Early American education is in a state of crisis, and the accepted solution is to lean into the problem. There has been no shortage of discussion about our failing school system, but even when isolating the source of the crisis, it always comes down to one factor: metrics. The numbers we record as students learn, as teachers teach, as schools reconfigure, and as populations change purportedly reflect how “well” each of these parties is “performing,” and because these numbers are lower than at some historical point, something must be wrong. From this perspective, it seems logical for any solution to be aimed at increasing these metrics, but this approach misses the point entirely: to support the growth and development of community members. Learning is not something an adult does to children in a classroom to make numbers go up, it is what happens when curiosity leads to growth and change in an individual. Perhaps one of the most commonly ignored symptoms of this disconnect between the educational needs of real people and the standardized bureaucracy of modern American schools is student impact, ostensibly the highest priority. Every adult in this country has heard the constant drone of complaints from young students that they have to sit in class too long, that they don’t have enough time to eat, that they’re stressed or sad or tired, that their curriculum doesn’t feel important to them or that they have no time to be a kid when they’re asked to take it home with them, that they need breaks, or to move around, or to “make an A” so they don’t get rejected from college and die on the streets. The impact of this “education” system is impossible to ignore, so the numbers provide a justification instead: when children take longer lunch breaks, when they focus on their own curiosity, when they think critically and challenge assumptions, indeed when they stray in any way from the status quo or use services that cost any more money, the numbers go down. Therefore, it is considered best that students simply endure the physical, emotional, and developmental strain inflicted upon them so that trends increase, so that they learn “properly,” and so that the adults can rest assured that we know better than them. In fact, the students most interested in learning, those who could stand to benefit the most from their own curiosity, are also the students subjected to the highest prescribed workloads because greater understanding comes not from questioning, exploration, or connection, but from “rigor:” from productive output and high metrics in the face of immense stress. These things are justified by argumentum ad antiquitam (it has always worked this way, therefore it should always work this way), because those making justifications labored under these conditions on the hope of one day being free from them and now feel others should do the same, and for many other reasons, each of which is based not on the needs of children today, but on our memories of our own childhoods. As the father of behavior analysis and radical behaviorism admits himself, “I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is” (Skinner; emphasis added). Skinner proposes not that children should be raised this way for any reason, but that since they are, we should accept this as part of life. This ignores the fact that human action can amend a failing status quo in which the desires of the arbitrarily older are imposed upon the arbitrarily younger. We do not question the authority of teacher-centric direct instruction, the abstraction of curriculum, the hierarchical command structure and social control of our education system, the frequent abuse of this system to disseminate propaganda to the most vulnerable, or the laughable ideas of the purpose of education presented by perennialism, essentialism, and even the ideas of classroom/behavior “management” because we are taught to accept them as natural and immutable. Thus, this paradigm can be difficult to question, but it becomes much simpler when considering the reality of learning even today. Students routinely forget information they “learned” in school as soon as assessments pass while intuitively forming lasting connections to material based on things they heard from family, observed themselves, or even watched on television, so clearly there must be something more to learning than the formal hierarchy of a standardized American classroom. This is because learning is a process of exploration, characterized by asking questions and seeking answers, meaning that it can occur with anyone in any environment. In fact, an entire industry has arisen around the difficult task of navigating pedagogy at home, though it isn’t advertised as such. We attempt to distance it by instead labelling it “parenting,” protecting the shared delusion that there is some natural or inherent basis for parents to have unilateral control over their offspring, and this also helps to deflect any questioning of the negative impact of our “nuclear family” model. As with Skinner’s ideology, it is simple to accept something when it is considered natural and immutable. When this model is actually examined, however, it plainly falls short of fulfilling any needs other than for control or ideology. An entire lifetime would be insufficient to enumerate each individual symptom of the immense workload and stress placed upon the handful of adults raising a given child (typically 1-2 parents and 1 teacher split between dozens of other children), but it is undeniable that such pressure exists, that it is distributed this unevenly, and that reducing it would be as simple as spreading it across a larger core base of adults involved in each child’s education. No one should be subjected to such oversized shares of this burden, and it certainly should not be presented to them as a privilege to which they are entitled. What’s worse is that not only do those involved in childrens’ education under this system suffer immeasurable stress as a direct result of it, it doesn’t even benefit the children being educated. This is because a person has less effort and attention to give to each of their responsibilities the more responsibilities they shoulder, and despite the accepted consensus that unwilling children can be forced to learn from lower-effort curriculum they have no interest in, humans have in reality been documented as highly selective learners from infancy (Koenig, 694–699). This means that we choose what we learn, when, and even from who inherently in every stage of life. When engagement, personal connection and relationships, and/or factual accuracy suffers—as they do when time, energy, and diversity of teachers are limited—so does learning. In addition, one of the core benefits offered by teaching is exposure to other perspectives, and even disregarding the highly specialized nature of individuals within a modern human society, this benefit is greatly diminished when it is afforded from a limited and/or uniform supply of such perspectives. These issues also each present with varying frequency and severity of impact from case to case, often on nakedly discriminatory bases and/or along racial, financial, and religious lines. For instance, SAT scores are lower on average among lower income populations as well as non-white populations, but not just as a result of the opportunity gap because students of color score significantly closer to white students on harder questions (Freedle), non-white school districts were denied $23 billion in 2019 alone compared to predominantly white school districts (EdBuild), and a separate educational class is maintained in the U.S. private schooling system, a divide which has been widening (Murnane) because we have responded by funneling more money into the system via vouchers rather than critically examining its purpose and impact. On the other hand, there has been much positive advancement in pedagogical theory such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs providing educators a critical reminder, growing recognition of the importance of instructional content relevant to the needs and interests of students, and the ideas of progressivism in modern classrooms as well as the lasting impact of reconstructionist policy, and just as the detriments disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, these advancements are disproportionately offered to the least vulnerable. This too is a direct effect of historical decisions subject to amendment, not a natural and immutable quality of education. We can expand upon these existing seeds by spreading them equally and following them to their radical conclusions. The first pillar of this lies in the established ideas of educational existentialism, namely the focus on individual freedom of and involvement in education. Since people selectively learn what interests them, and the sole aim of education is to learn, it makes no sense for anyone other than the learner to attempt to dictate this process. Students could attend school not to be measured and conditioned but to have access to a diverse range of resources for exploring anything they could possibly wish to know—the ultimate expression of student-centricity and instructional differentiation. This also demands radical systemic restructuring to shift towards seemingly simple goals such as “children should be afforded full human rights,” yet such ideas in practice are so foreign as to be considered almost unthinkable. This would require accepting that not everyone wants to learn everything we deem important for them to, that “success” is a subjective, individual experience, not a measurable phenomenon, that humans are entitled to making mistakes regardless of their age, that there is no less value inherent to study of sports, or video gaming, or fashion than of math or science or literature, and other shockingly uncomfortable realities. We could shed the puritanical absurdity of censorship, which is the “inevitable result of decision-making procedures that are highly subjective and arbitrary that reflect the ideological and personal preferences of censors” (Heins). The responsibility could be shared for the children of each community amongst the adult members of that community. Schools could become great centers of learning; comfortable, safe, and encouraging repositories of human knowledge and hubs for human connection could replace stuffy, efficiently-lit, concrete classrooms and cheap plastic chairs chosen to minimize expense. Anyone could establish a fundamental understanding rapidly under the guidance and writings of experts and groups of their peers (cooperative leavening), or scaffold new connections to any of these existing schemata, and because learning happens in proximity to questions, everyone involved could be guaranteed growth by inquiry-based learning. Early American education is in crisis, but we have the means to change course as long as we can set aside our preconceptions for long enough to consider that neither tradition nor consensus constitute evidence-based best practice, and that learning can be more than it is or ever has been.

Works Cited

EdBuild. “23 billion.” 2019. https://edbuildna.org/content/23-billion. Freedle, Roy. “Correcting the SAT’s Ethnic and Social-Class Bias: A Method for Reestimating SAT Scores.” Harvard Educational Review. April 2003. doi: 10.17763/haer.73.1.8465k88616hn4757. Heins, Marjorie. “Not in front of the children: ‘Indecency,’ censorship, and the innocence of youth.” Hill and Wang. 10 February 2002. Koenig M, Clément F, Harris P. “Trust in testimony: Children’s use of true and false statements.” Psychological Science. 2004. pp. 694–699. doi: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00742.x. Skinner.