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“What are the Goals of Schooling?”

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?

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.

    “The Lost Art of Implementation”

    by Alan Jones

         Over the last decade, schools have been inundated with reform initiatives, each introduced as a solution to the challenges revealed by national and international assessments. These scores consistently show stagnant or declining student achievement, prompting wave after wave of new programs and policies. Schools typically comply with these yearly initiatives through a managerial version of “implementation,” which usually consists of the following moves:

          Move #1:    Assign the initiative to a subordinate

          Move #2:    Distribute the required materials

          Move #3:    Schedule orientation workshops

          Move #4:    Establish timelines for turning in required accountability documents

          Move #5:    Compile data from accountability documents

          Move #6:    Prepare report on initiative outcomes

          While this managerial version of “implementation” checks the boxes of compliance, it has little to no impact on classroom practice or the deeper culture of the school. Regardless of the initiative’s merits, lasting change in classroom practice and school culture demands systemic—not compliance-driven—implementation. Systemically driven implementation consists of the following moves:

          Move #1: VISION

          Administrators bring teachers together in various meeting formats to present a clear image of success. That image may reference key data points, but it also entails what teachers and students should be doing in the classroom. This vision can be reinforced through different forms of media that model the classroom practices promoted by the initiative. Most importantly, these gatherings allow administrators and teachers to surface diverse perspectives and work toward consensus on the initiative.

          Move #2: STRATEGY

          Too often, school change initiatives lapse into fragmentation, superficiality, and burnout. To prevent “reform fatigue” administrators develop a strategy consisting of four parts: a)  a plan that takes into account the uniqueness of the schools and clear understanding of the dimensions of the change; b) the ability on the part of administrators to act adaptively both in overcoming obstacles and in staying the course on reform goals; c) the willingness on the part of administrators to negotiate changes in approach in light of new understandings of conflicting points of view; d) the skill on the part of administrators to take advantage of unexpected recourse and assistance; and e) the experience on the part of administrators to make formative adjustments, based on assessing whether the overall system is progressing, stalling, or degenerating.

          Move #3: STRUCTURE

          Most reform initiatives falter because schools fail to align their organizational system to fully operationalize the reform’s vision and strategy. Every reform initiative demands adjustments to core instructional systems—curriculum, professional development, technology, and scheduling—to absorb unfamiliar ideas and practices.

         Move #4: RESOURCES

          What is often overlooked in adopting a reform initiative is the assumption that schools already have the material and personnel resources needed to carry it out. More often than not, midway through the adoption process, a critical resource is missing, leading to modifications that David Cohen terms “lethal mutations” of reform theories, concepts, and practices.

          I am certain that administrators reading this blog would nod in recognition at the implementation moves described above. Yet the question remains: remains: Why do most schools fail to fully implement mandated initiatives? Entire libraries could be filled with explanations for reform failure. I would reduce them to a single cause: most school administrators approach systemic reform with a managerial rather than an educational mindset.

          I have devoted numerous blogs to the distinction between a managerial and educational mindset. Suffice to say in this blog, that a managerial mindset views the adoption of a reform initiative as a problem of mechanics—the what and how of implementation. An educational mindset views the adoption of a reform initiative as a problem of culture—the why of implementation. The systemic-driven reform moves described above design a process—vision–>strategy–>structure–>resources—that draws a teacher into activity structures that embed the “why” of the initiative into what and how of implementation. Although reform initiatives may initiate some changes in teaching practice, comprehensive adoption of new theories and methods necessitates substantial guidance and support, particularly through an emphasis on the underlying rationale for implementation.

    REFERENCES

    Cohen, D. K. (1990). A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 12(3), 327–345.

    Confrey, J., Castro-Filho, J., & Wilhelm, J. (2000). Implementation Research as a Means to Link Systemic Reform and Applied Psychology in Mathematics Education. Educational Psychologist, 35(3), 179–191.

    Seven Forms of Inquiry in Education: Essential Questions

    by Alan Jones

    When educators gather for meetings, conferences, workshops, or institute days, the term critical thinking is always on their lips. Yet, while everyone assumes the meaning is commonly understood, little time is actually devoted to defining what critical thinking is or to exploring the modes of inquiry it encompasses.” Listed below are seven forms of educational inquiry that a critical thinker might use to develop answers to the everyday questions that arise in main offices and classrooms.

    Type of InquiryCore QuestionDefinitionSchool-Based Example
    Ontological (What is real?)What exists? What is the nature of being?Examines the essence of things — what they are.What is “learning”? Is it memorizing facts, or developing the ability to think critically?
    Epistemological (What counts as knowledge?)How do we know what we know?Investigates the sources, justification, and limits of knowledge.Is student knowledge best measured by standardized tests, or by projects and portfolios?
    Methodological (How do we study it?)What methods should we use to gain knowledge?Focuses on the tools and procedures for inquiry.Should we evaluate teaching effectiveness with test scores, classroom observations, or student feedback?
    Political (Who decides?)Who has power and whose interests are served?Looks at authority, governance, and allocation of resources.Who decides the curriculum — the state, the district, or the teacher? Why do some schools get more funding than others?
    Representational (How is it shown?)How is reality or knowledge represented?Examines the role of language, symbols, numbers, or images in shaping understanding.Do grades and test scores truly represent student learning, or do they distort it?
    Analytical (What does it mean?)What are the parts, assumptions, and logic of a concept or argument?Clarifies terms and exposes assumptions through critical analysis.What do we really mean by “student achievement”? Does it include creativity, growth, or just test performance?
    Practical (What should we do?)Given what we know, what action should we take?Oriented toward decision-making and application in real-world contexts.How should a school respond to learning loss — more testing, tutoring programs, or curriculum changes?

    “The Grammar of Schooling Defined”

    by Alan Jones

     In previous blogs I have used the term, “The Grammar of Schooling,” to describe the classroom routines that teachers throughout our country perform on a daily basis. I use the term to highlight how uniform teaching routines are in this nation—and how these routines act as powerful barriers to instructional approaches that foster deep intellectual engagement with content and skills. The best description of the “grammar of schooling” emerges from John Goodlad’s landmark study of 1,000 classrooms across the United States. Goodlad’s study was carried out more than forty years ago, yet it still mirrors the dominate model of teaching in our schools today.

    John Goodlad’s Description of the Grammar of Schooling  

    –>The dominant pattern of classroom organization is whole group instruction where the goal of the teachers is to maintain orderly relationships among 20 or 30 more students in a small space.
    –>Students generally work alone within a group setting.
    –>The teacher is the central figure in determining all classroom decisions—class organization, choice of material and instructional procedures.
    —>Teacher spends most of their time in front of the class talking to students. The remainder of time is spent monitoring students’ seatwork or conducting quizzes or tests.
    –>Rarely are students actively engaged in learning directly from another or initiating processes of interaction with teachers.
    –>Rarely do teachers praise students or provide feedback on students’ performance.
    –>Students generally engage in a narrow range of classroom activities—listening to teachers, writing answers to questions, and taking tests and quizzes. Students receive relatively little exposure to audio-visual aids, field trips, guest lectures, role-playing, manipulation of materials, or hands-on activities.
    –>The subjects students like most involved drawing, making, shaping, moving, and interacting. These subjects were regarded as the easiest and least important.
    –>There was strong evidence of students not having time to finish their lessons or not understanding what the teachers wanted them to do.
    –>A significant number of students felt that they were not getting sufficient teacher help with mistakes and difficulties.
    –>In social studies classes (where you would expect a great deal of discussion) 90% of instruction involved zero discussion. In the remaining 10% discussion lasted on average for 31 seconds.
    –>Teachers who claim they are leading discussions, are, when observed, often leading recitations.