Carl Bereiter: Must we educate
This reference is used to annotate "I would never send my kids to school" (2017) by Piotr Wozniak
In 1973, Carl Bereiter wrote a book about the goals of education, and the associated moral dilemmas. Bereiter isn't as radical as me in condemning compulsory schooling. He was a pioneer of direct instruction of all things. However, his book came before the golden era of John Holt, before the explosion of homeschooling, before the documented success of unschooling or democratic education, before the digital revolution, and most of all, it arrived at the time when neuroscience was still in the diapers.
Nevertheless, Bereiter could already see the misery inflected by the institution of school on children. The book includes a great deal of ideas that even today could serve as an inspiration in designing an optimum framework for Grand Education Reform.
Bereiter considered the coercive system of learning immoral. He quoted John Holt:
“Most schools,” says John Holt, “remain about what they have always been, bad places for children”. What goes on there is nonsensical and degrading. Children are bored and humiliated. Schools are continually likened to prisons
Bereiter writes about school ritual:
From opening exercises to procedures for donning coats and boots at the close of the day, traditional school life was highly ritualized. For virtually everything that was done in school there was a certain way to do it, and traditional school life was in part a continued painstaking struggle to do everything the way it was supposed to be done. Some things were difficult to master, like the requirements for a presentable piece of written work. Others, like the rituals of oral recitation, were so easily learned that many young children knew how to act them out before they had even entered school, having learned them by playing school with older children
In 1973, schools were intellectually barren, but alternatives were scant. Today's web is an explosive jungle of creative ideas for children. No wonder schools and parents crank up coercion to keep children in check:
Schools have claimed a virtual monopoly on the intellectual life of children. Television programs like Sesame Street have now begun to challenge this monopoly, but interestingly enough they are moving in to compensate for the schools’ failures in training. There is not much intellectual play in school
Bereiter was influenced by Ivan Illich. He noticed institutional self-perpetuation:
A principle stressed by Ivan Illich, is that institutions should not generate needs for their own services and for other services, thus leading to an ever-increasing dependence on institutions. Illich has proposed radical redesign of institutions, including educational ones, so that they will leave people alone, as public utilities do […] Schools, says Illich, not only make people dependent on schooling, but they condition people to be dependent on institutionalized values in all other aspects of their lives
Interestingly, Bereiter advocates that children could take over their educational destiny from the hands of their parents:
We could establish by law that children at age thirteen or fourteen could enter into agreements for the use of learning vouchers, in other words that they would be free to use them as they wished without parental endorsement. This would not end parental authority in other areas but it would end it in an area that is central to the child’s development as an autonomous human being. It would not, of course, end parental influence. Parents certainly have a strong interest in what happens to their children educationally after the age of thirteen. It only means that parents would have to work through persuasion and through what they had been able to instill in their children during the preceding thirteen years, rather than through arbitrary authority
As I never like sharp age-based boundaries, I would like to ask why could we not have similar freedom for 5 year olds? The concept of the voucher is such that it may limit options and the scope of spending. What could go wrong? We may have rules that prevent a kid spending $2000 for toilet paper for the sake of TP-ing somebody's house. It would be a pity to see an investment in a microscope go idle for years. Perhaps the spending rights could be eased in gradually as all forms of learning, development, and conceptualization are also gradual.
Quoted excerpts come from the following reference: