Ideology As a Barrier to Change –
August 14, 2005
Over the past week, I’ve had conversations with two people – both
academics – who oppose any educational alternatives that aren’t
public schools. I believe their views are seriously myopic and, indeed,
harmful to the future of public education.
The first person – a woman –
carefully (and somewhat condescendingly) explained to me that her feminist beliefs do not allow her to
support home-based learning because it keeps women at home. Nonsense, I
snorted, explaining that fathers could – and sometimes do – stay at
home instead, or, as in our family, both parents could find a way to
balance their careers and facilitate the education of their children.
Indeed, an increasing number of families are involved with
community-based learning arrangements that have the same effect. I also
told her that my and my husband’s feminist beliefs were one of the
reasons our daughters didn’t go to school! We wanted them to avoid the
negative influence of sexism as it existed at that time in the public
school system, and in addition, we felt that self-education was a good
way to help change such stereotypes. I saw then, and still do, that
schooling is part of the patriarchal problem and not part of an
egalitarian solution.
The second conversation, which included similar irony, was with a man
who was concerned about the privatization of education. I share his
concern, except that he and I don’t share a definition of
privatization. He uses the word to describe anything that is done
outside the public school system, including alternatives like democratic
schools and homeschooling. When I, on the other hand, use the word
“privatization”, I am referring to for-profit education, which
includes for-profit schools (including many charter schools), testing
companies, textbook publishers, corporate sponsors and the like. Back in
the 1980s, I was on the board of directors of an organization that was
fighting to have its members brought into the public finance tent. They
were all not-for-profit – either informally like homeschoolers or
formally like Montessori schools, remedial learning centers and even religious schools – but all helping kids learn in ways that differed
from the one-size-fits-all publicly funded system. That organization’s
executive director was fond of saying that the government department in
charge of education acted like a “Ministry of Public Schools” rather
than a “Ministry of Education.” I believed then – and I still do
– that a public education system can and must recognize that the use
of one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum, testing and all the other
outdated methods that we know as schooling is not the best way
for most people to learn...and that we must abolish this stuff in favor of self-directed
education. I ended my recent conversation with this particular public school supporter by pointing out that, ironically, 20 years
later, the public school system is much more dependent upon the
for-profit mentality than most of the alternatives he believes will
erode the integrity of that system.
It seems to me that these supposedly
progressive people are spouting out-of-date, simplistic arguments in
favor of maintaining the status quo. People will always come up with
reasons – many well-founded – why change can’t or won’t happen.
Often, those reasons are some of the biggest barriers to change.
Posted: 2005/08/14
11:20 AM
