After training the teachers, many educational jurisdictions don’t just provide a general scope and sequence and curricular options for teachers to choose from but prescribe the exact books that one must teach.
Education is like gardening. Like all objective truths, this isn’t a new idea, but it’s become increasingly forgotten. In place of what we once knew to be true, many have been tricked into believing a particularly dangerous sort of folly: that schooling is a kind of manufacturing operation. Today, a child is seen as a “product.” Since this “product” has the potential to reshape the world, exerting immense control over a child’s education is a way to control the future.
The public education bureaucracy controls the future by regulating everything that happens in the schools. It begins with requiring that teachers have specific certifications, which seems appropriate on its surface, but certification is mostly concerned about how to teach instead of the subject mastery required to teach well. The bureaucracy’s rules for “how to teach” have become so onerous that the collective bargaining agreements for public school teachers in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles detail these classroom regulations and are hundreds of pages long.
After training the teachers, many educational jurisdictions don’t just provide a general scope and sequence and curricular options for teachers to choose from but prescribe the exact books that one must teach. Additionally, many of the minutest details of the classroom are prescribed — from what can be on the walls, to furniture arrangements, to who is allowed to dispose of trash or reset desks and chairs to their rightful place. Only those deemed “qualified” are permitted to make these pronouncements.
Yet by far, the worst embodiment of the power and control wielded by educational bureaucrats is their ability to tell children where to go to school.
This approach to education has been growing for more than a century and a half. The results are, to put it bluntly, not great.
More than half of U.S. adults are not proficient in literacy, reading below a sixth-grade level and costing the economy as much as $2.2 trillion a year as a result.
To put this in a global context, according to a recent comprehensive worldwide study of the educational aptitude of 15-year-olds, the United States ranked13th in reading, 18th in science, and 37th in math.
Trust in public education sits near an all-time low. Only 28% have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. public schools — down a staggering 44% since the high-watermark recorded by Gallup in 1975.
Members of the education cartel have had decades to address these failings but have not solved the countless problems engulfing public education. Worse, any attempts from outsiders to address and ameliorate these shortcomings are routinely stymied. Making way for new schools would threaten the cartel’s control. As a result, more than 1million students languish on charter school waitlists. What’s more staggering, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools estimates another4 million students want to attend a charter school but lack the option in their area.
Yet it turns out that parents don’t treat their children as mere tools to control the future. They think of them as a blessing, an obligation, and a joy (well, much of the time). This places them in precisely the frame of mind to make them excellent at their job, which is to help children grow. Parents cannot do the growing for their children: Even from a young age, children will grow by themselves. But they will grow much better if they have help.
In short, students don’t need an engineer — they need a gardener.
It isn’t right for anyone to own anyone else, but until children can act for themselves, parents possess the natural authority to make many choices for them on their behalf, especially the most critical choices involving the future and most decisions that involve delaying gratification. They may not always do this perfectly or even well, but they will do it well more often than anyone else.
Thankfully, people are starting to realize, as I think, that we have been following the wrong model. We should stop believing the fictionthat we make human beings into things. Human beings are, by nature, free. As such, they are decisive contributors to their own growth. The job of education, for parents and teachers alike, is to help children grow into what they already are. The road to recovery for education in America begins with recognizing this truth.
Dr. Larry P. Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College.