On a recent Sunday morning, I settled in for the weekly dose of my favorite political talk show “This Week.” As always, conservative journalist and baseball connoisseur George Will participated in the “round table discussion” about a number of pressing political issues. I became particularly interested, though, when Mr. Will decided to offer his opinions on school reform. He summarized the problem with public schools in the following statement:
“We have the shortest school year in the industrial world. We have a school year designed in the late 19th century for a ranching and farming nation when the children (were) needed on the ranches and farms in the late spring and early fall … We have to be in school at least another month a year.”
The irony in Will’s statement is rich. The solution he proposes to reform our ineffective and antiquated public school system is itself, ineffective and antiquated. In baseball terms, George Will’s argument strikes out on three pitches.
Strike One: His assumptions about school calendars are untrue
George Will is simply restating an old fallacy about school reform that seems to recycle occasionally, usually around election time, when politicians and consultants are eager to sell “new ways” to improve public education. He may have been correct about the school calendar two hundred years ago when the academic year in much of the United States actually did operate on an agrarian schedule, but sometime around the late 1700s, America moved into the Industrial Age (I assume George Will is aware of this recent development). Since that time, the school year has revolved around the country’s need for an educated workforce and an inability to cool classrooms to a tolerable level during the hot summer months.
Strike two: His solution would be ineffective
Consider the crux of Mr. Will’s argument: He asserts that all we need to do to fix our troubled school system is to ensure that students are forced to participate in its dysfunction for even longer periods of time. This seems similar to the strategy of speaking a foreign language to someone who doesn’t understand: if you just speak louder and repeat yourself over and over, the person will eventually understand. So, George Will seems to be saying that if our students aren’t learning effectively in our current system of education, we just need to “talk louder” and repeat ourselves for “at least another month per year.”
Strike three: The real problem is not with the agrarian calendar; it is with the industrial/scientific approach to education
As the United States moved in to the Industrial age and began to focus on the efficient manufacture of high quality and standardized goods, we also began to see our children as complex machines, subject to industrial “standards” and measurement. Education became less art and more science. We ought to be well beyond the idea that the purpose of education is to simply replicate our culture through the batch-processing of identically educated citizens. The scientific, factory-mechanical model of education is inappropriate for the needs of a 21st century population. In fact, we need our children to be less like standardized copies of ourselves and more like the problem solvers, collaborators, and creative entrepreneurs we’ll really need. And we need to trust our teachers as professionals to balance both the art and science of teaching and learning.
The problem with George Will, as with many education critics and policy makers is that they believe themselves to be connoisseurs of education, their only qualification being that they had at one point in their lives been the product of some type of institutional education. Many of these critics possess little appreciation for the rich context, history, and subtleties of education. In fact, most know “just enough to be dangerous,” and ought to limit their public criticism to their areas of legitimate expertise.
I’ll listen to George Will when he talks baseball. His deep knowledge and appreciation of the sport certainly allow him the credibility to offer legitimate critique. When it comes to issues of education however, he might consider calling in a “pinch hitter” to take his next turn at bat as public critic.
Mark Twarogowski, M.A., is Director of Education at the Denver Academy and a doctoral student at the University of Denver Morgridge College of Education.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
