“What do you think is the greatest challenge for education?”

“What do you think is the greatest challenge for education?”, is typically the first thing someone asks when they discover I’m interested in education policy reform. This question, in turn, prompts the response that the simplest answer is that there is no easy answer and that articulating the ‘greatest challenge for education’ is incredibly difficult because of the integrated role that the institution plays in our society. From day one, a child is taught how to think; he or she is given a box of tools and pictures that will serve as mechanisms to define and organize his or her world. Some of these tools are multipurpose - those which encourage collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Others are unilaterally used to measure the child through a system of standardizations, pushing forward a certain set of criteria and information which have been deemed necessary by the status quo in order to identify him or her as ‘educated’. Hand in hand with these criteria are a system of values that are superimposed onto the student based on perceptions of effort, intelligence, and ability. These values are then used to assess the student and funnel them into vacancies in the world at large. Unfortunately, rather than allow each student to determine for him or her self which path is most appropriate or which path will render the most fulfillment, the result is instead a buckshot effect wherein students succeed (or fail) on the basis of a random assortment of advantages and disadvantages established by birth and being able to test well. It is with this narrow vision of success with which I take the greatest issue.

The American education system, birthed out of the Industrial Revolution as a means to house truants after the introduction of child labor laws, not only structures itself after industry but also focuses its merit on industrial production through a means of return on investment thereby distorting the value of education, placing emphasis on capital success rather than inspiration and edification of the individual student. This model, as described by Sir Ken Robinson in his TED presentation, culminates in the increasing implementation of the standardized test in order to classify, rank, and otherwise issue a variety of opportunity to the individual based on his or her performance on an exam. In a society which postulates the notion of self-determination and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, this structure of placement and evaluation subjects students to a de facto segregation based on his or her ability to successfully complete a very rigid exam and does not necessarily take into account learning styles, pedagogical strengths and weaknesses, cultural or social capital available to the student, or any other of the myriad of factors which may support or inhibit the students’ ability to perform a specific series of tasks on command.

Functionally, such examinations have come to serve one purpose: to secure federal funds for a given school. This focus on resources not only undermines the intent of the exams, which is to ensure that all students are receiving and succeeding at what the federal government has determined to be the minimum standards in core subjects of reading, writing, math and science (whether or not the tests truly get at this issue is another paper in and of itself), but also serves to divide communities between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Couple this division with policies such as the Bush administrations’ “No Child Left Behind” and the Obama administrations “Race to the Top” (same schpeal, new moniker), the result is an ever widening achievement gap as struggling schools see their funding cut, resulting in students falling farther behind and successful schools being rewarded, despite not necessarily needing the additional funding. The greatest critique that I have for the American education system can be summed up by a quote from philosopher Allen Bloom (with whose philosophy I still have GREAT issue, but that is, again, for another time): "Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions -- not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy -- but forming and informing them as art." Education, while requiring a certain amount of measurement to ensure progress, should not have its’ funding beholden to the ability of the student to fill in a tiny little rectangle on a scantron. Education requires something more to connect with the student, to reach out to those sidelined by the standard model and help them find their place in the world, just as it has done for the academically gifted for generations.