We recently made passing reference to one of Mark Twain’s comments that he never let his schooling interfere with his education. We also briefly mentioned the parts of our educations that are also supplied by parents, religion, and society.
The roles that schools, parents, religion, and society play on our winding paths into adulthood vary greatly of course. Often those roles will overlap and reinforce each other, and that can naturally be beneficial. Various combinations of these entities can make for great teams and synergistic efforts that contribute to and reinforce our broader educations.
Sometimes, though, these overlapping roles create ‘turf battles’ that can cause damage if they are not treated with wisdom, perspective, and mutual respect.
Let’s examine these teams and turfs a little more closely. For the sake of simplicity and the nature of this column, let’s concentrate on various pairs of these entities, and limit ourselves only to the pairs involving schools. Clearly this approach will be over-simplified, and the discussion necessarily too limited, but perhaps it can get us thinking.
- Schools and Parents. This pairing is always in evidence and can be one of the strongest teams of all. PTAs, parent volunteers, and the like can help schools greatly, and parents/teachers can constantly reinforce some of the general mutual goals of each other (remember the days when getting in trouble at school automatically meant getting in more trouble at home?). Turf battles can erupt, of course, when parents worry about various content in schools such as controversial books, health or sex-education classes, and other similar concerns.
- Schools and Religion. This can be a very powerful team when both are helping instill obvious general values and ethics. The fly in the ointment is the word ‘obvious’, and when some religions begin to mistake more narrow dogma for general values, and insist such dogma be included in schools, the turf battles begin in earnest. The founding fathers were wise when they strongly advocated for separation of church and state, the latter of which provides for public schools.
- Schools and Society. This team is perhaps the one where each member has the most to gain (and therefore to lose?) from the other. Society depends on the schools’ ability to continue to provide new, well-trained citizens, while public schools depend on the ongoing support of society for their existence. This strong inter-dependence however can provide the most friction when turf battles develop. These battles can range from relatively minor things like evolving curricula (calculators added, cursive writing diminishing) to major foundational beliefs (free public schools versus charter schools, say).
For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to reluctantly mention one more pairing.
- Schools and Government. This pairing as a ‘team’ is perhaps a stretch. Government, especially Federal Government, can often have direct influence and control over schools. Well-intentioned programs on either side of the aisle (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) can create definite turf battles when government’s ideas about ‘fixing’ schools are based on limited or erroneous ideas about the nature of what happens in schools/classrooms.
None of this discussion is necessarily to take sides in any of these turf battles. Rather it is to call attention to how these differences can form, and to reinforce – as mentioned above – that they absolutely must be handled with wisdom, perspective, and mutual respect, or all the teams suffer. All groups suffer turf battles at times and using them to forge even stronger teams is of utmost importance to both our ‘schooling’ and our ‘education’.