The Element (31 page)

 

This student is railing against two things that most people eventually discover in their education. One is the hierarchy of disciplines in schools that we discussed in the first chapter. The other is that conformity has a higher value than diversity.

Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created
in the image
of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.

This system has had many benefits and successes. It has done well for many people whose real strength is conventional academic work, and most people who go through thirteen years of public education are at least moderately literate and capable of making change for a twenty. But dropout rates, especially in the United States, are extraordinarily high, and levels of disaffection among students, teachers, and parents are higher still. Increasingly, the structure and character of industrial education are creaking under the strain of the twenty-first century. A powerful symptom of the problem is the declining value of a college degree.

When I was a student, my contemporaries and I repeatedly heard the story that if we worked hard and did well—and certainly if we went to college and received a degree—we’d have a secure job for the rest of our lives. Back then, the idea that a person with a college degree would be out of work was preposterous. The only reason that a college-educated person would not have a job was if he or she didn’t want a job.

I left college in 1972 and I, for one, did
not
want a job. I’d been going to school since I was five, and I wanted a break. I wanted to find myself, so I decided to go to India, where I thought I might be. I didn’t get to India, as it happens. I only got as far as London, where there are a lot of Indian restaurants. But I never doubted that whenever I decided to get a job, I would just go out and get one.

It’s not like that now. Students leaving college are no longer guaranteed a job in the field for which they may be qualified. Many graduates leaving top universities are finding themselves doing relatively unskilled work or heading home again to figure out their next move. In fact, in January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts. It’s difficult to believe that this would be possible, but in fact, it is.

Problems for college graduates exist in many places in the world. A report from the Association of Graduate Recruiters in the UK noted that 3.4 percent fewer college-level job openings were available in 2003 than in the previous year. An average of forty-two people applied for each of these jobs, as opposed to thirty-seven the year before, meaning that the scramble for good jobs is becoming more frantic, even with a high-level education. China, which boasts the world’s fastest-growing economy, has seen huge numbers of college graduates (some estimates have it at 30 percent of the more than three million who graduate annually) going unemployed. What will happen when their economy slows down?

It is still true, though, that anybody starting out in the job market is better off having a college education than not having one. A recent U.S. Census Bureau report indicates that college graduates can expect to earn in excess of $1 million more than people with only high school degrees over their lifetimes. Those with professional degrees can earn greater than $3 million more.

But the plain fact is that a college degree is not worth a fraction of what it once was. A degree was once a passport to a good job. Now, at best, it’s a visa. It only gives you provisional residence in the job market. This is not because the standards of college degrees are lower than they used to be. That’s very hard to judge. It’s mainly because so many more people have them now. In the industrial period, most people did manual and blue-collar work, and only a minority actually went to college. Those who did found that their degree certificates were like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Now, with so many people graduating college, four-year degrees are more like the shiny paper in which they wrap the chocolate bars.

Why are there so many more college graduates? The first reason is that, in the developed world at least, the new economies of the twenty-first century are driven more and more by innovations in digital technologies and information systems. They depend less on manual work and more and more on what my uncle used to call “head work.” So higher levels of education are essential for more and more people.

The second reason is that there are simply more people in the world now than ever before. The population of the world, as I noted earlier, has doubled in the last thirty years from three to six billion and may be heading for nine billion by the middle of the century. Putting these factors together, some estimates suggest that more people will be graduating from higher education in the next thirty years than the total number since the beginning of history.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the decade from 1995 to 2005, the graduation rates of the countries with the most powerful economies grew 12 percent. More than 80 percent of young Australians graduate from college now, while nearly the same percentage of Norwegians do. More than 60 percent of American students get college degrees. In China, more than 17 percent percent of college-age students go to college, and this percentage is increasing rapidly. Not long ago, it was closer to 4 percent.

One of the results of this huge growth in higher education is that the competition to get into many universities—even those beyond the vaunted first tier—has become increasingly intense. This pressure is driving a new profession of commercial coaches and college preparatory cramming programs. This is especially true in Japan, where “cram schools” exist all over the country. There are actually chains of them. These operations teach preschoolers, sometimes even one-year-olds, to prepare for entrance exams to prestigious elementary schools (the necessary first step toward placement in a high-level Japanese university). There, small children perform drills in literature, grammar, math, and a wide variety of other subjects to gain an edge on their “competition.” So much for recess and arts and crafts. It’s a common belief that a potential Japanese executive’s future is largely determined by the time he or she enters first grade.

This is also the case in the United States and in other parts of the world. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, there is fierce competition for places in particular kindergarten schools. Children are being interviewed at the age of three to see if they are suitable material. I assume that earnest selection panels are thumbing through the résumés of these toddlers, assessing their achievements to date—“You mean this is it? You’ve been around for almost thirty-six months, and this is all you’ve done? You seem to have spent the first six months doing nothing but lying around and gurgling.”

Cram schools exist all over the globe. In England, cram schools focus on getting kids through college entrance exams, as do SAT prep courses in the United States. In India, cram schools known as “tutorials” help students drive through competitive tests. In Turkey, the
dershane
system pushes students toward getting ahead, with extensive programs for students on weekends and after school during the week.

It’s difficult to believe that an education system that places this kind of pressure on children is of benefit to anyone—the children or their communities. Most countries are making efforts to reform education. In my view, they are going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Nearly every system of public education on earth is in the process of being reformed—in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. There are two main reasons. The first is economic. Every region in the world is facing the same economic challenge—how to educate their people to find work and create wealth in a world that is changing faster than ever. The second reason is cultural. Communities throughout the world want to take advantage of globalization, but they don’t want to lose their own identities in the process. France wants to stay French, for example, and Japan wants to stay Japanese. Cultural identities are always evolving, but education is one of the ways in which communities try to control the rate of change. This is why there’s always such heat generated around the content of education.

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. Most reform movements focus on the curriculum and the assessment.

Typically, policymakers try to take control of the curriculum and specify exactly what students should learn. In doing this, they tend to reinforce the old hierarchy of subjects, putting greater emphasis on the disciplines at the top of the existing hierarchy (the back-to-basics drive we discussed earlier). In practice, this means that they push other disciplines—and the students who excel at them—even further to the margins of education. In the United States, for example, more than 70 percent of school districts have cut back or eliminated arts programs because of No Child Left Behind.

Next, they put greater emphasis on assessment. This is not wrong in itself. The problem is the method used. Typically, reform movements rely increasingly on the proliferation of standardized tests. One of the principal effects is to discourage innovation and creativity in education, the very things that make schools and students thrive. Several research studies show the negative impact of unrestricted standardized testing on student and teacher morale. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence too.

A friend recently told me that his eight-year-old announced in October that her teacher “hadn’t done any teaching” since the school year began. She said this because her school insisted that the teacher focus on preparing for the upcoming statewide standardized tests. My friend’s daughter found the endless review in preparation for these tests boring, and she would have preferred that her teacher “teach” instead of doing this. Interestingly, when my friend and his wife had their semiannual meeting with the teacher, the teacher complained bitterly that she gets to spend much less time on a reading program she loves because the school administration forces her to prep her students for the district-wide tests that come up every marking period. Good teachers find their own creativity suppressed.

Third, policymakers penalize “failing” schools. In the case of No Child Left Behind, schools that fail to meet guidelines five years in a row, regardless of circumstances such as socioeconomics, face the termination of teachers and principals, school closures, and the takeover of schools by private organizations or the state. These schools struggle to conform to the hierarchy and the culture of standardization, fearfully eschewing nearly all efforts at creativity or adaptation to the specific needs and talents of the students.

Let me be clear here. I’m not against standardized tests in principle. If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I want to know what my blood sugar and cholesterol levels are in comparison with everybody else’s. I want my doctor to use a standard test and a standard scale, and not ones that he thought up in the car on the way to work. But the tests in themselves are only useful as part of a diagnosis. The doctor needs to know what to make of the results in my particular case, and to let me know what I should do about them given my particular physiology.

It’s the same in education. Used in the right way, standardized tests can provide essential data to support and improve education. The problem comes when these tests become more than simply a tool of education and turn into the focus of it.

Whatever its educational effects, standardized testing is now big business. There’s a considerable profit motive associated with increasing reliance on standardized tests. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in the United States individual states will spend in the range of $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion each between 2002 and 2008 to implement the tests mandated by No Child Left Behind. This number includes direct costs only. Indirect costs could make these figures ten times larger. Most of this money goes to private testing companies that create, administer, and grade the tests. Standardized testing has become a booming industry. Using the GAO figures, these testing companies may generate considerably more than $100 billion in business over seven years.

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet mentioned teaching. The reason is that policymakers, for the most part, don’t seem to understand its fundamental importance in raising standards in education. My own extremely strong belief, based on decades of work in the field, is that the best way to improve education is not to focus primarily on the curriculum, nor on assessment, important though these things are. The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. There isn’t a great school anywhere that doesn’t have great teachers working in it. But there are plenty of poor schools with shelves of curriculum standards and reams of standardized tests.