The remark came – almost in passing – in a chamber of commerce leadership session I was chairing years ago, but it has stuck with me. The speaker was listing various trends and how they affected Southwest Missouri and the nation. He noted that not long after the turn of the (20th) century, industry was learning the value of specializing, centralizing, and standardizing in its factories. He then claimed that – intentionally or otherwise – education had soon begun to follow the same pattern.
Interesting. One can certainly see the truth there, and while turning out educated students is not a 12-year assembly line process (or is it?), it’s worthwhile to ponder effects on our schools of education’s natural tendency to centralize, standardize, and specialize. I have begun to call it ‘getting hit between the IZE.’ (Yes, yes, I know it would be more grammatically correct if it were ‘hit among the IZE’, but . . . ).
Certainly getting hit between the IZE is not all bad! Like factories, centralizing schools and their operations is much more cost-efficient. Standardizing operations, curricula, and tests, both locally and nationally is much more uniform, and theoretically contributes to a certain degree of improved accountability. (More on this next month.) And, specializing in subject matter should, in theory, produce better workers (teachers), with more/better knowledge in their various content areas. And none of those things is bad.
But, since a school is not a factory, and we are not turning out uniform products on an assembly line -nor would we want to!?- the drawbacks are also obvious.
We are dealing with individual students, so, the bigger (and more centralized) a school system gets, the easier it is for students to get lost, to fall between the cracks – to actually lose ‘individual’ treatment. As a natural result then, standardization begins to kick in. Rules invariably get made and applied uniformly, regardless of special cases. That can make things fairer on the surface (justice, after all, is blind), but, as in any situation, it takes away anyone’s ability to handle special cases, and the bigger ANY group gets, the more certain that there WILL be legitimate special needs and cases.
Standardization, for all its potential can also be unexpectedly cruel. Theoretically* Thomas Jefferson once said, “There is nothing more unequal than equal treatment of unequal people”, and certainly not all students are the same. Students anywhere may take equal standardized tests, but can all those students possibly have similar lifestyles, backgrounds, and cultures? Will that one test tell who is better educated and ready for the real world? (Will ANY test do that, I wonder, but that’s another column!)
Finally, the drawbacks of specialization can be very subtle and less noticeable. The more fragmented a student’s ‘education’ gets, the more he/she tends to see the parts, rather than the whole. Even in my area – mathematics – we give kids a year of something called ‘algebra’, a year of something called ‘geometry’, and so on. Rarely do we show them how they all fit together as tools. No wonder so many kids have trouble with (what they view to be) ‘math’ in general. And this is not only true within subjects, it applies to viewing ALL ‘subjects’ as part of an overall process. (It’s actually worse in elementary grades, but that, too, is for another time.)
We’ve come a long way since the days of the one-room school and I’m not suggesting we should return. On the other hand, if the advantages of size and similarity deter our ability to effectively educate individuals, then they aren’t advantages. Then, getting hit between the IZE in our schools becomes fatal for all of us.