Schooling is Not Education; Or, a Lesson In Status Quo Bias

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If you asked the average high school graduate if they feel like they learned a lot in school, they’d likely laugh at you. If you asked the average college grad why they went to college, they wouldn’t tell you that it was to get an education, but rather to get a job. If you asked a doctor, lawyer, or academic why they went to their respective graduate programs, their answer would similarly be “so I could become a [doctor/lawyer/professor].”

Then tell somebody that you don’t believe that children should be forced to sit at desks in white rooms, forced to walk in lines with their arms to themselves, forced to ask to go to the bathroom, or forced to learn things they find totally irrelevant to their lives and people will look at you like you’ve just said you want to reanimate King Tut to do a Vaudeville show for blind schoolchildren. You’ll get questions like, “how do you expect them to get into college?” “How would they get to know other children and become socialized?” and “how would they learn?”

Despite the fact that most people are glad to admit that their own schooling adventure wasn’t the primary locus of their learning, and despite the fact that they will then admit that they attended optional additional schooling not to learn, but to get past gatekeepers for other things they want to do, many find it difficult to wrap their minds around the idea that learning can happen outside of a formal classroom.

Human beings are natural learners. As higher-level beings, we are forced to learn the complex systems that govern our worlds early on, lest we be taken by the forces of nature. Language, symbols, market exchange, and the norms and mores that govern small communities like families and villages are just a few examples of things that we learn outside of the classroom (though school-creep in more and more Pre-K programs will make it that “reformers” are soon demanding we teach infants how to speak in a classroom setting), and they’re incredibly complex and multifaceted things. People learn sarcasm from their friends and families — an amazingly complicated emergent quality of language. Many learn what market exchange is like by pretend-making businesses on the playground at recess, not by reading a civics textbook.

School can be a place of learning, but the idea that school and learning/education are synonymous and ought to be so is an outgrowth of early 20th century Progressive school reformers who were the primary advocates of crafting the language in such a way that it encapsulated everything that a common person would want out of schooling. By monopolizing school’s possession on learning, anybody who existed outside of the schooling paradigm would be thought to not be learning.

The reformers established a status quo bias in favor of schooling. The questions that unschoolers, homeschoolers, and radical school alternative advocates (like Sudbury Schools) may all be legitimate, but they are couched in the context of, “how is little Jimmy going to learn calculus[, because my status quo bias leads me to believe that he will learn it if he is in public schools]?”

Imagine if people asked the same questions of compulsory schools that they ask of homeschoolers and unschoolers. Imagine if people gave the same scrutiny, skepticism, and questioning to public school administrators (who, on average, score lower in aptitude tests than the teachers they administer) or to the teachers themselves.

The status quo bias doesn’t end there. It only gets worse.

Jane doesn’t have a clue about what she wants to do with her life. She has gone through school for the past 12-or-so years, found herself with a high school diploma, and the question, “What now?” She decides to enroll in college, and spend the time and money figuring out what she wants to do. She flops between majors, taking classes in different areas, and eventually graduates after 5 years with a degree and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

John knows he wants to own his own company and work for himself. He goes to college for a year, drops out, and founds a company. After struggling to build a clientele for a year, he gets some grounding, and is on the path to having a legitimate business.

Who is more likely to get the scorn of doubtful questions, Jane, or John?

“How do you expect to make a living for yourself?” “What if you can’t find a job [if the business fails]?” “How are you going to learn about the world?”

It is considerably more likely that these questions will be put towards John and not Jane. Jane will get to sail on by without much critical feedback or thought because she’s doing what the status quo expects. John may very well find himself more educated than Jane at age 24, though he may have passed up schooling at this stage of his life, he hasn’t necessarily passed up education. The same questions applied to John — which may be legitimate questions — are not applied to Jane because the status quo is to get schooled, not to get an education.

Schooling is not education. Schooling can be education, but even then, it is just education for a short span of somebody’s life. Twelve, sixteen, or twenty years of schooling is not the end of education. Real education happens when we engross ourselves in projects that we derive meaning from and find interesting and fulfilling. If a school can do this, then it has a shot at being a place of education.

 

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