In recent times, one of the biggest defenses for “in-person” education is the belief that students need to be socially educated, otherwise they will be incapable of interacting in society.  What I mean by “socially educated” is in reference to the philosophy that one of the school’s purposes is to be a sercure environment that is a microcosm of the society outside the walls of the schools.  The bugging the minds of insightful educators is this… Has the school succeeded in slowly introducing society to its students?  Or, Has the school essentially become nothing less than a hyperextension of the society?  Meaning, all the issues existent in society are not only existent in the school, but they are magnified and/or hypersensitized?  While contemporary examples abound, lets turn to one from the past for insight, the racial integration of the public schools in the United States.

Hannah Arendt once wrote a brilliant essay on the incident in Little Rock c. 1957, titled “Reflections on Little Rock.” (1)  Within this essay she oulined the near hypocrisy of the society at large making children work out its issues as opposed to it working out its issues in the public arena.  What is meant by this is that through the courts, the public (the space where private individuals come together), decided that instead of segregatory issues being worked out in the public domain–e.g. marriage laws, employment laws, etc.–rather these issues would be placed upon the children to deal with, as opposed to adult society.

Similarly, today issues which belong in the public domain are placed into the microcosm of the school, as if our children possess something beyond the society at large, some sort of capability to work on these issues.  While some educators may suffer from these delusions, in reality the reason societal issues are placed in the school are because of a desire of some to engineer society to conform later to an ideal that they have predetermined as superior to other ways of living.  This seemingly simple explanation can be dismissed, but it is more than evident from the experiments of John Dewey and the public/government school since his time.

At a fairly consistent “clip”, the public domain has placed issues of rights (racial, sexual, etc.) in the schools, in addition to formerly private matters being placed in the school to circumnavigate the private domain’s control over those issues (e.g. sexual “education”).  In each instance the reasoning has sought to justify these actions, and whatever debate against such actions was demonized, rather than being treated as an actual philosophical stance of worth.  Recently, these very movements of private matters being circumvented by the public and then placed in the school have moved into matters of politics and faith.  No longer is the private domain a stakeholder in these matters, instead the desire for the school to work out all the issues in society has caused the private domain to become a thing of the past.

Thoughts?  What do you think of this movement?  Is the school really supposed to be a place where society’s issues are resolved, or is that supposed to be a matter for “adults” in the public sphere?

1. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” (1957-9) in The Portable Hannah Arendt, Penquin classics: New York, 231.  Purchase at Amazon

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Education, Futures, Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.