School's Out

There are many people who believe that any social, cultural or political structure which has remained in its present form long enough to attain ‘sacred cow’ status is almost certainly due for overhaul. Many of the proponents of pot theory (see below) have taken great pleasure in applying it to such structures.

So it is in the early 21st Century that various challenges are arising to the orthodoxy of universal education for children and the further orthodoxy of what precisely that education is expected to achieve.

The title of this post comes from a pamphlet written by Jan Huysmans of the University of Amsterdam. The pamphlet was actually called School’s Out Forever, somewhat bizarrely mirroring the Alice Cooper song of the same title from the 1970s.

I say ‘somewhat bizarrely’ because the pamphlet makes a very serious argument, quoting extensively from John Stuart Mill and other champions of liberty, that all formal education should be abolished. His argument was that compulsory education was a gross infringement of the personal liberties of children and counterproductive in the modern age. He argued instead that the government would be responsible for ensuring that educational programming was shown on television during the day and that combined libraries and education centres would be open to people of all ages for additional support.

Huysmans is a colourful character and admitted subsequently that he didn’t envisage these changes coming about, nor did he even think they were entirely workable, but he wanted to start a wide-ranging discussion about the purpose of education and to look at what it achieved. He also quite rightly pointed out that for a significant proportion of the school population, the achievement of education was little more than crowd control.

These arguments have been taken up by many others, but perhaps the one we should consider is Eileen Kempson who was working on her book The Idea of a School at the same time Huysmans was writing his pamphlet.

Kempson’s book was based on her experiences of running The Silver Mountain School which she established in her native Colorado after teaching in both the private and public education sectors on the East Coast of the US.

Her experience suggested that formal education was of benefit to very few people and thwarted many more. Children with problems suffered either academically or socially (or both) from day one. Children who were bright but not academic were made to feel like failures, soon lost faith, and were never allowed the opportunity to explore learning experiences that might have suited them and prepared them for life after school. The most able children were often bored and were once again expected to confine their intellectual development to very tightly prescribed studies.

At first, she too toyed with the idea of abolishing education. She quickly saw that the single biggest problem, even more than a populace that was illiterate and innumerate, was one of providing childcare for children who would no longer have anywhere to go during the day.

Her first criteria, then, when setting up The Silver Mountain School was to make its day match the working day. The second was that children had to be literate and numerate by the age of eleven (this might seem late, but in Continental Europe, formal education often doesn’t begin until seven, yet children surpass their American and British counterparts in literacy and numeracy within a year or two). Beyond that, the aim was to allow the children as much freedom as possible to explore their own interests. Controversially, though Huysmans would approve, this even included watching TV all day if they so desired.

It’s impossible to judge the success of The Silver Mountain School by normal standards because not all children are expected to pass a given academic benchmark. It’s perhaps also difficult to judge it because the parents choosing to send their children there are generally from the higher socio-economic groups. Having said that, it’s record in terms of very high employment and college admission rates among former students, and very low rates of criminality, suggest it’s doing something right. It’s not surprising that a relatively high percentage of former students go on to set up their own businesses. What’s most dramatic is a survey of four hundred former students, in which not one said they hadn’t enjoyed their time at Silver Mountain, and in which only two students thought they might have received a better education elsewhere.

This raises a lot of questions about education. How much is it simply about childcare? How much is it about providing a skilled workforce (something the current education system is failing to achieve in most of the Western World)? Should education be more about socialization (again, for many people, the current education experience is socially tortuous and does nothing to prepare them for adult society)? Governments pay lip service to such questions but don’t seem much interested in the fundamentals – it’s reassuring then that communities and individuals like Eileen Kempson are exploring the answers for them.

(coming next - disengagement theory)