So James Besser, as he wrote in last week’s Chronicle, wants a “real debate” over education in this country in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “school choice” decision, holding that Cleveland’s school voucher program is constitutional?
Fine, let’s have one. But let’s start with the fundamentals: What is the purpose of education? What can — and can’t — education do for individuals and society?
Should it make us all independently and individualistically creative and critical thinkers in all areas of life? Or should it indoctrinate us into acceptance of our society’s values and make us as much alike as possible?
Should it make us rounded people who appreciate the richness of life and of human achievements all over the world? Or should it primarily prepare us for narrow, specialized jobs and careers in capitalistic America?
Should it help us make informed choices about aspects of life and among a wide variety of available lifestyles? Or should it force us to fit into a narrow range of lifestyles?
Should it provide information about everything that impinges on human life? Or are there certain subjects — sex, child-rearing, the existence of social-economic class struggle, among others — that it should stay out of and let people learn through their own potentially catastrophic blunders?
Should it inculcate the values American culture theoretically stands for — striving for and celebration of excellence and creativity, pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, acceptance of and kindness toward others?
Or should it display the values so much of American culture seems really to live by without openly saying so — idolization of athletic ability and physical beauty, anti-intellectualism, economic success at almost any price, insistence on social-economic-racial-religious-sexual distinctions?
Should education help to change society or preserve it? Encourage us to be activists or conformists? Make us liberals or conservatives?
How much power does education really have, anyway? Can it change society, or does it merely reflect it? Can it change individuals, or are personality and home environment more powerful?
Jewish education
And those questions just refer to secular education. On top of this, what should be the purpose of religious — specifically Jewish — education? Should it add a surface layer of religious knowledge to secular knowledge? Or should it pervade all knowledge?
Should it encourage critical thinking about religious doctrines and history? Or should it demand total acceptance of one religion’s teachings and rejection of all other religions and philosophies?
All these questions swim under the surface in the debate and posturing over the school choice issue. Though seldom openly addressed, they often are the presumptions on which people base their policies and positions.
Not least of the reasons I feel very dubious about “school choice” is that most of its advocates appear to have an educational philosophy that I and, I think, most American Jews oppose.
These advocates seem to be mostly political, economic and religious conservatives. Apart from wanting governmental bodies to help promote religious (mostly Protestant Christian) teachings, they tend to want education to narrow people rather than broaden them; to inculcate prejudices rather than values; to teach people what they should think rather than how to think for themselves.
They want to use tax money to do it — but as little of that as possible. They claim education is important to society, but they want it cheap. One sign of this: many school choice advocates attack teachers’ unions with venom, as though teachers shouldn’t have the right to demand good salaries and working conditions.
And I deeply doubt that most school choice advocates outside of the black community have sincere concern for the educational plight of this country’s impoverished minorities.
Even state Rep. Annette “Polly” Williams (D-Milwaukee), the “mother of school choice” in Wisconsin, at least twice has been quoted saying she suspects her would-be allies are more concerned about religious education and helping middle- and upper-class whites than they are about providing real and equal educational opportunities for poverty-stricken blacks.
And as Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson pointed out in an article in Tuesday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, many highly visible school choice advocates oppose policies that might actually fight racial prejudice and enable disadvantaged people to do anything with their education in the society outside the schoolhouses.
Of course all the rhetorical questions posed at the beginning of this article are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps our educational system should be aiming at all those goals in different degrees or balances, maybe even emphasizing some of them and not others at different times in students’ lives.
But neither is considering these seemingly theoretical questions a mere luxury of the “chattering classes” who ignore the desperation of many impoverished parents to get their kids out of failing public school systems.
What good would it do to give low-income black families vouchers for private or parochial schools, if the “choice” schools won’t take their kids or treat them fairly; or the kids have to return to crime-ridden neighborhoods; or the kids’ presence causes white families to pull out; or even if the kids get a better education, only to enter a society that finds all kinds of overt and covert ways not to treat them equally and fairly?
A better education would help, but that alone can’t fix everything. Ultimately, a real debate over what educational system, or systems, we want to have is a debate over what kind of society we want to have — and what kind we do have. If such a debate is held, it could provide a real learning experience.
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