Here’s a presentation on study that I made last weekend at the Association for Moral Education national conference in Pasadena, CA.  It had a rather long title:  “An Architecture of Study, The Central Virtue of Formal Schooling, Placed in Dialogic Relation with Works of Conceptual Art And Quotations from Conceptual Artists: Then There Is the Idea, Which Is Always Unstated.”

I’ve reduced the title to its central question.

For those interested in this type of  thing, here is the abstract.  (The visual learner crowd can just watch the video.)

“Did you learn anything from this sentence?” Through engagement with this question, the film demonstrates that learning requires attention, dialogue (or dialogic reflection), and interpretation. Each of these is further examined. Works of conceptual art and quotations from artists and philosophers are interspersed without comment. We conclude that we learned from the original question because we took it seriously, reflected on it, and forged a personal understanding based on our appreciation and reflective practice. The components of attention, dialogue and interpretation are found to be ethical, not technical, so the legitimate aim of schooling is to inculcate intellectual virtue.

Many words to be seen, so please, FULL SCREEN.

(Vimeo Link)

The first radical thesis: schooling fails. It fails to do what it ought to do.

Every child in America is compelled by law to attend school for more than a decade. The result should be a nation of people whose actions, words, feelings, and habits of thought demonstrate that they spent most of their childhood learning things, in the company of teachers and fellow-students.

This is obviously not the case.

Our nation is not seen this way. We do not see one another this way. When you pass an adult on the street, you can be reasonably certain he or she has been to school for, at the very least, twelve years. But you do not think: “Ah, there goes another well-educated American.” Our leaders in business and politics do not speak to us with the respect that twelve years of schooling should command. They talk down to us. We talk down to one another.

We all spend long years at school, but we do not become a well-schooled population. Thus, schooling fails.

Wait a second….. 

Schooling fails?  The entire process of schooling? Do you really expect anyone to buy that?

No. We expect a vigorous argument, which we will call the DICHOTOMOUS DISSENT. It will be the subject of our first video segment coming soon. So, keep following!

If you want to know why your child is failing, look at your child, your family and your school. Observe them with patience and imagination and you might learn something worth knowing. Even so, your insights will apply only to your own children. School failure, like most social failure, is personal.

But not to worry. Your child probably isn’t failing. Children rarely fail. Mostly they succeed, sometimes miraculously, against insanely long odds. They do fail tests, or perhaps tests fail them. Their schools fail society, or society fails the schools. Of these four— the child, the test, the school, and society— the child is the smallest and most defenseless. The child is the easiest to blame. But we are well ahead of our argument. The point is, if you want to know why certain children cannot seem to pass certain tests, do not read this blog. You will find no answers here.

Also, this blog does not explain why individual schools fail. Sometimes a school will collapse spectacularly, generating bonfires of ill will and ferocious press, while a nearby school gently rots away. The result is the same. But again, these are individual stories, and they are uncommon. Most schools accomplish what they set out to do. It is the position of this blog, however, that what they set out to do is for the most part deeply misguided. Even if they meet the municipal, state and federal standards, even if they achieve all their goals, they cannot educate because their goals are non-educational and occasionally even anti-educational. Quietly, without much ado, a tragedy is afoot.