The litany of the forces arrayed against quality state education systems is long. We believe these forces make state education's decline inevitable. Without a thoroughgoing reformation of the fundaments of Western society itself, resistance is futile. The Borg is here.
We know that in New Zealand roughly one third of all graduates from state schools are functionally illiterate and innumerate. They cannot read supermarket shelf labels. Nor can they compare prices. We also know that on any given school day one tenth of pupils will be absent, without a conscientious reason. Truancy is systemic.
Recently we sought to interview potential candidates for a teaching position in our Christian school. These candidates were committed Christians; they were currently studying at a teacher training institution; they were zealous for their prospective careers--but were unable to write a sentence that was grammatically or syntactically correct. Apparently they had never learned after thirteen years of state schooling what a full-stop was, or how one was to begin a sentence. They had all graduated with "flying colours" from NCEA levels 11 through 13 in English! Sadly they were unemployable in our school.
These folk were neither functionally illiterate nor innumerate--but they were incompetent in even the rudiments of language and maths. This, of course, meant that their ability to think, reason, encapsulate, describe, argue, and comprehend was severely curtailed. We guess that this cohort would represent another third of graduates from state schools.
Those who think that starting a new state funded programme (for example, Early Childhood Education), or shrinking classroom sizes, or raising teacher salaries, or introducing national testing will turn the tide are naive. They have not reckoned with the tsunami of the secular forces arrayed against state schools. It is bigger by far than any ten metre wall of water racing into Sendai.
Let's name two of these secular forces. The first is statism--which arguably is the established religion of our day. By this we mean that for many the state or the government is the ultimate reality and force. Name any social, political, material, economic or cultural problem and within a nano-second the conversation will have become political--by which we mean that "the government needs to do something, or this, or that" will have been introduced into the conversation. Functionally our society looks to government as its god.
The spin-off effect upon state education is direct. The state's "long term" solution to any problem is to attempt to use its schools to change human nature and action to solve society's perceived problems. Government as redeemer translates into schools as agents of socialisation and state propaganda, not education. This is a weight which schools simply cannot bear. They both stop educating and fail miserably in socialisation.
The second secular force also has religious roots. When the West turned away from the Living God philosophical scepticism was the inevitable long term outcome. Knowledge lost its point of integration and so fractured into thousands of pieces. Three hundred years of post-Enlightenment maturation has allowed scepticism to reap a prodigious harvest. Unbelief now understands that it can no longer talk about culture, but only multi-cultural reality. It can no longer speak of truth, but only perspectives. Rather than knowledge, it is reduced to telling stories about the world. It can no longer speak intelligibly about mankind; rather, more "accurately" only an emerging life-form. Correspondence between what we think we know and the actual world is in itself impossible. Truth is prejudice. Knowledge is opinion. Any claims for either beyond this is nothing more than adding ignorance and stubbornness and arrogance to the mix.
The end result of scepticism is pluralism. You can have as many truths as there are people or opinions. This drive to pluriformity is relentless. We have now been gravely informed by Stephen Hawking that we must no longer speak of a universe, but multiverses.
Scepticism means that education is impossible in the sense of a teacher imparting actual truth and knowledge to students. This is why state school systems are failing--and will continue to do so. In a philosophically sceptical world to attempt to teach someone can never rise beyond being an act of arrogant, presumptuous intellectual imperialism.
The only course--and this is now the current paradigm in education--is constructivism. This refers to education being made subservient to pedagogy, and a particular kind of pedagogy at that. It is a way of "teaching" where the "teacher" becomes merely a facilitator, enabling the pupil to construct their own meaning, truth, and perspectives. In this sceptical world-view--which now dominates the West--to impart knowledge is to impose and enslave; it is to do serious damage to the pupil. It impedes true enlightenment which is self-discovery and individual perspectival sovereignty. The only recourse of state education systems is to affirm everything, which is to deny nothing.
Above all, the child must be affirmed, rather than taught.
Making children feel good about themselves has been on of the main objectives of US schools during the past three decades. By the time they are seven or eight years of age, American children have internalised the prevailing psychobabble and can proclaim the importance of avoiding negative emotions and of high self-esteem. Yet this has had not perceptible impact on their school performance.Maybe not, but the child will be well on the way to constructing their own private curriculum--and that is the whole point in a culture which is both democratic and Unbelieving. Scepticism can only mean self-discovery--whatever that might mean--not conformity to an authoritative Truth.
Robert Whelan, ed, The Corruption of the Curriculum, p. 9
Western state schools cannot do aught, but fail.
Alex Standish, who has taught both in the UK and the US, has provided a case study using geography as a subject to illustrate how scepticism has not only destroyed the subject, but has reduced it to incoherence. In his essay, "Geography Used to Be About Maps", he shows how the modern UK curriculum now specifies that geography is about teaching students self-awareness.
[The curriculum's] emphasis upon the personal ethics of pupils is apparent in its specifications of content document: "Candidates should be encouraged to examine their own values as they analyse the values of others and to become aware of the power relations implicit in any situation and the conflicts and inequalities which may arise."Yes, geography used to be about maps. Now it is about self-examination. Scepticism's fruit.
Whelan, ed., op cit., p. 34. Emphasis, ours.
Standish goes on:
In post-structuralism, truth is replaced by truths and knowledge by knowledges. Thus, much of our present inherited knowledge is dismissed as only one perspective: that of a Western, white, male, middle-class elite. If knowledge can no longer be abstracted from the particular social context in which it arose, it cannot be separated from the prejudices or values of the individual who constructed it.
Ibid., p.42
Scepticism has silenced the teacher. He dare not speak or teach, lest he impose his prejudices and values upon students. Rather, he must facilitate a student's self-discovery of his own values and the values of his peers.
Every subject is being inundated by the sceptical tsunami. Even science. A UK recent report entitled, "Science Education in State Schools" produced, in part, to understand why science as a subject has declined in "popularity" in state schools called for a radical re-write of the science curriculum. The subject must be made explicitly to engage with the "enthusiasms and concerns" of students. Here is the clanger: "science education can only succeed when students believe that the science they are being taught is of personal worth to themselves." (Whelan, op cit., p.120) Personalised curricula, self-discovery, values education, constructivism . . . scepticism.
"State education" is now an irrecoverable oxymoron.
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