Against School

AARON SWARTZ

Despite all the talk about educators and education priorities, the most
important people in any school have always been businessmen. They
constantly complain that our schools our failing, that they need to cut out
modern fads and go “back to basics,” that unless schools get tougher on
students American business will be unable to compete.

As Richard Rothstein has shown, such claims are hardly new. Because
schools have never been about actual education, businessmen have been
easily collecting studies about their failure at this task since the very
beginning. In 1845, only 45 percent of Boston’s brightest students knew
that water expands when it freezes. In one school, 75 percent knew the US
had imposed an embargo on British and French goods during the War of
1812, but only 5 percent knew what embargo meant. Students, the
Secretary of Education wrote, were simply memorizing the “words of the
textbook...without having...to think about the meaning of what they have
learned.”

In 1898, a writing exam at Berkeley found that 30 to 40 percent of entering

freshman were not proficient in English. A Harvard report found only 4
percent of applicants “could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a
sentence.” But that didn’t stop editorialists from complaining about how
things were better in the old days. Back when they went to school,
complained the editors of the New York Sun in 1902, children “had to do a
little work. ... Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you
had to learn.” Now schooling was just “a vaudeville show. The child must be
kept amused and learns what he pleases.” In 1909, the Atlantic
Monthly complained that basic skills had been replaced by “every fad and
fancy.”

That same year, the dean of Stanford’s school of education warned that in a
global economy, “whether we like it or not, we are beginning to see that we
are pitted against the world in a gigantic battle of brains and skill.” Because
of their failing schools, of course, Americans were coming up short.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed a presidential commission to study

how to improve our international educational competitiveness. They found
that more than half of new recruits to the Army during World War I “were
not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper with ease.” In 1927, the
National Association of Manufacturers complained that 40 percent of high
school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express
themselves in English.

A 1938 study complained that newfangled teaching methods were forcing

out basic instruction in phonics: “teachers...conspire against pupils in their
efforts to learn; these teachers appear to be determinedly on guard never to
mention a letter by name...or to show how to use either letter forms or
sounds in reading.” A 1940 survey of business executives “found that by
large margins they believed recent graduates were inferior to the previous
generation in arithmetic, written English, spelling, geography, and world
affairs.”

A 1943 test by the New York Times found that only 29 percent of college
freshmen knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi, only 6 percent knew
the original thirteen states of the Union, and some students even thought
Lincoln was the first president. It was, the Times declared, a “striking
ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.”
In 1947, the Times’s education editor published a book titled Our Children
Are Cheated. In it, businessmen lamented the poor state of American
schools. One complained he had to “organize special classes to instruct [his
new hires] in...making change. ... Only a small proportion [can] place
Boston, New York...Chicago...Denver...in their proper sequence from east
to west, or name the states in which they [are located].”

A 1951 test in LA found that more than half of eighth graders couldn’t
calculate 8 percent sales tax on an $8 purchase. The newspapers
complained that students couldn’t even tell time. In 1952, the journal
Progressive Education complained about the “attacks on textbooks that
encourage inquisitive thinking and individual reasoning, ... mounting
pressure to eliminate the ‘frills and fads’—by which are meant such vital
services as nurseries, classes for the handicapped, testing and guidance,
programs to help youngsters understand and appreciate their neighbors of
different backgrounds”—what today would be called multiculturalism.

In 1958, U.S. News and World Report lamented that “fifty years ago a high-
school diploma meant something…. We have simply misled our students
and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who
we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school
diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It
is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”
A 1962 Gallup poll found “just 21 percent looked at books even casually.” In
1974, Reader’s Digest asked, “Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? [There
is an] evident sag in both writing and reading...at a time when the
complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function
effectively. ... [T]here is indisputable evidence that millions of presumably
educated Americans can neither read nor write at satisfactory levels.”
[Rothstein]

In 1983, Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education

declared that our failing schools made us A Nation At Risk. “If an
unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the
mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have
viewed it as an act of war,” it declared. In 1988, the chairman of Xerox
warned that “public education has put this country at a terrible competitive
disadvantage. ... If current...trends continue, American business will have
to hire a million new workers a year who can’t read, write or count.”

In 1993, the government was singing the same tune. “The vast majority of
Americans do not know that they do not have the skills to earn a living in
our increasingly technological society and international marketplace,”
lamented Education Secretary Richard Riley. In 1995, the chairman of IBM
told state governors that our schools needed higher standards for “an era
that demands improvements in skills if Americans are to succeed in the
world marketplace.”

Similar complaints continue right to the present day. They are always
followed by calls for “education reform” and “higher standards” which in
practice always translates into the same old “drill and skill” of old. And, of
course, that’s exactly the point.

I can hear the objections now. “That’s a conspiracy theory!” they cry.

As a simple factual matter, that’s badly mistaken. A conspiracy theory is the

notion that a small group of people have, in secret, managed to subvert the
way things normally work. What I’m talking about is exactly the opposite:
it’s a large group of people, working in public, making sure things keep
going the way they normally keep going.

So why does it seem so much like a conspiracy? I think it’s because, in both
instances, you’re saying things don’t work the way people have always
believed they worked. From a young age, we’re told that the society we live
in may have its share of problems, but it’s fundamentally sensible. Schools
exist to give people an education, companies exist to make things people
want, elections exist to give people a voice in how the system is run,
newspapers exist to tell us what’s going on. That’s just how the world
works.
 Now it’s reasonable to believe that all of these things have flaws—that
schools, for example, could do a better job of teaching students. After all,
things can always be improved, sometimes quite a lot. But when you go
further and say that schools are not only bad at teaching people, but that
they’re not about teaching people at all—well, that’s when things get scary.

The girls who staff them keep causing strikes and other trouble, so they require their
employees go to school from a young age and learn to behave themselves.

Because if schools aren’t about teaching people, that means everything

we’ve been told about them is a lie. And if everybody is lying to us, then,
well, that does start to sound like a conspiracy theory.

But look back over our history—there’s no conspiracy. A group of bold

entrepreneurs find they can make cloth more efficiently by building large
mills. The girls who staff them keep causing strikes and other trouble, so
they require their employees go to school from a young age and learn to
behave themselves.

But obviously most people won’t be thrilled to go to school so that they can
learn to accept lower wages without complaint. So the bosses develop a
cover story: schools are about teaching people the things they need to know
to survive in the world of business. It’s not true, of course—there’s no
connection between the facts memorized in school and the skills needed on
the job—but the story is convincing enough.

And so the spread of schools and factories destroys the American model of
freedom. Instead of being independent farmers or self-employed
manufacturers, Americans are herded into factories en masse, forced to
work for someone else because they cannot earn a living any other way. But
thanks to schools, this seems normal, even natural. After all, isn’t that just
the way the world works?

Today, it seems like everyone agrees that what we need are more rigorous
schools. George W. Bush joined with Ted Kennedy to pass No Child Left
Behind, which punished school districts (i.e. took away their funding) if
they didn’t get high enough test scores. (How failing schools were supposed
to improve by having less money was never really explained.) Barack
Obama, of course, would never support such a cruel plan. Instead, his
“Race to the Top” program will, like Skinner, catch schools doing
something right—and reward them with extra funding.
 But what is being tested is never a student’s “prosocial attitudes” or
“consistent attendance”— instead it’s how well they memorized facts and
figures. Why the disconnect? Perhaps because flunking students for not
being good enough quitters wouldn’t play well with parents. As Peter
Cappelli, director of the US government’s National Center on the
Educational Quality of the Workforce, put it most people are “disturb[ed]”
by the suggestion “that the values, norms, and behaviors being inculcated
into students through the schools appear to be in conflict with the values
associated with personal growth and development.”

The solution has been to fight the battle through other names. No Child
Left Behind was supposed to have the effect of forcing schools to do a better
job educating their students. Who could argue with that? But examining its
effects on the ground finds it did something rather different. Students, of
course, were not tested on how well they actually understood basic concepts
but simply on how well they could answer the standard multiple choice
tests. And with so much at stake, schools converted even further from
teaching kids ideas to teaching them how to perform well on tests.

Instead of covering the walls with students’ art, they’re covered with test-taking
advice.

Linda Perlstein spent a year at one school struggling to survive No Child

Left Behind. Everything that wasn’t tested had to get cut—not just art and
gym, but recess, science, and social studies (yep, no science on the tests).
What remains is converted entirely over to test prep—the only writing
students ever do is short answer sections (“What text feature could have
been added to help a reader better understand the information?”) and the
stories in class are analyzed only in terms of what questions might be asked
about them.

Large sections of the class have nothing to do with learning at all. Students
are instead drilled on test-taking procedure: take deep breaths, work until
time is called, eliminate obviously wrong answers. Every day students are
taught special vocab words that will earn them extra points and reminded
about how to properly phrase their answers to get the maximum score.
Instead of covering the walls with students’ art, they’re covered with test-
taking advice (“BATS: Borrow from the question, Answer the question, use
Text supports, Stretch the formula”).

The single-minded goal of maximizing test scores has been a blessing for
the textbook market, which forces schools to buy expensive “evidence-
based curricula” which has been “proven” to maximize test scores. The
packages include not only textbooks and workbooks but also scripts for the
teachers to read verbatim—deviating from them hasn’t been proven to raise
test scores, and is thus prohibited. The package also comes with trained
supervisors who drop in on teachers to make sure they’re actually sticking
to the script.

The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is

simply about searching contrived stories for particular “text features,” they
learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about
cycling through the multiple choice answers to find the most plausible ones,
they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations
of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. “The joy of finding
things out” is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.

Such drills don’t teach children anything about the world, but it does teach
them “skills”—skills like how to follow senseless orders and sit at your desk
for hours at a time. Critics of high-stakes testing say that it isn’t working as
planned: teachers are teaching to the test instead of making sure kids
actually learn. But maybe that is actually the plan. After all, employers seem
to like it just fine.