The School Paradox, Double Think.

What is a paradox? The following statement is a logical paradox: 'This statement is false.' If this statements is true, then it is false. If the content is false, this makes the statement true; and if the statement is true, then it is false. This statement refers to or says something about itself which, while possible in English, is impossible in logic, thus creating a paradox. It is thus because in logic, a category or class cannot contain itself as a member. Here is another logical paradox: 'Only one thing is certain -- that is, nothing is certain.' If nothing is certain then one thing can not be certain. If one thing is certain then the statement that nothing is certain is false. This second statement is saying A is not A, this violates one of the laws of logic that says that A cannot be not A. What can we say about these statements? Perhaps they are both true and false or perhaps neither. What they are, is illogical.

There seems to be a paradox in what we believe about schools. This is not a real logical paradox however, but rather an apparent paradox. Here are three premises that are generally believed by most people about schools and children.

1. It is the job or mission of schools to educate most children that go to the school, and that this is paid for by the parents of those children, either directly, or indirectly through their taxes.

2. Schools do this job or perform this mission quite well, and are thus, one of our most successful institutions.

3. Most students are perceived as being unsuccessful in schools and are viewed as a disappointment to their parents, the schools and society.

The holding of ideas in the mind which are mutually contradictory or mutually exclusive as is in this apparent paradox, is what George Orwell referred to in his book "1984" as double think. These ideas are logically inconsistent. In the book "Inventing Education for the Future" Robert Bikner first drew the world's attention to this double think as follows:

David C. Davis also had a lot to say about this in his book "Model for a Humanistic Education". He said:

"Once we become aware of this irony we see other strange manifestations of our approach to education. As for example the pass and fail concept of grades. Just who is it that is passing or failing? It seems a most grievous misunderstanding of both human beings and institutions to assume that the school succeeds and the child fails. If the schools exist to educate the child and the child is not educated, who failed? If education is for the child, rather than the other way around, it must be the school that has failed. The mechanic we have paid to repair our car, the painter we have paid to paint our house, would be laughed at if they explained their failure to do their job by saying 'It is the fault of your car' or 'It is the fault of your house - it just won't be painted.' Yet we unquestioningly sign our child's report cards which report that the child is failing to become educated, or is only being half educated - that he just won't accept education."

"The report cards implicitly blame the child and by indirection ourselves, since it is well-known that not only do our children receive their intellectual abilities from their genes but that children from disadvantaged homes do less well in school than those from advantaged ones. If our children don't do well we are obviously to blame. At the same time they reject any notion of failure on the part of the school. Education, in fact seems no longer something which we do for the child, but rather something the child does for the school, somewhat as if the mechanic charges us for the extent to which he is unable  to repair our car, rather than the extent to which he is able to repair it. Does it not seem strange that when a child does not do well at school we are disappointed in him? What is the great power we suppose this child to have that we expect from him infallibility in his dealings with institutionalized education."

The School Paradox Resolved.

For this apparent paradox to be resolved, at least one of these premises must be incorrect. Here are three possible solutions.

1. If most students are well educated, there is no paradox. The schools are performing their mission admirably which is to educate most of those students.

2. If most students are not sufficiently educated, and the mission of the schools is to educate most students, then clearly the schools are not performing their mission well and are clearly not successful institutions.

3. If schools are fulfilling their mission admirably, but most students are not well educated, then clearly the mission of the schools cannot be to educate those students and must obviously be something else.

The first solution is clearly inconsistent with how most people view the education system. The second solution, though possible, would I believe not be well accepted by the schools. This leaves us with only the third solution which seems likely to be acceptable.

What then is the mission of the schools? Is it to educate an elite and partially educate all other students? John Holt in his book "Freedom and Beyond" suggests that schools have many missions and that those missions are in conflict with each other, so much so, that none of them can be performed very successfully. He said:

"But - and here is the rub - the schools have other missions, other functions. They acquired them slowly, over many years. Perhaps nobody ever planned deliberately that they should have them. perhaps many people now in schools wish they did not have them. But they are there."

Here are some of the missions that John Holt and others have suggested as being functions or missions of schools.

1. The incarceration, baby sitting, custodial or jail function.

2. The channeling, grading, labeling or meat stamping function.

3. The propaganda or indoctrination function.

4. The preparation for the acceptance of the student's eventual position in society. (A life of power or a life of pain.)

5. The resolution of racism and the integration of the ethnic groups. Thus the acceptance of others.

This site holds that schools, society and especially children would be far better off if schools did not have some of these missions, but now the missions are there it seems impossible for schools to get rid of them. In his book "Freedom and Beyond" John Holt examines the various missions or functions of schools as follows. He said:

The Incarceration Mission or Jail Function

"One of these we might call the custodial function. Society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone's way. Mom doesn't want them hanging around the house, the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor force. What then do we do with them? We put them in schools, That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

Many teachers get very upset and angry when I speak of schools being in the jail business. They say, as I would have said myself, that they personally are not in the jail business. They don't feel like jailers, and they are not running a jail. Perhaps not. But the fact remains that if their students did not go to school, and within that school to their class and even their desk or seat - if they did not do that they would go to jail. ...They do not mean that society says to young people, we would like you to please go to school. Society says, if you don't go to school, we are going to put you in jail - a real jail with bars in it."  

"If people object to the word 'jail' we could use another. Try 'corral.' It has a nice OK western sound, with a John Wane tang to it. Call our schools day corrals for children. The point is that people want them there because they don't want them anywhere else."

"This task or function of schools, the custodial or jail function, the task of keeping young people out of everybody else's way, is quite obviously not a humane function. It is an expression of adults' general dislike and distrust of the young. It is and must be in conflict with the humane function of true education, of encouraging and helping human growth. Whatever we may tell them, we cannot make learners feel we have confidence in them, or make learners have confidence in themselves, if by the way we treat them we show clearly that we do not trust them and do not want them."

The Labeling Mission or Meat Stamping Function

"The jail business is not the only wrong business we are in. The schools have another important mission, task, function. Edgar Friedenburg has often called it the 'social roll selection.' Other people have used other names for it. A once widely distributed memo from the Selective Service System called it 'channeling.' We might also call it grading and labeling. If we want to be blunt, we might call it meat stamping. It is the business of turning people into commodities, and deciding who goes where in our society and who gets what - who gets the best paying jobs and the most interesting careers, who gets the middle-paying jobs and who gets the low-paying jobs, who gets no jobs at all. Every society has one mechanism or another for deciding such questions.

I am not objecting here to the existence of such mechanisms. I do object, and very strongly, to their being in schools. Until quite recently they were not. As Paul Goodman has often pointed out, at the turn of the century only about six percent of the young people in this country finished high school and less than one percent went to college. Most people, including many who were in many ways prominent and successful, were what we would call dropouts. People may often have had to decide which of a number of applicants they would employ or promote, but they did not decide on the basis of diplomas and school transcripts, because there were none. People's school records did not follow them all through life. But now these choices, decisions are made very largely on the basis of information supplied by schools."

"If we turn our schools into a kind of cream separator, If we give to schools the business of finding and training a future elite, if in short we turn education into a race with winners and losers, as in all races we are going to have many more losers than winners. The trouble with this is that when we start calling someone a loser and treating him like a loser, he begins to think of himself as a loser and to act like a loser. When this happens, his chance of doing much more learning and growing becomes very slight. On the contrary, he is likely to put more and more energy into protecting himself against a world that seems too much for him."

"The things we do to select a few winners defeat whatever things we do to encourage the growth of all. We cannot do both of these kinds of work at the same time in the same place. We cannot in any true sense be in the education business and at the same time in the grading and labeling business. We cannot expect large numbers of children to trust us if they know, as before long most of them do, that an important part of our job is compiling records on them which will be used to judge them for much of the rest of their life."

The Indoctrination Mission or Propaganda Function

"Another important mission of the schools is indoctrination, getting children to think whatever adults, or at least politically powerful adults, think, or want children to think. Some of this indoctrination is straightforward and direct. Our society, like every other, demands that its schools teach children what is called 'patriotism.' This means teaching them to think that whatever country they live in is the best country in the world; that its ways of thought and life are better than anyone else's and that in past and present quarrels with other countries it has always been and can only be right. It is the patriotism of Admiral Decatur, who, they tell us (not quite accurately) first spoke the famous words, 'My country, right or wrong.' It is hardly ever that of Carl Schurz, a German immigrant boy who later became mayor of New York, and who wisely replied, 'My country right, or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be put right.' Least of all do they teach G. K. Chesterton's grumpy reply, 'My Mother, drunk or sober.' which in its odd way speaks a truth that might be useful and consoling to many disillusioned and alienated people - your country is your country, liking it or not liking it has nothing to do with it."

"But there are other kinds of indoctrination, more subtle, more subliminal, less conscious or deliberate and far more powerful and destructive. Schools work hard to transmit to children certain other beliefs and attitudes, perhaps without even being aware they are or that they are doing it. Indeed they might often sincerely deny that they do it. Some of these attitudes might be called consumer attitudes. In a small city, where large numbers of people are jobless and poor, some parents concerned with school affairs were taken by the school authorities to see a newly constructed school in one of the poorer sections of town. They were proudly shown among other things, a room called the 'grooming room.' One whole wall of this room was lined with stainless steel sinks, and above them mirrors lighted with bulbs all round, as in an actors dressing room. Much other space was given to full length mirrors that the students could rotate so as to see herself from every angle.

Later they were shown to the Home Economics room, again crammed with the newest and most expensive stoves, ovens, refrigerator-freezers, washer-dryers, and sewing machines - the kind of equipment that quite literally, not two percent of the people in that whole town could afford to buy. What is being taught here? The course may be called Home Economics, but obviously these young people are not being taught anything about the economics of running a home, far less how to run economically the kind of home that most of them will soon be running. On the contrary, they are being carefully trained in Consumerism, to think that they need, must have, cannot possibly get along without whatever latest gadget is being dangled before them in newspaper and magazine ads and on the TV screen. By now a great deal has been written, and is being written, about how to be a wise, skeptical, thrifty, and critical consumer. But this is not getting into the schools, least of all the schools for of poor kids."

"In his first years, before he gets to school, the child lives his life as he should, all in one piece. His work, his play, and his learning are not separated from each other. What is even more important, they are not separated from him. He is his work. He is his play. He is what he knows and does and learns. But in school (sometimes before school if he has hard-pushing parents - the process can start very early) the child is taught to think of his work, his play, and his learning are separate from each other, and all separate from him, and that all of these including his very self are commodities, to be exchanged for grades, praise, approval, success, to be measured, evaluated, bought and sold."

"As one college student put it, we are trained to sell our learning for grades so that later we will sell our work for money. Worse, we learn to think not only that work is what we do for money, out of fear, envy, or greed, but also that work is what we would never do except for money, that there could be no other reason to work, that anyone who talks about meaningful work must be the wildest kind of romantic dreamer or crackpot. We learn to take it as natural, right and inevitable that our work should be boring, meaningless, hateful."

These schools have got it somehow backwards. You cannot learn at all without being interested. So the job of true education should be to make you interested. One must beware that the indoctrination function of the schools is usually preventative of learning and promotes the extinction of intrinsic motivation.

The Acceptance of One's Lot in Life Mission or Fatalist Function

This is of course indoctrination of a special sort, to change what we believe and feel about ourselves, which can be contrasted to socialization.

"Finally the schools, as they separate and label children, a few winners and many losers, must convince them, first, that there must always be a few winners and many losers, that no other human arrangement is possible, and secondly that whether winner or loser they deserve whatever comes to them. Only thus can we be sure that the winners will defend the system without guilt and the losers accept it without rancor. G. B. Shaw once said, 'Be sure to get what you like, or else you will have to like what you get.' The successful students are trained to think that being superior they have a right to get as much as they can of whatever they like, a right to more of life's goodies, a right to order other people around. The losers are trained to like what they get. To them the schools say, in all ways in which they deal with them, 'Do not expect in your later life to be treated with consideration or respect, as if you had dignity. You have none, you will not be, and you do not deserve to be. Accept what you are given, and do what you are told."

"We might sum up and make concrete much of this by saying the business of schools is to make Robert Macnamaras at one end and Lt. William Calleys at the other. They are, each in his own way, perfect products of schooling; the one, unshakably convinced that his cleverness and secret knowledge give him a right to exercise unlimited and godlike powers over other men; the other, ready at an instant to do without question or qualm everything, anything anyone in a position of authority tells him to do. We may be sure that there are not many universities that would not be glad to have Macnamara as their president if he wanted the job, and just as sure that there are not many high schools in which, if Lieutenant Calley went there to speak he would not receive a hero's welcome."

"In short, it was becoming clear to me that the great majority of boring, regimented schools were doing exactly what they had always done and what most people wanted them to do. Teach children about Reality. Teach them that life is No Picnic. Teach them to 'Shut UP And Do What You're Told.'"

Learning is all about change, about doing and becoming better than before. It is about not knowing your place. The fatalist 'know your place' (willingly being boxed in), is the complete antithesis of this.

The Resolution of Racism Mission or Integration Function

In the USA especially, the schools also perform the function of integrating the various ethnic groups that exist in their country. There can be no doubt that the placing together of children from different ethnic backgrounds causes racial tensions, conflict and real problems of violence and drug use, all of which make learning more difficult and sometimes impossible. The problem was that the government did not even attempt to think through such integration might be managed by the schools. They simply assumed that if the racial groups were forced into close proximity in the schools this would somehow reduce racial tensions and equalize the educational experience. This unfortunately was left up to various school district administrations many of which were at a total loss, which aggravated rather than solved the problem. This however, does not mean that the US government was necessarily essentially incorrect in enforcing this. It may well be that the very rapid integration of these diverse ethnic groups in the USA can be directly traced to this forced school integration. On the other hand a few school districts managed to implement real successful solutions to the problem of integration. If America had implemented such programs on a nation wide scale the problem of integration may simply have been permanently solved.

Perhaps the most effective program that was implemented at the beginning of desegregation was the one implemented in Austin Texas. A former student of a Social Psychologist called Elliot Aronson challenged him to help with the problem of racial prejudice in the Austin schools following the mandate from the Supreme Court to desegregate the schools in 1954. What Aronson came up with was a way of restructuring how lessons are actually taught so that the desirability of competition was replaced with the desirability of cooperation. Aronson and a group of his graduate students came up with what is now known as the jigsaw method. Elsewhere in this site, most notably in the section called teach to learn, various forms of cooperative learning are examined, including the jigsaw method. The jigsaw method was however the only one invented specifically to to deal with the problem of integration. To this day it remains the best program for dealing with racial relations over extended periods of time.

Of all the extra functions that schools have assumed this is the only one that this site accepts as having real merit.

School

Sitting, searching endlessly in a desk and wooden chair. Waiting, wondering, patiently for a reason why we're here. It can't be that we're learning things 'cause that I haven't done. The thought of school is sickening and certainly not fun! Algebra and Science too are subjects of no use. We'll waste our precious childhood through and school is our excuse! Cindy