The problem with much of the present talk about school reform is that everyone is talking about means without talking about ends. President Reagan and others are talking about merit pay, performance evaluations, more homework, longer school days and years, tougher discipline (which usually stands for more punishment). But these are all means to the educational end, though they are talked about as if they are ends in themselves, as if all these recommendations were sufficient to create the change everyone wants.
The problem with talking about these things as if they were ends in themselves is that it avoids the talk about the more intangible but certainly more important issue of attitudes and beliefs. What, after all, is the end of the educational enterprise? Or rather, the ends, for the enterprise should match the diversity of the people it teaches, and no single end can encompass everyone. Is it to teach people simply to read and write? If that were true, then it would be best to do that at a young age and put the money into creating good libraries, so that the person could pursue an education according to his or her own wishes. We don't need multibillion dollar industries to teach the rather simple and natural tasks of reading and writing. Is it to create Jefferson's informed citizenry? A nice rhetoric, of course, but what is "informed"? Being informed means being involved, and how can students be involved if they are secreted away in institutions and kept busy doing busy-work? These are hard questions because they are philosophical, not technical, and cannot be "solved" by the advocacy of particular means. In fact, they are not questions that can be solved at all, but must be continuously asked as a way of checking the solvency of our thinking and the goodness of our actions.
I would like to offer some ways to think about these questions, some ways to get at the understanding of what education could be doing.
Formal public schooling in any democratic society has a double burden. On the one hand, it works to promote the individuality of the student. On the other hand, it tries to curb that individuality so that the student fits into society. The latter is always the easier course of action because authoritarianism is always easier, though more destructive in the long run, than the patience and intelligence to sit and listen and guide and allow for differences. I think we first need to think about how these two intentions can be balanced. Do we teach much about democratic responsibility and personal self-government by forcing young children to attend schools, under the penalty of law? Do we teach much about the need to make personal choices with as much information as possible by not allowing students a say in how they are educated? The answer is no. One way to think about school reform is to think about how to better make students a functioning part of the system other than being the passive recipients of whatever teachers and administrators want to hand out. This will encourage a sense of responsibility and pride in self and institution, in addition to teaching them what it means to participate and volunteer (a cause dear to the heart of libertarians, who call for the dismantling of the whole shebang).
Another area to talk about is curriculum. Many of the reformers today are talking about more homework, and it's true that people learn more when they spend more time "on task," which is only common sense. But a question should also be raised about what it is they are supposed to be spending more time on. Are teachers simply going to give an absolute amount, pile it on, in other words? This is closer to burying students than it is to encouraging independent thinking. What, after all, is homework? What's it for? Doesn't science, for instance, have anything to do with history? Doesn't English have something to do with art? The reason more homework and stricter discipline about doing it won't work is because it only further divides a divided curriculum. Schools, for the sake of bureaucratic convenience, have always divided up the learning into discrete units, into departments, and very few programs exist where these departments acknowledge that knowledge overlaps, that how Melville wrote had something to do with the history of his times. This way of integrating knowledge, of making people see connections, should be the raison-d'être of a curriculum. And homework should spin off this. Only then will the homework have something like a logical reason for being heavy, insistent, and constant. And it may get done by students who are delighted to find connections. After all, students suffer from a debilitating sense of unconnectedness as it is, and humans generally don't like to feel isolated. Changing the curriculum can make people feel more involved while tying them closer to the concerns of the society around them.
Another notion that might be questioned is, Why should students spend all day in school? What, after all, is the purpose of making school what they do with their lives, what they do for a living? Longer school days and years, especially if it means increased burdens of homework, will cure nothing. School could be combined with work programs or apprenticeships, and most especially for those students in college tracks who never get to take car mechanics. This will have several results. One would be to cut down the sometimes harmful division of school society into the "innies" and "outies." The "good" kids never hang around with the "bad" kids, and it's a shame because there is a lot there to share. Second, people might learn a useful trade. Schooling by itself is not a useful trade. Right now, it cannot be exchanged for anything except more schooling, until one gets the magic degree that offers the key into the work force. This is absurd and a waste of time and talent. Students should be learning all along what it is they might like to do with their lives, even if it's a plurality of careers rather than just one single enterprise.
This is really a book-length topic, and I promise to stop before it goes that far. But the thinking about school reform cannot be based on the notion that we have always done it this way, and that what we need to do is more of the same. We need fresh thought, exciting innovations, even radical experiments. After all, if the "back to basics" education gives us people like Ronald Reagan, we certainly need to rethink the whole enterprise.