While dropping the kids off at school, I saw a bus picking up kids for a different school. We waited patiently as they clamored aboard and took their seats. Eventually, the flashing red arm folded up and the bus was on its way. Something occurred to me during this brief moment:

* School buses are required by law to have red arms that stop traffic both ways.
* Kids must be seated before the bus can proceed.
* Federal law requires them to stop and open the door at a railroad crossing to listen for trains.
* Despite all these rules, school buses do not have seatbelts.

I consider this to be an allegory for what is wrong with our approach to education. A large body of regulations to force certain behaviors is considered obvious and necessary, but the tools that allow kids to take care of themselves are not even present.

There have been many changes in education in the USofA lately, many of them required by the “No Child Left Behind” policy of the Bush Administration. This body of regulation is based on the same philosophy of industrial organization that gave us “Six Sigma” and other programs designed to create an atmosphere of constant improvement. The idea is that you measure everything you can, and over time whittle down the variation registered in this process by focusing on the worst problems and solving them. Data collection is at the heart of it. That is how we know what is wrong.

Too bad kids aren’t widgets being produced by a factory.

The application of industrial models to what I refer to as the “Education Industrial Complex” is far from new. The basic idea has been a part of our system for more than a century, with the latest trends in education nothing more than shadows of the last wave of industrial fads. The school bus example is a holdover from industrial techniques that are now considered ancient, based on procedural codification. In the delicately conservative world of the Education Industrial Complex, things usually change rather slowly.

But change they did, especially when it was clear that a new generation of factory workers and consumers was the truly desired “product” of schools. Workers were to be turned out like the widgets they would one day turn out, and America would keep hummin’ along. This was at the turn of the last century, the start of the American Century. Obviously, something worked.

Consider, for example, the Pavlovian reality that faces High Schoolers who move according to a system of bells all day long. What is the purpose of this? If you thought it was “enrichment”, you had part of the answer. The idea was that kids should learn to move according to how workers were alerted to break times and shift changes. It was based on the prevailing method of running a factory when it was introduced about 100 years ago.

This may seem hard to swallow, but it’s only a small part of the creation of the Education Industrial Complex. For a real eye-opener, you have to read what John Taylor Gatto has to say:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

He alleges that schools exist for the purpose of boring us into a consumerist stupor. I’m not willing to go that far, but the approach that is taken is certainly not one of empowerment. Kids are actively discouraged from understanding their own power and are forced into very large, impersonal buildings with thick walls and few windows. The isolation makes a few every year go full-blown batshit crazy, some of them killing themselves and some going out in a final blaze of glory. Not everyone likes becoming a widget.

In the end, the allegory of the school bus is a very powerful way to look at what is done and what is left undone in our schools. Everything is proscribed, nothing is prescribed. Conformity to the exacting standards set forth in the Widget Making Specifications is paramount. Deviation is not tolerated.

If we can only imagine one small act of empowerment, a click of a seatbelt if you will, we can see the difference between bright and creative young humans at the start of their life and a factory that cranks out widgets. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination, really, but it’s more than we have ever allowed from our kids.