David L. Kirp wrote in a recent editorial for the
New York Times,
schools are not a business.
In a certain sense, I agree entirely.
Historically, as Kirp notes, schools have been built on a sacred bond of trust between teachers, students, parents, and the wider (usually local) community. It is interesting to note that while principals and superintendents occupy a higher place in a educational bureaucracy, they feature rather less often in the typical parent-teacher conference, let alone the ordinary classroom. Perhaps with the exception of school board meetings, the vast majority of students and parents that I have known care relatively little about the business-managerial side of education, and much more about the workers themselves--that is to say, teachers.
One of the major businesses of business, however, is product delivery of some description, somewhat removed from the lowest-level workers.
- Think of a meal at a nice restaurant: how often do you get to see the chefs?
- Think of a car: what personal contact do you have with automotive assembly lines?
- Think of Facebook: how many nameless, faceless software engineers does it take for you to Superpoke™that friend you haven't seen in person since 2002?
And yet, how many names do we know of restaurant owners? How familiar are the names of Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg?
In short, the hierarchies and points of contact differ fundamentally between business and education. Perhaps a business exists in which human interaction
is the product, at some profound and fundamental level, but one of the most foundational, most primitive industries in which this is certainly the case, is education itself. And the product isn't just educational content, as some might suppose: among other things, it's also hierarchical and peer-level social interaction, a huge variety of formative pedagogical experiences, and--if we believe C.S. Lewis in his
Abolition of Man--moral values. In all of these ways, contemporary business models clash more than they collaborate with the ethos of a classical education.
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And yet… is it not the job of educators to prepare their charges, somehow, for life as an adult?
Back in the 1960s,
Moore's Law worked specifically with transistors and processor speeds, suggesting that they would double roughly every 18-24 months. But what if it were applied to technology in general, or to the growth of the tech sector in the overall global economy? Look at the areas that are developing in super-exciting ways at the dawn of the 21st century: sky-scraper-sized naval architecture for carrying tens of thousands of modular shipping containers; massive multiplayer online computer games; cradle-to-grave digital records for all things related to personal health and medicine; black-box / algorithmic trading in--and advanced cyber-security for--the world's banks and stock markets; self-driving cars, transoceanic fiber-optics and transcontinental high-speed rail.
In short, the large-scale products of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education are becoming increasingly visible, if not vital, in a burgeoning global economy. And these things take money: not just playing on the stock market, but any--all--of the big projects noted above. They're expensive in a way that most our forebears could not even begin to imagine, when the upper limit of technology was the ox-cart or the power loom, or even the rotary-dial telephone. Simply put--and separately from a discussion of how desirable this might be--it's not just STEM fields, but the economy itself, that looms ever larger in the contemporary global imagination.
And
someone needs to do the teaching in these fields, to prepare the next generation of workers for all of this STEM-related industry, and all the issues of law and finance that surround it. As an historian by training, I might argue for the value of Liberal Arts and Humanities classes (wouldn't the world be a nice place if we could all quote intelligently from the
Avesta, the
Tale of Genji and
Two Treatises of Government?), but to the extent that the industries mentioned above are going to need highly-trained personnel, parents--and therefore students--are quite right to demand an education in STEM fields, and closely bound up with the macro-economy as a whole. To the extent that economic endeavor represents a major route to human achievement, prosperity, fulfillment, even self-actualization (well, notionally anyway), why would parents and students
not want this?
Teachers and their advocates, alas, are in a bind. Lose the social bonds and ethos that give educators a standing as pillars in a local community, and the content won't really matter anyway--just as Kirp suggested, and as any good educator knows intuitively. But lose much of the close correspondence between education and the global economy--including STEM fields--and the students in that school will lose a competitive edge, with perhaps catastrophic effects on personal and family finances down the road. Kirp never said, "don't teach STEM," or "don't teach business," but where he did criticize the links between business demands and educational supply, well… the reality is that schools and teachers really are like businesses in competition. Their product is their pedagogy, and the stakes for students can be very high indeed.
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In an organizational, bureaucratic, hierarchical sense, school never was, is not, in fact never can be functional in the strictest sense of the term, business. With respect to the overall economy, however--in training the workers who will partake in industries potentially global in their scope--education not only is a business: it is perhaps the most fundamental, most essential, most critical of all businesses. At a social and pedagogical level (including with parents), I join with my fellow teachers in a firm belief that education for the most part is best left to us. For its content, however… the problem to my mind is not that education and business are colluding too closely. Rather, for the bulk of students who desperately need an edge in an increasingly frenetic, technically sophisticated, globalized economy, I would humbly submit that they're too far apart.
The problem isn't business--and especially not businesses that are trying to prepare the next generation of their own employees! If we're looking to point fingers, I wonder if we might point them at the state, and the general philosophy of public education. At one time, the mandate of public education was to prepare students for the rigors of citizenship, apart from whatever might become their chosen craft. That meant a pedagogy that focused on functional mathematics--especially arithmetic and maybe a bit of geometry, language arts and literature in one's native language and perhaps 1-3 major world languages, regional and national history, a bit of fine arts and athletics, and civics, rhetoric, home economics and political science--the last four being major hallmarks of an informed and active citizen, taking part in the life of the state. What classes among these are left in the public school system? Is the state really doing a good job training its young people to be active, reflective, conscientious citizens? Especially if not, and even more if and as students look forward to transnational employment in an increasingly globalized economy, should the world of education not follow suit?
To my mind, the solution to the business-education conundrum
absolutely is not taking business out of education. Rather, quite contrary to what I see as the current ethos of public education, I would suggest that it's bringing educators farther into the business world, so that despite the inevitable professional remove, they (we! I!) become better equipped to prepare students for the economy in which most of them are likely to live out their lives as educated adults.
