Alan Jones

“The WHY of Schooling”

December 15, 2025December 17, 2025 by Alan Jones

Students are demoralized, bored, and distracted in school, not because of a lack of interesting methods, but both teachers and students lack, a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons.

(Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of Schooling)

Over forty years in public school administration, I spent innumerable hours in offices talking about policies, mandates, systems, budgets, legal opinions, staffing, and whatever crisis happened to be at hand. I cannot remember ever discussing the educational goals and values embedded in school mission statements—the very why of schooling.

My prior books on the subject list the following reasons why the occupants of main offices never discuss what kind of public should their school be creating.

The occupants of the main offices are consumed with the managerial details of running a school.
The occupants of main offices assume that the why of schooling has already been answered by state legislators, school boards, or central offices.
The occupants of the main offices see little value in spending time on ivory tower discussions of the way of schooling.
The occupants of the main offices lack the academic training to engage in thoughtful discussions over the why of schooling.

Without a compelling narrative to inspire a reason for schooling the occupants of main offices are unable to develop a meaningful response to the following problems of schooling:

Problem #1: Coherent Response to the SIX Fundamental Questions of Schooling

The force behind creating an engaging learning environment is a coherent response to the following six fundamental questions of learning:

What are the goals of schooling?
How do children learn?
What knowledge is of most worth?
How should knowledge be organized?
How should we assess what students understand?
HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?

All of these answers to these fundamental questions depend upon what goals of schooling main offices and classrooms are pursuing. Over the year’s schools have pursued the following goals:

To educate (what is the meaning of life?)
To emancipate (who am I?)
To join (How do I effectively participate in a democratic community?)
To prepare (What do I want to become?)
To socialize (How should I behave?)

While school mission statements tend to emphasize goals 1, 2, and 3 — critical thinking —most school curricula and school organizations are designed to train and follow orders — goals 4 and 5. A school curriculum and school organization dominated by credits, seat time, grades, and subjects respond to the fundamental questions of schooling far differently than a school curriculum and school organization designed to develop agency, a sense of belongingness, an interest, and a critical thinker.

Problem #2: The Problem of Mandates

Every school year occupants of main offices enter their offices with their in-boxes filled with new policies, directives, or mandates that governmental or administrative bodies expect their administrative teams to implement. Most of these mandates involve routine changes to school curricula or school organizations. Some, however, are controversial and draw occupants of main offices into philosophical questions. Take, for example, recent trends in curricular mandates asking schools to emphasize and implement materials specifically designed to advance the concept of multiculturalism.

On the face of it, curricular materials designed to foster the acceptance of different cultures in society and the active support of these cultures by both majority and minority groups would appear to be a value worth embracing. On the other hand, public schools from their inception have favored the goal of cultural pluralism in which multiple ethnic groups can coexist and maintain their unique cultural identities while participating fully in the dominant society.

The problem with such a mandate is which curriculum should a school pursue:

A multicultural curriculum designed to focus on recognizing and celebrating diverse cultures within a society or should a school pursue a cultural pluralistic curriculum emphasizing the coexistence and interaction of different cultures. This distinction may appear to be splitting hairs, but, at a board meeting, parents may question either approach, and, in the process, raise philosophical questions over assimilation versus integration, loss of identity, educational disparities, and social integration. With such issues, the managerial what’s and how’s of board meetings quickly turn to the whys of schooling.

Problem #3: The Problem of Contradictions

Although rarely articulated in school meeting venues—faculty meetings, parent open houses, board meetings—there are contradictions between what schools profess in their mission statements and the realities of school policies and classroom practices. The most glaring example is the educational value most frequently mentioned in school mission statements—critical thinking. While this value is most often announced from auditorium stages, the goals they list—agency, interests, questioning—disappear in main offices and classrooms pursuing institutional goals and values—standardization, accounting, compliance.

Problem #4: The Problem of Relevance: Connecting the Dots

W. Edwards Deming, the father of TQM, emphasized the distinction between information and knowledge. In Deming’s view, information is not knowledge. Knowledge, according to Deming, is the ability to predict future outcomes and understand the past, requiring a theory or framework for analysis. Information, on the other hand, is simple data without the context or theory to make it meaningful.

In school classrooms, the pedagogical methods teachers employ treat information as if it were knowledge. In the words of Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

When students question the relevance of the facts they are required to memorize, the common teacher response to these questions is to assure students that they will need these facts later in the course or some distant future—a future which never seems to materialize. The large amounts of information that are transmitted in daily lesson plans and in textbooks align well with classroom-based testing instruments. However, facts alone align poorly with real-world applications that require, in Deming’s words, a theory or framework for analysis or simply put, are shaped by the relationships we have and the situations we are in.

THE FINAL PROBLEM: Student Discipline

The problem that dogs school organizations is how to work with students who do not conform to the norms of institutional schooling. School administrators address this ongoing problem with institutional responses: discipline codes; parent conferences; suspensions; detentions; time-out rooms; and demerits. In the last decade, schools have moved from looking upon student discipline as a matter of poor parenting or biological proclivities of different age groups to a variety of explanations for student misbehavior: attention-seeking, learning difficulties, unmet emotional needs, lack of social skills, power struggles, problems at home, medical issues.

While all of these explanations are reasonable as far as they go. What they all ignore is the inconvenient truth of institutional schooling: schools are boring. In John Goodlad’s seminal study of classroom practices in thirteen high schools throughout the country, he describes what a boring classroom looks like in practice:

[I saw] the teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class or a single student, occasionally asking questions requiring factual answers; the teacher, when not lecturing, observing or monitoring students working individually at their desks; students listening or appearing to listen to the teacher and occasionally responding to the teacher’s questions; students working individually at their desks on reading or writing assignments; and all with little emotion, from interpersonal warmth to expressions of hostility.

(Goodlad, A Place Called School)

If students are not engaged in what is occurring in the classroom they become disruptive. Changing the inconvenient truth of schooling asks school administrators to “self-author” a narrative composed of three parts:

PART I: Schools are boring

Openly admitting to the reality that the design of the school organization and the organization of curriculum align well with institutional goals, but, fall short of creating a learning environment that would fully engage children and adolescence. Included in Part I of the narrative is specific organizational and instructional strategies administrators and teachers will pursue to address one or more the problems of schooling listed above.

Part II: What does an engaging learning environment look like?

Throughout this narrative school administrators must describe what teachers and students are doing in a learning environment where students are socially, emotionally, and intellectually engaged. There are many descriptors for engaging learning environments. The answers to Elliot Eisner’s list of questions listed below could serve as a template for designing a school organization that places the goal of creating engaging learning environments ahead of the enforcement of institutional goals.

Part III: The HOW of creating engaging learning environments:

Once the why and what of engaging learning environments has been established, the final paragraph in the narrative would describe specific changes to the school organization and curricular design that would develop engaging learning environments. Listed below are the four areas in a school organization that would signal a change what goals and values classrooms would be pursuing:

The budget
The curriculum
The master schedule
The training regime—professional development

WHAT IS A GOOD SCHOOL: EISNER

(Eisner, E. W. (January 01, 2001). FEATURES – What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?.

Phi Delta Kappan, 82, 5, 367)

1. WHAT KINDS OF PROLEMS AND ACTIVITIES DO STUDENTS ENGAGE IN?

2. WHAT IS THE INTELLECTUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IDEAS THAT THEY ENCOUNTER?

3. ARE STUDENTS INTRODUCED TO MULTIPLE PERPSECTIVES?

4. WHAT CONNECTIONS ARE STUDENTS HELPED TO MAKE BETWEEN WHAT THEY STUDY IN CLASS AND THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL?

5. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO YOUNGSTERS HAVE TO BECOME LITERATE IN THE USE OF DIFFERENT REPRESENTATIONS FORMS (i.e. various symbol systems which give humans meaning)?

6. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO STUDENTS HAVE TO FORMULATE THEIR OWN PURPOSES AND TO DESIGN WAYS TO ACHIEVE THEM?

7. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES TO STUDENTS HAVE TO WORK COOPERATIVELY TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS THAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE IMPORTANT?

8. DO STUDENTS HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THEIR OWN PERSONAL INTERESTS?

9. TO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO WORK IN DEPTH IN DOMAINS THAT RELATED TO THEIR APTITUDES?

10. DO STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN THE ASSESSMENT OF THEIR OWN WORK?

11. DO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS GENUINELY ENGAGED IN WHAT THEY DO IN SCHOOL?

Democracy and Education

November 29, 2025 by Alan Jones

“The process and the goal of education are the same thing.”

(John Dewey)

“The core duty of tax-supported public schools in a democracy is to pass on to the next generation democratic attitudes, values, and behaviors.”

(Larry Cuban)

At the turn of the century, there was a group of progressive educators who believed that our schools should bring democracy to life in the curriculum, in school governance, in community relations, and in the hearts and minds of young people. The various curriculum designs developed around this core belief would balance creative individuality with concern for the welfare of others and a desire for the common good. These designs would focus on personally and socially significant themes, collaboratively planned by teachers and students in democratic learning communities.

As I have written about in previous blogs, today the talk of teaching and learning is mostly about something else entirely. The long list of facts and skills lodged in thick textbooks mistakenly calls this a curriculum, and the definition of curriculum planning itself is reduced to the managerial function of aligning standards, tests, lesson plans, and all the rest of institutional mechanisms needed to control young people and teachers. School administrators respond to the boredom of these institutionalized curriculum designs with fads and glitzy programs with no pedagogical or moral compass to guide us.

What would that moral compass look like? The best description of a democratic compass can be found in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), where he envisions moral direction not in fixed institutional rules and standards, but as the ability to think reflectively, act cooperatively, and judge one’s actions in light of their consequences for the community. What follows are the major themes that organize Dewey’s argument.

Education as Growth

Dewey rejects the primary goal of schooling written into school missions’ statements: education as a preparation for future life. Instead, Dewey views growth as the primary goal of schooling, which he defines as A continuous process of developing capacities for intelligent action. Classrooms, in Dewey’s mind, should nurture adaptability and curiosity, not conformity.

Democracy as a Mode of Associated Living

Dewey defines democracy as not merely a description of political structures, duties of citizenship, and patriotic instruction, but as a way of life characterized by communication, participation, and shared experience. That way of life is best represented in school organizations, curricula, and activity structures that connect learners to the life of the community and engage them in genuine or simulated forms of political participation.

Experience and Reflection

Teaching and learning must be grounded in experience—in active engagement with real-world tasks and problems. Rather than classrooms ruled by teacher talk and the transmission of inert information, students would enter inquiry-based environments where meaning emerges through the interplay of doing and thinking.

Role of the Teacher

In classrooms where students are actively engaged in real-world tasks and problems, teachers relinquish the role of knowledge transmitters and assume the role of facilitators who design learning experiences that foster growth.

The Unity of Theory and Practice

Dewey’s pragmatism is grounded in processes where thought and action are inseparable. Knowledge is abstract contemplation or memorization of facts and processes, but the outcome of a problem-solving activity. Learning must connect theory and practice—ideas tested by consequences.

Individuality and Social Responsibility

While individual development of children and adolescents is a fundamental value expressed in school mission statements, Dewey insists that individuality flourishes only within a social context. Education, for Dewey, should cultivate both personal autonomy and social responsibility—to act intelligently for the good of the community.

The Problem with Institutional Schooling

A recurring theme in Dewey’s writings on education is the tendency of traditional schooling to be authoritarian, static, and subject-centered. Too much of institutional schooling treats students as passive recipients rather than active participants in their own learning. A Deweyan school would emphasize inquiry, cooperation, and the integration of subjects around meaningful problems.

Redesign of Knowledge and Curriculum

If school administrators are serious about teaching democratic values, they must commit to moving away from fixed subjects and fixed disciplinary boundaries toward a curriculum that employs academic tools to address real-world problems. Curriculum, then, must be dynamic and connected to students’ lived experiences.

Education as the Foundation of Democracy

Progressive educators at the turn of the century believed that the survival of democracy depended on educational renewal. A democratic society requires citizens who possess the following attitudes, values, and behaviors:

Open-mindedness to different opinions and a willingness to listen to such opinions.
Treating individuals decently and fairly, regardless of their backgrounds.
A commitment to talk through problems, reason deliberately, and struggle to openly arrive at a compromise.

“Hey, Dad it’s high school”

November 10, 2025November 11, 2025 by Alan Jones

Throughout my career as a high school principal, every dinner conversation was consumed with discussions about the problems I was encountering leading a large comprehensive high school. In the midst of one of these dinner conversations, my son made a comment that crystallized for me how students view schools in the United States. I cannot remember what I was saying about schools, but I do recall my son saying in exasperation, “Hey Dad, it’s high school.” If I could paraphrase my son’s succinct analysis of secondary education in America, it would go something like this:

Dad, relax. Stop getting so upset with student apathy towards learning, teacher indifference towards professional growth, the misplaced priorities of parents, the political moves of Superintendents and Boards of Education, and all the athletic events you have to attend. What high school is all about is what happens before and after school, during lunchtime, passing periods and on weekends. It has nothing to do with what happens in classrooms. Students understand this; teachers understand this; parents understand this. The only one that doesn’t seem to get it is you—so lighten up, it’s only high school.

My son’s glib analysis of schooling in America masks a deep divide between the realities of contemporary classroom learning and the kinds of schools students would like to attend. In the eyes of students, they learn best within a classroom where teachers allow them to work in groups and openly discuss their feelings and perceptions; students express dissatisfaction with a classroom where they sit all day and simply read textbooks. Students look for teachers who are patient and willing to provide additional explanations and help for the rough patches in class. Most importantly, students want adults throughout the school to respect and empower their individual talents, abilities, personalities, and cultural backgrounds.

The list of qualities students would like to see in the schools they attend can be reduced to one recommendation: We learn best when our emotions and affiliations are considered to be as important as intellectual development. There were moments in the history of the U.S. schooling when educators made valiant efforts to formulate curricula and school configurations accommodating the social and emotional as well as the intellectual development of the child. These educators, however, were unable to stand up to the vocational and social mobility goals of schooling.

Not only were these brief interludes into educating the whole child quickly discarded by efficiency-minded administrators, but the theories and practices associated with progressive approaches to schooling received the unshakable label of being too soft to produce graduates who could compete in a global economy. Instead of John Dewey’s hope for democracy in education, policymakers and school administrators opted for a configuration of schooling more suited to producing a compliant workforce and obedient consumers rather than the realization of the democratic and humanistic ideals proclaimed in school mission statements.

“What are the Goals of Schooling?”

November 1, 2025November 3, 2025 by Alan Jones

In my last blog, I surveyed the different approaches to the question: “What does it mean to be educated?” When asked that question in strategic planning sessions, the responses below involve the cultivation of judgment, imagination, and moral awareness:

Critical thinking
Being stretched beyond the limits of backgrounds, prejudices, and opinions
Cultivating humanity
The art of reason
Analysis, argument, and interpretation
Current fashions and practices in the academic disciplines

Although school administrators at these meetings will nod their heads in agreement with these responses, upon returning to their offices, they think and act upon the goals of schooling. Administrators distinguish between the two competing goals of schooling: being educated and being schooled. Being schooled refers to the formal structures through which their communities transmit knowledge, skills, and norms, aiming to produce measurable outcomes such as literacy, competency, and social conformity. The schools they lead are organized around standards, assessments, and credentials that document the progress of an institution.

While schooling prepares individuals to participate in society—the socialization goal—education equips them to understand and, when necessary, to challenge it—the individuation function. Dewey ascribed the goals of schooling to primary and secondary schooling as formalizing the young with what their elders take to be true, whether it is true or not. College and universities, on the other hand, should be about helping students realize they can reshape themselves—the educational function of schooling. Higher education is not a matter of inculcating the truth. It is a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination.

The distinction between the goals of schooling and what it means to be educated was played out every time I returned home from college. My parents expected that college was augmenting the goals of schooling—transmitting knowledge, occupational skills, and societal norms. In the college classrooms I was sitting, however, they were inculcating in me the intellectual tools to question, in the words of Richard Rorty, my parents’ final vocabularies. Becoming educated in my college classrooms was a continual process of questioning conventional wisdom.

Unfortunately, in today’s educational environment, the goals of schooling have all but erased the goal of becoming educated—courses devoted to the development of judgment, curiosity, and the capacity to think critically and independently. Instead, higher education is increasingly organized around occupational goals that prize credentialing and the monetization of degrees.

What does it mean to be EDUCATED?

October 19, 2025 by Alan Jones

An age-old question that inevitably arises when Boards of Education and community stakeholders gather to craft a school’s mission statement is: What does it mean to be educated? Typically, what is on the minds of those sitting in conference rooms is the intrinsic value of education. Although it may be articulated in different ways, the intrinsic nature of being educated is usually associated with cultivating critical thinking, inspiring curiosity, and developing a well-cultured individual.

In that same room, others may lean towards a more instrumental view of the meaning of education. In their view, schools serve four “uses,” best articulated by Harry Broudy:

Replicative use: to reproduce facts, methods, etc.
Applicative use: to apply what has been learning in new contexts
Associative use: to help students make connections across domains
Interpretative use: to involve deeper understandings.

Still others in that same room frame the question in terms of the goals of schooling. For these participants, they will use different vocabularies to describe five goals of schooling:

To educate: What is the meaning of life?
To emancipate: Who am I?
To join: How do I effectively participate in a democratic community?
To prepare: What do I want to become?
To socialize: How should I behave?

For the academics sitting in the room, the question is understood in disciplinary terms: learning the vocabularies and methods of various fields that enable students to solve particular problems and make informed predictions. These academics reduce the question to disciplinary goals:

Historians: The transmission of the human heritage
Anthropologists: The humanization of the young that occurs in the dialogue between generations.
Sociologists: The socialization of the young into the societal roles and values
Political Scientists: The preparation of the young for citizenship
Economists: The acquisition of knowledge, skills, and values necessary for gainful employment
Philosophers: The development of a morally and socially responsible person

There is nothing wrong with any of the answers to the question of what it means to be educated. The real problem for those sitting in that room—the people who manage and teach in our schools— is deciding which answer to pursue, since each one implies a different set of pedagogical methods. How schools solve this muddle of educational goals is to reduce the substance of schooling to subjects and the methods of schooling to their uses. In doing so, the question of what it means to be educated becomes a matter of institutional outcomes—standardization and documentation. What gets left out, however, is the original intent of the question: to cultivate critical thinking, inspire curiosity, and develop a well-cultured individual.

When the meaning of education is reduced to what can be standardized and documented, both teachers and students lose sight of schooling as a humanistic enterprise—one grounded in inquiry, imagination, and moral development. Personally, I adopted Richard Rorty’s purpose of education, which is to equip students with the vocabularies and intellectual tools to challenge and rethink the “final vocabularies” they inherit—that is, the set of words, beliefs, and moral assumptions through which their parents and communities make sense of the world. I did not reject my parent’s vocabularies outright but in my course work and readings I developed a self-awareness and intellectual autonomy—the ability, in Rorty’s words, to redescribe oneself and one’s world in new term terms.

So much of the goals and methods of schooling at the secondary and post-secondary level focus on the transmission of inherited knowledge—what Whitehead called, “inert ideas.” In college, however, I discovered venues—mostly outside the classroom—where fellow students and professors offered me the intellectual means, the new vocabularies, to question the “final vocabularies” of my parents and the communities in which I was raised.