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Book: FIX THE WHOLE ENCHILADA: A ROADMAP TO THE COMMON
GOOD
Public Schools in a Future That's Not Broken The American public school. Some are quite effective.
Some are seriously ineffective. What's the nature of the problem? What's
it take to create public schools that aren't broken? In a future that's
not broken?
The first major issue on the table is the question of Purpose. What is public education for? What is it that we want public education to do? One way to understand today's sense of purpose is to rewind the tape, back to the 1700's. Then play it on Fast Forward till it brings us back to the present. From schooling the elites to schooling the children of working folks. From authors of the classics to contemporary authors. From Whites Only to schools for all races. From the one-room schoolhouse to the suburban mega-school. From McGuffey's Reader to more than two dozen Advanced Placement options. From lessons studied by firelight to lessons illuminated by the worldwide web. From rising at dawn for summer chores to summers abroad and staying awake till dawn. This is a tale of many layers. Train the elites in the classics. None can doubt the value of a classical education as it was understood in the days of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Latin and Greek were doorways that led to the greatest minds of the ages. From the beginning of the Renaissance on, Italian city-states tried their hands at being republics. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they failed, these experiments grist to Europe's sharpest political philosophers in an endless debate over right and wrong ways to design a successful republic. The gentlemen scholars and their colleagues who met in closed session that memorable summer in Philadelphia were leaders of an infant nation, yet the richness of their classical schooling was critical to their success in shaping America's Constitution. Build democracy by teaching every child to read. During the nineteenth century, a movement on behalf of universal and free education gathered force all across America. (read: universal and free for white America) Horace Mann and many others argued that all America's children should be taught to read and do arithmetic, for only if they were educated could they function as responsible citizens in this democratic republic we call the United States of America. The public school movement started slowly, but caught on and grew steadily. America was still rural, schools had to be within walking distance, and funds were limited. One community after another raised funds, built one-room schoolhouses, hired teachers, and scooted their kids off to school to learn their ABC's. From these early roots, from these simple schools, grew a piece of the mission that guides public education even today. Serve All Children. Pretend black children don't need to learn. Progress doesn't travel in a straight line. In the days of slavery, Southern leaders didn't want black children in school learning to read. Schooling was off limits. After the Civil War, after slavery was outlawed, schooling slowly crept into the lives of black sharecroppers and their children. Schools for black children were at the mercy of white school boards. Such schools were always poor, barely hung on, lived on the crumbs of a social order in which endorsed social injustice as its defining design principle. Anne Arundel County maintained a completely separate set of schools for black students, into the late 1960's. More than 70 one room schoolhouses for elementary and middle school children - the long-standing Jim Crow norm for schooling the children of sharecroppers. A single black high school for the entire county. Black high school students from the far ends of the county were expected to ride the school bus an hour and a half each way, every day, if they wanted to attend the Wiley Bates High School in Annapolis. Educate children in desegregated schools. Change wasn't easy. Patient and tenacious, Thurgood Marshall and the other lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chipped away one after another at all the inequalities that comprised segregated education. Eventually the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP on the core issue. Separate but equal, the Court declared, was inherently unequal. America's school systems slowly abandoned Jim Crow segregation. Integrated schooling was the law of the land. Not always the reality - de facto segregation in real estate so often produces segregated schooling as well - but the days of legal segregation were gone for good. Create high schools to provide a public school path to college. Here I make an interpretive guess. Those who know the history in more detail than I will correct me if I'm in error. But I think the guess I make here is very nearly on target. This nation's elementary schools may owe their beginnings in large part to one-room schoolhouses all across America, but I doubt that the same can be said for the nation's high schools. The high school begins as an urban institution. It begins as a finishing school for the sons of the elite, and as a prep school for families of means who want their sons prepared for college. It trains young men for the military, it trains them for the ministry, it trains them in the classics. In time, a rising urban middle class insists on public high schools to provide the same level of training every student of talent, even those from families of modest means. High schools spread more widely. From its roots in serving the urban elite, the public high school acquires its initial sense of mission. Educate and graduate the most capable. Serve all, graduate the most able. Decades ago, these twin movements merged and fused and busted out of their early cocoons. Public school systems were charged with serving children all the way through Grade 12. Large modern school buildings were put up, one room schoolhouses torn down. High schools went up, their gyms and locker rooms furnished, sports teams launched, leagues organized, referees hired, games played, rivalries begun. Greek as an academic subject died so long ago no one remembers it ever being taught. Latin withered, but not as much; it lingers still in diehard locations. Colleges sprang up everywhere. The days of memorizing 3000 lines of Latin as one's ticket to college vanished everywhere. Signing up for community college was almost as easy as going shopping at the mall. Still, in spite of all the fusion, all the consolidation, all the reorganization, the essence of the original imprint still survived. From the early days of the one-room schoolhouse, the mission of serving all children. From the early days of high school as the home of an academic aristocracy, the mission of graduating the most able. Serve all, graduate the most able. Serve all, educate all, graduate all. History's wheel keeps turning. An America known as a manufacturing powerhouse for the first half of the twentieth century saw its once renowned manufacturing base disappear with almost dizzying speed as the 1960's gave way to the 1970's. It didn't take the nation's business leaders all that long to come to some conclusions about what this meant for their workforce needs. An old-line manufacturing economy might not need workers with high school diplomas, but a modern service economy sure did. In a hundred different ways, business leaders started pushing back on public schools. They didn't want "Serve all, graduate the most able" any more. They wanted something new. They wanted "Serve all, educate all, graduate all." They didn't want half the workforce educated; they wanted the entire workforce educated. Amazing what two centuries can do. Once the nation was happy if only a few of its sons drank deeply from the font of learning, for it liked the results it had gotten from Jefferson and Madison and Adams and Franklin and Washington and those early patricians who knew something of the classics. Now what we as a nation seem to want is high school graduates who can do algebra. And we wants three and half million new ones every year. Cultivate civic wisdom. The preceding purpose - Serve All, Educate All, Graduate All - is an exciting step forward. But still not quite enough. For a future that's not broken, we should ask our public schools to cultivate a well-grounded capacity for civic wisdom. Humanity's deepest civic themes are timeless. Balancing order and change. Balancing freedom and community. Cultivating individualism and nurturing personal integrity. Balancing stewardship and consumerism. A future that's not broken embraces all these values, simultaneously, and relishes the fun of keeping them in proper balance. Young people can acquire the civic seasoning they need if they're given adequate preparation, especially in our schools. There's no deep mystery about what's needed. Civic wisdom requires peripheral vision, it requires ethics, it requires foresight. Peripheral vision connects us with our neighbors and the complexity of the world we live in. Ethics trains us to tell right from wrong and leads us away from temptation. Foresight awakens an awareness of trends and a sense of how trends can be guided to our benefit.
An art and design curriculum is all about discovering the design patterns that exist around us. Material flows, and the designs that take them from the point of extraction through consumption to the point of discard. Energy flows, and the design decisions that take them from the point of generation through the distribution system to the point of use. The design and arrangement of water and sewer systems, the design of stormwater runoff systems, their consequences for the health of streams and waterways, lakes and bays. The design and arrangement of corporate value chains. The design of transportation systems. Urban master plans - how they're put together, the design principles they embody. And so on. Every system, as it evolves and grows, passes through a series of "design moments." In those moments, there's much that's still fluid. Options are still "live." Little is frozen. Students learn that the world we live in is as it is because of the choices that were made in each of those design moments. Decisions were made. Designs were frozen. Capital was expended turning those design choices into embedded capital. Some of the design moment's latent capabilities were realized, others were foreclosed. Some communities manage their design moments well, and their lives are the richer for it. Other communities blow their opportunities and awaken years later to a realization of how impoverished their lives have become due to the careless decisions of yesteryear. Art and Design isn't a one-year curriculum; it's a sequence that stretches quite naturally across six or eight or even twelve years of schooling. As students interact with the world around them, as they learn to appreciate the significance of design approaches that unfold decade after decade, they also take advantage of their classroom time in sketching and drawing and drafting and painting. The smarter their eyes become, the better their drawing skills, the better their "seeing" skills, the smarter their eyes become, the smarter their eyes, the more they understand the world around them. What business owner wouldn't welcome employees whose eyes have been carefully trained? Who'd learned as students how to recognize design issues and design opportunities? So much of modern life involves negotiation among stakeholders. The deeper the skills of all those who come to the table, the higher the shared level of understanding, the greater the opportunities for effective collaboration. More skill means higher value achievement. More skill at the table shrinks transaction costs. The stronger our society's design skills, the more value we realize from each of life's "design moments." Civic wisdom is about balance. Order and change, freedom and community, stewardship for tomorrow as well as for today, character and self-expression. Civic wisdom is about purpose - knowing where we need to go and shaping the themes that keep us pointed in the right direction. Civic wisdom is about ethics - knowing the difference between right and wrong, fair and unfair. And civic wisdom is about design - knowing where design can take us, and having the tenacity to elicit beauty from each of the design moments that life blesses us with. Schools of the future give us more than graduates
who know algebra. They give us graduates who understand the designed environments
we live within and who understand design's potential to give us a much
richer future. |