The Paradoxes of Education

The following series of comments on education paradoxes were written over the months of April and May 2006 and first posted on www.ilfpost.org, the blogsite of the International Leadership Forum.

Education Paradox I: Fatalism and Aspiration

Our philosophy of education is being tested in debates about the federal budget for 2007 and elsewhere. The futures of today’s school children and college applicants depend on the philosophical assumptions that underlie these decisions.

At this season of the year, as the days grow longer and spring approaches, households all over the country are awaiting news about college admissions and financial aid. At the same time our philosophy of education is being tested in debates about the federal budget for 2007 and elsewhere. The futures of today’s school children and college applicants depend on the philosophical assumptions that underlie these decisions. Students both choose and are chosen, they select or are rejected, not just in this season but in the years to come.

Everyone is in favor of education, right? Yes and no. Even in this year of budget cuts, politicians know that supporting education is as American as apple pie – but that there are many different ways of supporting it. Americans argue in favor of equal opportunity, but believe that achievement depends on individual potential – and this they define rather differently. “Be all you can be” is a wonderful slogan – more, it is a wonderful aspiration. But it leaves unquestioned the expectation that while Jones has the potential to be an officer and should realize that potential, Smith can’t be much more than a private – hopefully well trained and disciplined to play a subordinate role.

Just as the Bush tax cuts increase differences between income levels, some education systems are designed to sort children into categories that match their backgrounds and probable futures and preserve or strengthen an existing class system. Other systems are designed to seek out and promote a potential elite regardless of background, and still others are based on the assumption that hardy anyone develops up to his or her genetic potential so that better education is always good, regardless of existing limitations or endowments. Some regard education as a source of change, others as a source of continuity. Students should ask themselves how profoundly they expect to change in college, how different they expect their lives to be from those of their parents, and whether the college they have chosen will provide the appropriate challenges.

These assumptions about the goals of education are part of the mindset of high school students choosing colleges, as well as of guidance counselors and admissions officers, and play out in the treatment of those who are admitted. Does the institution assume that everyone who matriculates will be able to finish? Does it follow a sink or swim policy to weed out the weaker? Or does it offer a combination of supportive services and second chances with a realistic appraisal of their limits? Does it assume that aspirations are set and lead to a particular outcome or does it encourage experimentation and even protest? We have all heard stories of students dissuaded from their aspirations.

Liberals believe that positive educational experiences and environments bring about real change, and that people’s “stations in life” are often a result of accident, often unjust and wasteful of human promise. Conservatives, on the other hand, distrust this view as wasting resources and leading to unrealistic expectations. The best example of this difference is that liberals are likely to support rehabilitation programs in prisons, while conservatives tend to talk about career criminals and to doubt the possibilities of all efforts at rehabilitation. There is, of course, case evidence on both sides. Programs for rehabilitation have probably never received the kind of effort that is now invested in at least some children with congenital disabilities, who would once have been institutionalized as ineducable, with extraordinary results. Probably there are criminals who can never be reformed. But institutions tend to be biased toward one assumption or the other and each will err in certain cases. Increasingly, the US criminal justice system follows the fatalistic assumption that people get what they deserve and cannot change: prisoners deserve incarceration and millionaires deserve their mansions.

These are the extreme cases that illustrate assumptions most vividly but the differences are more in higher education. The liberal assumption has favored affirmative action for members of groups that had suffered discrimination in the past, sure of the discovery of otherwise mute inglorious Miltons and of the need to empower Shakespeare’s sister. The conservative assumption rejects that kind of affirmative action but practices affirmative action for the children of alumni, particularly in the most highly privileged sectors.

Fortunately, different kinds of players are involved. America is blessed with a very diverse system of higher ed, ranging from community colleges specifically designed to create opportunity to heavily endowed private institutions. Teachers and faculty tend to be liberals – they need to believe that good teaching will change lives. They are often thrilled to see the achievements of students who are the first members of their families to get to college, and exasperated at the lackluster performance of “legacies” who take their advantages for granted. Boards of trustees tend to be more conservative – often alumni themselves, successful and privileged, they tend to believe that the system that privileged them is properly sorting out those who deserve its benefits, including their sons and daughters. But in a future where less federal money may be available for education and tuitions are rising, we run the risk that inequality will be perpetuated and hidden talents will not be developed.


Education Paradox II: Schooling vs. Learning

Many schools at all levels actually undermine the capacity to continue to learn after graduation, precisely by defining learning as something that happens in school.

Does schooling in our society work against lifelong learning? Several years ago I had the pleasure of teaching a series of graduate seminars at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I soon noticed that conversations about learning tended to slip over into conversations about education and from there into conversations about schooling. This was disconcerting to someone with an anthropological background, accustomed to considering how a particular process can occur without the institutions that frame it in a given society. Learning is something all humans share: a pattern of adaptation based on a transmitted tradition is part of the definition of our species. But schools have developed differently in different societies – schooling is local.

This same slippage from basic human issues to familiar institutions happens in many kinds of conversation, and often shuts down imagination. Discussions of health slip into discussions of the medical system. Discussions of spirituality slip into discussions of institutionalized religion. Discussions of norms of conduct segue into discussions of the criminal justice system. And as for marriage and the family… In each case, the focus on existing institutions distorts the conversation.

How does a child born into a community without a formal school system and perhaps without literacy gain the skills and information and above all the attitudes that will allow him or her to participate fully in the life of that community and meet the expected and unexpected demands of a lifetime? And does our elaborate educational system fulfill that criterion?

Even in an industrialized society, the most important learning of a lifetime happens before and after and outside of school. And even in those years when children and young people are spending most of their days within the walls of educational institutions, the most significant learning going on is listed nowhere in the curriculum.

I would argue that the most important outcome of any system of schooling should be the capacity and desire to continue to learn through a life time, a capacity that becomes even more important when a society is undergoing rapid change. Yet many schools at all levels actually undermine the capacity to continue to learn after graduation, precisely by defining learning as something that happens in school.

I had an interesting experience as an undergraduate. I had been one of those children who read my way ravenously through childhood and adolescence, often curled with a flashlight under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep, setting ambitious independent study projects for myself. I had a long subway commute to school so as a teenager I made up an ambitious reading list starting, for some reason, with Das Kapital (in English, I hasten to say – but even so not a viable choice with interruptions every time the train stopped). Yet at the end of my freshman year of college, I was startled to realize that everything I had read that year had been on a reading list or related to an assignment. My fine expensive education challenged me to read specific books but undermined the habit of elective reading which might have been far more valuable.

There are assumptions built into most schooling, including much of higher education, that undermine lifelong learning, and structures that force teachers to accept those assumptions. Children rapidly get the message that you learn in school not for joy but because you are required to and that you are being asked questions to which the answers are already known and fixed and must simply be reproduced. These are not helpful lessons for a lifetime that will pose new and never before answered – often unanswerable – questions. And all too many children learn the lessons of competition, individualistic effort and, all too often, failure – that their particular talents are not wanted or valued.

The current emphasis on high stakes testing underlines precisely these lessons. Then in higher education, we often find ourselves working at cross-purposes. Liberal arts faculty may try to encourage habits of open-mindedness and debate, of curiosity and imagination, even as their colleagues down the hall slip into contrary patterns. The stakes are still high as students push for grade point averages that will get them to the next stage, and the skills developed are those of “psyching out” the professor to know what answers will be rewarded.


Educational Paradox III: The Future of Wisdom

All educational institutions need to rethink their programs by asking not what graduates will know when they move on but what they will be ready and willing to learn for many years into the future.


Will you be wise when you grow old? Don’t count on it, work on it. Traditionally, wisdom comes at the opposite end of the life cycle from education.

This model fits a society that is fairly stable, so that by maturity individuals have a basic competence in their culture that can be supplemented by on-going experience largely intelligible within the framework of earlier learning. Wisdom remains the most positive attribute of aging, yet we now live in a society that is changing so rapidly that without a lifelong commitment to learning and reflection, even basic forms of cultural competence become obsolete.

Often in the past wisdom was associated with the waning strength and immobility of old age. Modern improvements in health not only increase average longevity but extend the years of relatively energetic and pain free productivity and participation for many, creating a new and active life stage (which I refer to as Adulthood II) inserted before old age. Today’s older adults often have decades of health and energy that allow them to play active roles. We need to create the institutions and attitudes that will make the growing numbers of seniors wise and effective actors.

Extended access to education is one way of supporting lifelong learning. We have a strong tradition of adult education in the United States, which is good, going back to the settlement movement, education for immigrants and for emancipated slaves who had been denied literacy, and programs in many churches. The GI Bill of Rights opened the doors of institutions designed for younger students to those who had fought in World War II and within less than a decade about eight million veterans benefited from it. The veterans were only about five years older than traditional students, but a life time distant in experience. New wave feminism brought a wave of middle aged women back into the classroom, both to complete programs that had been abandoned and in order to return to the workplace. The community college movement was a key component of the Great Society. Today many universities either admit students regardless of age or have special programs for retirees, and others, like Elderhostel, specialize in learning opportunities for seniors. In fact, programs for returning students of all ages have been a key to economic survival for many institutions.

But education is not the same as learning. All educational institutions need to rethink their programs by asking not what graduates will know when they move on but what they will be ready and willing to learn for many years into the future. Each passing decade demands new kinds of awareness: not only do we meet new technologies and new forms of art and expression, but new dangers, new ethical challenges, and a need for new understandings of the self and others. It is not enough to learn the facts of global climate change: at some level each of us needs to embrace the implication of those facts for the way we live our lives. Somehow we need to draw on the perspective of extended lifetimes to encounter the new and strange with resilience and compassion.

The most fundamental kind of new learning involves a reframing of identity. All of the liberation movements of the 20th century involved changes of consciousness, repudiation of stereotypes, and new understandings of the self. So what do the increasing numbers of older Americans and the wave of Baby Boomers reaching traditional “retirement age” need to learn? It’s great to learn French or Chinese, painting or piano, ancient history or comparative religion. But older Americans will also need to break away from stereotypes of old age and see themselves as representing a new phenomenon in human history somewhat different from wisdom as it was framed in the past.

Active wisdom is the benefit we will reap as more and more individuals combine in themselves years of experience, energetic health, and a continuing willingness to learn. Consciousness of this phenomenon may be as revolutionary as the shifts in consciousness behind the liberation movements of the 20th century.


Education Paradox IV: Diversity vs. Similarity

Somewhere along the line, it is good to be with others like oneself. Somewhere along the line it is good to be with others who seem profoundly different.

It is logical to assume that increasing diversity in the classroom will offer children and young people the opportunity for broader and deeper learning, and certainly one of the main goals of school is to expose children at every age to different kinds of people and challenge them to get along across differences of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and endowments. But maximizing diversity is not always the best path. There are also advantages to moving from one coherent environment to another and experiencing diversity across time rather than all at once.

Before I speak about the ways in which separating groups for parts of their education may be useful, I want to emphasize that I think we are correct as a society to insist that while self-segregation is the right of any group or community, extended segregated education should not be supported from the public purse. However, if pluralism is a good, homogenization may not be. Arguably, every child needs to grow up not only with a sense of equal possibility but with both a sense of his or her own uniqueness and an identification with one of the many vibrant communities that exist in American society. Somewhere along the line, it is good to be with others like oneself. Somewhere along the line it is good to be with others who seem profoundly different.


When is it helpful to group children with others like themselves? Children benefit from mixed-aged groups, but it simplifies life for teachers to segregate by age. It probably is useful for girls to receive some of their education separately from boys since the sexes experience physical and mental growth spurts at different times. It is useful for children to have the experience of being a member of a minority, but being in the minority all the time is stressful, and members of minorities often feel under pressure to stand together – to put solidarity before individuality. A handful of young women in a military academy are likely to be embattled and exploited. A handful of children for whom English is a second language need a time and a place to work on language skills without feeling self conscious. And children with special talents or disabilities need contexts where they can have the attention needed to realize their greatest potential.


We could probably go a good deal further as a society in designing appropriate ways to shift from partial and temporary homogeneity to diversity – and back. At present, the weight of that variation rests on college choice. One of the dimensions of choice in choosing a college is how similar or dissimilar it should be from previous experience. Going to a different region of the country; going from rural to urban or vice versa; going from a large consolidated high school to a small liberal arts college – or going from a sheltered private school to a vast state university - all these demand adaptation and offer challenges. African American youth who have experienced de facto segregation for years can take on the challenge of moving into a wider community – but those who have lived in integrated communities may find that going to a historically black institution gives them a chance to deepen their sense of distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is a resource we sometimes underestimate. When institutions struggle to make sure that they do not lack anything offered by their competitors, they tend to downplay the way distinctive characteristics can become strengths. George Mason University (where I was on the faculty for many years) made a choice not to have a football team and even though students sometimes complain, that may have been a key to their quality in basketball and soccer. They also decided not to have a medical school, which has probably allowed them to develop one of the best graduate nursing programs in the country – a place where nursing is not second best. A look through the Mason catalog will reveal half a dozen programs that were developed not to match other schools but to break new ground. So the “school that has everything” is not necessarily the best school for a young man or woman who wants to become a unique person.

The real losers in the system, however, are those who by choice or necessity are sheltered for all their years of education as part of a homogeneous group where their assumptions are rarely challenged. The perfect and highly selective private school may not be the ideal preparation for a changing world. The campus that makes you feel immediately at home on a visit may be the one that feels suffocating two years later. Higher education is the time for choosing to go beyond your comfort zone before life makes that choice for you. Failing that, look off campus, look for volunteer opportunities in unfamiliar communities or overseas exchanges. Taste the experience of being an outsider asking questions.


Education Paradox V: The Irony of Financial Aid

Everywhere in the world, debt functions as a form of social control, sometimes very severe, in which case we speak of debt servitude, sometimes just as a reminder not to step out of line.

Whatever happened to the youthful idealism of the 60s and 70s, and why do students today seem so preoccupied with careerism and their financial futures? One possible answer is that students today know that most of them will be in debt when they graduate.

At one time, institutions offered a few full scholarships on the basis of need or conspicuous quality. Such scholarships do still exist (although all too often the conspicuous quality is athletic rather than intellectual), but in many institutions today the needs of a larger number of students are met with a “financial aid package,” carefully worked out in relation to expenses and family income, constructed according to complex formulae of parental contribution, work-study (money earned through work on campus), summer earnings, loans, and, finally, grants. The cost of attending the most prestigious institutions today runs as high as $40,000 a year, and even at cheaper institutions few high school graduates can work their way through except over many years, even though an ever larger number of students have jobs to cover part of their expenses, including car payments. Education loans are common even if parents could theoretically afford tuition, and of course many students now have multiple credit cards and are well launched on habits of consumption and debt. How many students are stepping forward to receive their diplomas reflecting that except for a short grace period (to find a job), commencement marks the commencement of paying back.

Financial aid packages and student loan programs were clever, commendable inventions to stretch scholarship funds further and increase access to higher education, not a plot to make students more docile. I can’t fault them, I would hate to see them slowly dismantled, and I don’t know of a better alternative that will work without much broader social support. But these policies have had unintended consequences. I take my hat off to institutions with the resources for need-blind admissions, and it’s nice that the richest and most prestigious institutions (like Harvard and Stanford) are reshaping their policies so they can compete for bright students who do not come from wealthy families and offer students the experience of being part of a genuinely diverse community. At the same time, however, students across the country now receive their bachelor’s degrees with an average of about $20,000 of debt (not counting the credit cards).

Perhaps debt makes young people more responsible. Perhaps it encourages better planning and later marriage — after all, in the 50s early marriage was what forced young people to settle down and become practical. Perhaps debt encourages hard work without reducing creativity. Some would think it a good thing that indebtedness inhibits idealism and discourages dissent and rebellion. Everywhere in the world, debt functions as a form of social control, sometimes very severe, in which case we speak of debt servitude, sometimes just as a reminder not to step out of line. But I believe that as a society we need to go beyond even the best of these policies to support a common experience of higher education with time to reflect and the freedom to imagine. If that freedom is denied to youth, when will it be found? How many Americans are limited in their visions and decisions by the constraints of debt, having literally mortgaged their freedom?