It Takes a Village

If we are natural born learners, why do we believe everyone must go to school? Let’s consider a brief history of school.  Where does the idea originate?

The Book of Proverbs in the Bible’s Old Testament contains admonitions that children should pay attention to their teachers, that learning is valuable and there are consequences to suffer for those who do not attend.  In Plato’s Republic, Socrates speaks at length about the power and importance of learning and about the appropriate curriculum for schooling the young. He did not think young boys should be exposed to the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The stories were too violent and showed the flaws of gods and heroes.  By profession, Confucius was a teacher.  The Analects of Confucius is the collected wisdom that Confucius imparted to the children of China’s aristocrats, including the importance and never-ending nature of learning.  All three sources are about 2500 years old, right at the early edge of recorded history. Schooling is an old idea, but it assumes many forms and varying possibilities for who could be teachers and who could be students.

Although the idea of school originates most clearly Jewish, Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, the availability of formal schooling for everyone is far more modern.  In fact, almost all aspects of modern culture pre-date common schooling – mechanical technologies, industry, commerce, politics, government and the arts developed well before schooling became widely available. So, one could argue that formal schooling for everyone is not a necessary element of civilization.

In America, it was not until the 1820’s that the need for wide spread schooling became apparent because commerce and industry needed an educated work force.  The origin of many public school systems and public colleges can be traced to the early 19^th century. Although Thomas Jefferson insisted on the value of education in a democracy, he was an old man before his own state of Virginia committed to building its first state university. Ironically, the driving force behind public education was industry and commerce, not democracy.

The early days of public schooling in America were rather awful.  The curriculum was limited both in breadth and depth; teachers were usually only a little older than their pupils; there was no such thing as teacher training or standards; culture wars were common over everything from who could attend school to the content of the curriculum. In the Philadelphia riots of 1844, churches, homes, and market places were burned and 30 people killed over whether public schools should use either the Catholic or Protestant bible. Girls and young women were either excluded from schooling or assigned to segregated schools.  In southern states it was a criminal offense to teach slaves to read or write.

The American public school took its modern form in the early 20^th century after child labor laws excluded children from being employed in factories and mines and mechanization changed the nature of agriculture. As adults were consumed by commerce and industry, there had to be a place in society for children and adolescents.  School, for better or worse, became that place and it evolved from a five or six year experience to a 13-year experience.

People like me – white Americans over 60 years old – often think of the 1950s as the golden age of American public schooling. Since women of that era were still mostly excluded from higher paying professions, there might be reason to believe that teachers back then were more capable. But, non-whites will certainly have a different memory – of underfunded schools and worn-out textbooks handed down from the white-only school system. And where were the children with significant disabilities schooled? We don’t remember them being in the public schools because they were not there.

Schooling is not a flawed idea, but its execution is flawed. Its effects are not uniformly beneficial, in part because we often ignore the natural agents and mechanisms of learning, and in part because rapid changes in culture have altered the learning environment in which children live. The availability of parents, family and community members to play a role in children’s learning have declined or, in many cases, disappeared. It does take a village to raise a child, but the saying stands in stark contrast to the reality that most children do not live in anything that resembles a village.  They live in attendance zones.  Automobiles, transit lines, patterns of work, shopping and entertainment define the real village. The concept of village now has no geographic center and school attendance zones usually serve several mutually exclusive villages.

Children do not necessarily need schools, but they do need real villages and good teachers. Good teachers could be anyone, anywhere, anytime. But modern culture has lost the capability of providing a wide range of natural teachers. Schooling has not adapted to a world in which the geographic village has disintegrated.  We live in the 21^st century, but the structure of schooling is still based on 19^th and 20^th century models that assumed the existence of coherent communities, supportive parents and the power of self-driven learners. Fixing our schools would be easy if all our children lived in nurturing communities.