Smack bang in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown is the perfect time to be asking what schools are for anyway!
Has schooling been disrupted in your part of the world? Are there kids relentlessly banging a basketball off the bedroom wall? Do they claim such behaviour is okay merely because they are bored or stressed or neither or both?
Why can’t they get back to school!!!!
Well – what are schools for anyway?
Writing from Kentucky in the late 1980’s one sociologist had this to say about the purpose of schools after the American revolution.
‘to select, sort, and standardize students according to their ability to fit into the urban factory system (Schlechty 1990)
The next phase he identified as being
‘In this vision, students are viewed as products to be moulded, tested against common standards, and inspected carefully before being passed on to the next workbench for further processing.’
The change here is quite dramatic. In the first instance, schools are for students. They are for sorting students.
In the second instance, students are for schools. Schools are for forming students.
In the first instance – schools are at the end of the production line, doing the final quality check. There was a perception that the potential for a student was ‘fixed’ and the job of a school was to identify who was fit for what purpose. In other words – Schools produce workers. Elite schools produce rulers.
The second instance is the product of the ‘scientific management’ approach to production. Thus, schools produce data.
Schools produce data, data for politicians, data for industrialists, data for marketers and those who furtively seed narratives for aspirant mothers and aging grandparents to buy into. Schools produce data, data relentlessly extracted from its host. The host, writhing about energetically in the petri-dish of the classroom just trying to grow. Data to sell, data to sort, data by which to subjugate. Data to liberate and navigate, to celebrate. DATA DATA DATA!
Interestingly, Schlechty defines structures as ‘rules, roles and relationships’. With this new narrative, each of these ‘Rs’ soon acquiesced to the cold impersonal pressure of the Data Narrative. Even the oldest of school purposes, the transmission of culture to the younglings took a back seat as merely one of the functions that data production could consume.
Those who make rules and allocate resources have the extraction of data from children as the primary vision for the existence of these rules and resources. Improving student learning is merely one byproduct among many. It is an especially useful subnarrative to keep handy as it affords the monetization of the data.
Schools are directed to respond to all this data that they have extracted from the human bodies in their care. Professional non-educators consort with non-professional education administrators. On dimly lit, grubby street corners all red-faced, they whisper in heated tones whilst crumpled money changes hands. Unable to restrain themselves, with no thought of dignity, they scheme how best to use this data to produce yet more data.
So then – this whopping big data producing machine has been tipped on its head and emptied. All the schools have no students and the NAPLAN industry has been starved of its raw material. DATA. Year 12 students in this year’s final throws of The Hunger Games have been stripped of the possibility of bludgeoning each other to see who can produce the best data. What gift shall the winners grovel with at the university entrance gates?
Gosh – if we can’t produce data because the students are not in school – then what are schools for?
Three models are offered by Schlechty, School as Tribe, School as Factory and School as Hospital (meets the needs of children)
Well – you shall have to read tomorrows blog for the answer to that!
** Railroaders were disrupted by truck and air freight – didn’t see themselves as freight transporters. Educators with a clear vision for the purpose of schools will not suffer the same fate as the railroaders.