Why Schools Fail

Introduction

In 1959 James B. Conant, former president of Harvard, writing about the American school system, said, It works, most of us like it, and it appears to be as permanent a feature of our society as most of our political institutions.¹ Given the widespread support for public schooling, there are probably not many people who would quarrel with the observation that the institution is permanent. Today, however, many people might hold that Conant somewhat overstated the case for his first two claims. For if there are those who do like the public school system, there are also many who do not. Dissatisfaction with schooling is widespread at all levels. Among high school students the dropout rate is 25 percent. A third of all new teachers leave the teaching profession after two years. Every day more than a million children are required to take psychoactive drugs so that their behavior in school will be manageable.

Facts like those have led some observers to conclude that if the system can be said to be working, it is doing so very poorly. Within 10 years of Conant's optimistic study of high schools, there were calls for a complete restructuring, or even abandonment, of formal education, and the bestseller list featured such titles as Crisis in the Classroom, The Underachieving School, and Deschooling Society. The central question raised by those and other works was, Why is the system not working in anything like the way intended?

What seems undeniable is that there is a substantial contrast between the vision of what public education is supposed to be and the reality of schooling itself. Educators have tended to portray schooling in glowing terms. Horace Mann, the father of the public school system in America, claimed that the process of schooling would build up the nature of the child into a capacity for the intellectual comprehension of the universe and a spiritual similitude to its Author.² As a result of going to school, children would acquire the bloom and elasticity of perfect health, manners born of artlessness and enthusiasm, and a countenance so inscribed with the records of pure thoughts and benevolent deeds, as to be one beaming, holy hieroglyph of love and duty.³

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the schools have fallen somewhat short of achieving that vision. As marty observers have seen them, they are not the benevolent, beneficial places Mann envisioned. Schools are often, in effect if not in intent, rather dreadful places in which to spend time. Charles Silberman, then an editor of Fortune magazine, wrote in Crisis in the Classroom,

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, of pleasure in creating, of sense of self. The public schools ... are the kind of institution one cannot really dislike until one gets to know them well. Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are, how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually and esthetically barren the atmosphere.⁴

When critics characterize the failure of schooling in terms of the mutilation of the child's sense of self or the suppression of the child's individuality, as opposed to declining Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, defenders of the status quo tend to react with derision. They see such criticisms as expressions of naive romanticism or romantic individualism. A child's education, they say, is to be directed by educational professionals, implementing the knowledge they have gained from their study of educational science, that is, knowledge of the conditions required for children's optimal mental growth. Education is not to be left to the subjective intuitions of romantic dreamers with their foolish ideas about children being the best judges of what they need to know or being allowed to do whatever they want to do.

There are, I believe, two things wrong with that response. First, the claims educators have made to scientific knowledge of what children require do not sustain examination. To put the point more strongly, there is no such thing as educational science. When the views that have been offered as scientific are examined closely, they tum out to be not scientific at all but rather a combination of personal taste and simplistic, distorted versions of philosophical theories about how the mind works. Second, the denial of children's individuality is not to be taken lightly. What careful observation of children actually shows is that great harm is done when there is a systematic suppression of a child's interests, values, and idiosyncratic potentials. Indeed, it is the denial of individuality, the idea that everyone must follow some general plan, that is at the core of the failure of the schools.

In brief, defenders of schooling in its present form claim that its programs are arrived at scientifically and are applicable to everyone. I believe that the programs are not arrived at scientifically and are not applicable to everyone. The present work is an attempt to illustrate those points.

Footnotes

¹James B. Conant, The American High School Today (New York: Signet Books, 1959), p.19.

²Horace Mann, Lectures and Annual Reports on Education, ed. Mary Mann (Cambridge, Mass.: Published for the editor, 1867), p. 227.

³Ibid., p.220.

⁴Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 10.

1. Is Educational Theory Scientific?

Horace Mann was one of the first educators to claim that the process of formal schooling is based on scientific knowledge of how a child's mind develops. Without that knowledge, he said, one would have no right to attempt to manage and direct ... a child's soul.¹ Given that Mann is praised by contemporary educators for his insight and for the modernism of his views,² it is somewhat disconcerting to discover that the science that he saw as guiding the process of schooling was phrenology, the now entirely discredited pseudo-science of bumps on the skull. The book he regarded as containing the knowledge necessary for training children's minds was The Constitution of Man by the Scottish phrenologist George Combe. Its philosophy, Mann said, is the only practical basis for education.³

Combe held that the mind consisted of some 30 faculties or propensities, such as benevolence, combativeness, self-esteem, and veneration. Each of those faculties was located in a particular part of the brain. As the faculty developed, the area of the brain in which it was located got larger, pushing out the skull. Using that scientific knowledge, one could cultivate the desirable faculties and suppress the undesirable ones by using an objective method, that is, by measuring the bumps on the skull to determine how well the process was proceeding.

The Behaviorists

The claim that schooling is guided by scientific knowledge has been made by countless educators, but it has never been supported by any evidence. Just as Mann thought that phrenology provided the scientific basis for training children's minds, many educators in this century believed they had found the key in behaviorist psychology.

It has become clear, however, that the behaviorist psychologists, in claiming to have a scientific understanding of human mental development and a scientific foundation for schooling, vastly overstated their case. Their claims were nothing if not grand. One of the leading behaviorists, Clark Hull, said that on the basis of psychological laws, stated entirely in terms of stimuli and responses, he would provide a scientific explanation of familial behavior, individual adaptive efficiency (intelligence), the formal educative processes, psychogenic disorders, social control and delinquency, character and personality, culture and acculturation, magic and religious practices, custom, law and jurisprudence, politics and government.⁴ Hull's actual achievement was somewhat more modest. It consisted, as the philosopher R. S. Peters pointed out, of nothing but some simple postulates which gave dubious answers to limited questions about particular species of rats.⁵

Behaviorism has been the most influential psychological theory among educators in the present century. The theory, originally advanced by Johns Hopkins psychologist John B. Watson in 1913, claimed to place psychology, for the first time, on a scientific foundation.⁶ For psychology to become a genuine science alongside physics and biology, Watson argued, it was necessary to abandon the concepts and methods of the discipline as it had been practiced up till then. According to the traditional, so-called introspective or mental-istic view, psychology was the study of mental states and processes, such as consciousness in general, thinking, remembering, having an intention, desiring, and willing. Its goal was to discover the nature of those processes and the laws governing their causal interactions. The principal method of investigation was introspection. By carefully attending to what actually took place in the mind when he or she thought or remembered and so on, the perceptive psychologist could discover important truths about what is involved in mental functioning. In addition, the psychologist could use as data the reports of subjects asked to describe their own mental experiences. William James's Principles of Psychology, a widely read work of the time, illustrated the introspective approach. In his chapter on The Stream of Thought, for example, James described in great detail how the different parts of a thought ebb and flow as the thought passes through the mind.

Watson's contention was that introspection is unreliable and unscientific. It is unreliable in that introspective reports vary widely from individual to individual. It is unscientific in that reports of subjective experiences are, by their very nature, unverifiable. Watson argued further that the data gathered by introspective methods did not enable psychologists to predict behavior.

The alternative to introspectionism is for psychology to focus on what is objectively observable, namely, how organisms behave in response to stimuli. For several years Watson experimented on rats learning to run mazes. He concluded that, in terms of the concepts of stimulus, response, habit formation, habit integration and the like, one can fully explain how animals learn and how they acquire their repertoire of behavior.⁷

The fundamental explanatory concept in accounting for both animal and human behavior was the conditioned reflex. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that animal responses could be conditioned. If one paired a stimulus, such as a bell, with food, a dog's natural salivary response to food would soon be evoked by the bell alone. The bell became a conditioned stimulus and salivation a conditioned response.

Watson conducted a series of experiments on conditioned responses in human beings. He was able to show that, by pairing a sound with an electric shock, people could be conditioned to fear the sound alone. The goal of psychology, he held, was to provide laws describing such stimulus-response connections for human behavior in general. Then, "given the stimulus, psychology can predict what the response will be; or, on the other hand, given the response, it can predict the nature of the effective stimulus.⁸ In possession of such laws, the psychologist would have a technology of behavior control. Behaviorism states frankly, Watson said, that its goal is the gathering of facts necessary to enable it to predict and to control human behavior.⁹

Over the next two decades Watson wrote numerous articles and books describing the social and educational implications of the new science of human behavior. Not only in scholarly journals such as Psychological Review, but also in such mass-circulation magazines as Harper's, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and McCall's, Watson expressed views on a wide variety of topics: the nature of marriage; how to raise children; the origin of fears; and the usefulness of psychology in prisons, in schools, and for directing society generally.

The central idea throughout was that, since a human being is nothing but an organic machine, we are able to predict that machine's behavior and to control it as we do other machines.¹⁰ Viewed in that way, psychology had great social utility. It could provide, Watson said, "laws and principles whereby man's actions can be controlled by organized society .... If it is demanded by society that a given line of conduct is desirable, the psychologist should be able with some certainty to arrange the situation or factors which will lead the individual most quickly and with the least expenditure