline and chyron about how monumental a failure school has been in nearly every regard for the past year and a half feels a lot like the parent-teacher conferences from his youth when he got to listen to a small group of adults enumerate the many ways in which he was a disappointment. As if I wasn’t sitting right there.
But I get it. I do. Disappointment comes from unmet expectations and we have nothing if not the highest expectations for American schools. As we should.
Or maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe it’s absurd.
Almost twenty years ago, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Marvin Lazerson came up with a concept to describe our unrealistic expectations for what public schools can do. He called it the Education Gospel.
[It] refers to a system of belief that has dominated American education for more than a century: the belief that social, economic, civic, and moral problems can be solved through schooling. Whatever the difficulties—economic recessions and economic development, social instability and crime, disengaged youth and deteriorating family life, inequality and poverty, even traffic safety and physical health—the Education Gospel assumes that schooling can solve the problem.
And when things don’t go right, who do we blame? Depending on the crisis (or moral panic), American schools are repeatedly called upon to improve or include in the curriculum financial literacy, sex education, social and emotional learning, civics education, nutrition and health, character education, digital literacy, social media literacy, news literacy, and, just in case none of that works, general critical thinking and problem solving skills. If only we had had one more class, we might have prevented the subprime mortgage crisis. A few more worksheets and we may have avoided that insurrection.
If your response is that that’s what students should be learning in schools, I would agree, but I might ask if you’re comfortable with schools being the only place where students learn those things, which is mostly how it seems now. There are a couple problems with that model.
The biggest problem is that we can’t teach the most important stuff explicitly, and even if we could, we certainly couldn’t teach it effectively at scale in a traditional classroom. You don’t improve critical thinking by explicitly teaching critical thinking. You don’t make better readers by explicitly teaching reading. And you don’t teach children how to become good people by explicitly teaching them how to be good people. Teaching those things is like walking with a bowl of water. Even though your goal is to not spill the water, if you focus on not spilling the water, you’ll spill the water. (The trick is not to look at the water.) Meaning, we come by those “skills” in a roundabout way. This is the entire rationale for liberal arts education.
(And if you’re skeptical of the claim that many of those aforementioned competencies are difficult [if not impossible] to teach in a classroom, then I have a banana and a condom I’d like to show you. Even the most artfully written policy mutates in unexpected ways by the time it’s put into practice in a real classroom. For further evidence, see: Common Core.)
Compounding this inconvenience are two stubborn facts that many of us either don’t know, or choose to ignore. First, from kindergarten to senior year, the average American student spends only about 15 percent of their waking hours in school. Fifteen percent! Seems like way more, doesn’t it? How could anyone possibly expect so much to get done in so little time? Especially when there are overwhelmingly irresistible, overwhelmingly powerful forces outside of school (like social media) that directly contravene the values and goals of school?
And second, as measured by standardized tests, schools and teachers only account for about 30% of variance in student achievement. The other 60% is due to out-of-school factors like family income, home language, access to dental care, etc.
So why do we insist on expecting so much from schools when it’s irrational to do so? Is it just because we spend a shitload of money on schools? Maybe. My other theory is that there is no other American institution, civic or otherwise, that requires as many people, and as many different people, to believe in its mission. Furthermore -- and this is the critical part -- no other American institution requires so many different people to actively participate in executing that mission, and for so long a period of time, too. You go to every single day of your life until you’re 18, and then you send your kid there every single day of their life until they’re 18. (Even if you don’t, we still send you a bill.) The relationship between American public schools and the populace is symbiotic in a way no other institution in this country is.
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After the final school aide interview, I sat in my office in a gloom. I could have sulked there for the rest of the day had a series of administrative non-emergencies not demanded my immediate attention. The flagrant bathroom pass abuser who needed to be shaken down; the fledgling teacher who radioed for reinforcements; feedback to be given on unit plans; class walkthroughs; tech support for a parent; an email blast reminding families to give covid-19 testing consent; monitoring dismissal; two bites of my lunch.
Such was my day. Executing one small task after the other, in unrelenting succession, until the last bell rang and the hallways were quiet. When I left, I was not as demoralized as I had been earlier, and my disappointment in my former students had ebbed. Though I didn’t exactly stride home with a renewed faith in the power of public schools to singularly improve students’ lives and in turn remake American society, I did feel accomplished, even if that sense of accomplishment came from completing the most quotidian of tasks that were far removed from idealistic ends of school.
There’s a reason monks occupy their days with small chores. My mind had no room to ruminate on the grand purpose of American education -- and whether we had accomplished it or not -- when a computer cart needed to be unlocked. Which, at that moment, is exactly what needed to be done.
Above image: Eagle school bell; Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1692585