Systems Theory for Pragmatic Schooling: Toward Principles of Democratic Education

Toward Principles of Democratic Education

C. Cunningham

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137449320
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

Writing for educators and education leaders, Cunningham shows that combining a philosophy of pragmatism with thinking about education as systems can illuminate challenges in contemporary schooling and provide practical solutions for creating a democratic education.

1

The Schooling We Have

Abstract: American schools are organized like factories, which doesn’t work well, partly because humans are not interchangeable parts. Educational policy-makers use a rhetoric of crisis to impose simplistic solutions that fail to address central issues. Instead of asking what schools are really for, we offer a vague and incoherent curriculum that reduces everything to isolated bits of knowledge and fails to give students a sense of the big picture. A combination of John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism and systems theory can offer an alternative conception.

Cunningham, Craig A. Systems Theory for Pragmatic Schooling: Toward Principles of Democratic Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137449320.0006.

American schooling is in transition.

It is hard to see the significance of this change, because we are in the middle of it. If we could jump ten or twenty years into the future, we would see the change. Let’s hope we would see what we want to see!

Changing our schooling is sorely needed. The typical American school reflects organizational and management decisions made more than a hundred years ago, when the world was in the Industrial Age. The reigning metaphors then were the machine, and the combination of machines in factories.

Our schools resemble a collection of machines in factories more than they resemble anything else.

Students are organized into grades by their age, in roughly identical classrooms, with a single teacher in each classroom, teaching predetermined curricula divided up into subject and grade levels, using teacher-centered learning activities that require student compliance, with periodic quizzes and tests serving as quality control (Waks, 2014). Students are fed into one end of the system as small children, and they proceed in lock-step through the grades, receiving the same treatments along the way, acquiring bits of chopped-up knowledge and skill at each stage, and emerging at the other end. This basic and simplistic structure varies very little (Davis & Sumara, 2000).

What’s more, the primary thing students learn in schools is “habituation to the norms of industrial life rather than academic learning” (Waks, 2014, p. 40). Students learn to do what they are told, learn what they are supposed to learn, submit to standard forms of assessment and accept the judgments applied, and treat each other according to their roles within the institution rather than as whole human beings. I don’t quite get why this is what we want of our kids.

The world has moved beyond the Industrial Age and factory schools don’t work very well in the new age. For one thing, humans aren’t interchangeable parts. They don’t always comply with what’s expected. Factory schools ignore the facts “that learning must be active and that children learn in different ways and at different rates” (Abbott & McTaggart, 2010, p. 197).

Leonard Waks (2014) points to other failures. Factory schools “fail to promote academic achievement and the desired graduation rate”; they are “wasteful of the energies and capabilities of students and teachers”; they “fail to connect young people to worlds of opportunity”; and they “are losing their legitimacy as their failures lead citizens to withdraw their support” (p. 189).

I would add that too much emphasis is placed on the individual student, on competition, on grades, on sorting students by academic ability, and on meeting pre-specified expectations rather than helping students to think creatively and originally (Robinson, 2011).

The educational policy environment is not especially helpful. “Fixes” are legitimated through a discourse of “crisis”: most commonly in recent years the so-called crisis of global economic competitiveness (Bartos, 2012; Lauder et al., 2012; Nordin, 2014). The alarmism is striking. When international comparison test results were released in 2010, Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, said they were a “wake-up call” (Barboza, 2010). Wake-up call? I have to think that this discourse is intended to undermine support for public schooling in the United States, suggesting that nothing we’ve been doing is right. This is hard to accept. But this way of talking isn’t new: it’s been around at least since A Nation at Risk (United States, 1983). Politicians want the American public to think that public schools are terrible. Why is that?

The crisis discourse, once it becomes widespread, becomes a kind of common sense assumption that is hard to contradict or dislodge, even with good evidence. The problem with the crisis mentality is that it tries to “fix” the perceived problem or problems without considering whether the system as a whole needs to be transformed or whether maybe we’re thinking about the whole thing in the wrong way. It uses simplistic measures of success, based on simplified understandings of the needs of the past, to force changes that center specifically on those simplified measures. What’s more, the attempted “fixes” are generally piecemeal, focusing on just one part rather than the system as a whole.

Responding to the crisis becomes the preoccupation of policy makers and the public, thus sidelining the need to reconsider “What are our schools for?”

I argue that the “crisis” is not so much a crisis of schooling as a crisis of perception.

We need to change the way we see things.

Instead of running schools as factories, with a reductionist, mechanical mindset that doles out knowledge and skills bit by bit and aims for standardization, we need to emphasize complexity and the interrelationships of things from the beginning (yes, even with young kids) and encourage diverse perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking.¹ Each child’s uniqueness is a strength, and our schools need to be redesigned to celebrate and nurture those qualities. We need to reconceive of the people involved in schools—students, teachers, administrators, parents— as well as the schools themselves in terms of relationships and context rather than in isolation.

We should aim for engagement, joy, deep learning, critical awareness, understanding of systems and complexity, and belief in the value of democratic discourse. Our public schools need to take a stand in favor of democratic approaches to solving social problems, not aim at neutrality with regard to the importance of sustaining public discourse. Our public schools should be for a flourishing public.

The curriculum we have

The curriculum in American schools tends to be “vague” and “incoherent” (Hirsch, 2006, p. 317). What is learned in school varies considerably from state to state. Because teachers often get to decide what content is emphasized, the curriculum also varies quite a bit from classroom to classroom. And since the amount of content in the curriculum keeps increasing over time, teachers spend less and less time on important concepts. It’s not possible to teach everything.

Partly because of the ways schools and teachers are evaluated, but also because of a simplistic view of learning, schools tend to focus on dispensing and assessing “discrete bits of information” (Boyles, 2006, p. 67). “Coverage” of the curriculum is the priority (Gardner, 2007). Teachers try to “get through” the materials in their textbooks or curriculum guides, and students are prepared to regurgitate this rapidly digested information in papers and examinations. The overall effect is a kind of mind-numbing social reproduction. Kids from wealthier families are prepared for high-level jobs and kids from lower-income families are prepared for low-level jobs (Anyon, 1997).

What’s worse, our schools seem to be pushing a “curriculum for consumption”:

The harder you work, children have been told, and the more exams you pass, the better job you will get, the more money you will earn; with that will come a bigger car, larger house, more wine and fine clothes, and holidays taken regularly on the other side of the globe. (Abbott & McTaggart, 2010, p. 193)

The purpose seems to be to increase compliance and conformity—and to prepare young people to plug themselves into the economic order so they can earn and spend money—rather than to increase their adaptability for a changing world or help them think about the big challenges that our world faces in the 21st century.

Why do we have this kind of curriculum?

Lawrence Cremin (1990), the great historian of American education, makes it plain:

Out of a process that involves all three branches of government at the state and federal levels as well as thousands of local school boards, a plethora of private interests ranging from publishers to accrediting agencies, and the variety of professionals who actually operate the schools emerges what we call the curriculum, with its requirements, its electives, its informal activities, and its unacknowledged routines. It is that curriculum, in various versions, that is supposed to be offered to all the children of all the people. (p. 36)

Curriculum is often set by third parties, rather than by the members of a school community (Murgatroyd, 2010). This reduces autonomy and tends to define the teacher as the “deliverer” of a curriculum instead of as a key stakeholder. The curriculum that results reflects the values of those involved in its development, but not in a particularly well-thought-out way. If the mainstream textbooks that most schools use are any indication, the curriculum is more like a grab bag of random isolated facts and disconnected skills, assembled with attention to marketing to test-anxious administrators and harried teachers, rather than presenting a coherent picture of our complex world.

Thinking about schooling

The title of this book refers to “schooling,” because I am going to draw attention to general features of schooling that apply regardless of the school—even to schooling that takes place outside schools (such as homeschooling).

We need to distinguish schooling from education, which is a much broader term that covers all of the ways that people become who they are.² Schooling refers to the intentional process of organizing the activities of learners to produce learning. An education can be gotten by accident and is often absorbed from the larger culture, whereas schooling is organized, typically in institutions. Schooling involves a coordination of multiple efforts; it is systematic and systematized (Vanderstraeten, 2000).

Training is a specific type of schooling that involves an organized, intentional effort to produce specific and predictable outcomes. Not all training occurs in schools: much of it takes place in the workplace. But a lot of what goes on in schools is better described as training than as education. Indeed, we could say that the purpose of schooling historically has been to shape learners so that they conform to social expectations, which is inherently a training function rather than an education function.

Socialization is another form of training, although its purposes tend to be more general and it takes place as much in families as in schools. Historically, systems of schooling emerge when society becomes too complex for adequate socialization to occur in families. Put differently, societies build systems of schooling when typical parents are no longer able to train their children for the demands of the larger society.

To understand schooling in a given society, we need to understand how it relates to the larger society. To simplify, we can look at the society’s political economy and ideology. Political economy is the way that the society is structured, in terms of making a living, daily routines, population distribution, and voting. Ideology, on the other hand, is the assumptions that people make that shape their thinking across multiple domains.

Picture an equilateral triangle, with schooling at one corner, ideology at another, and political economy at the third. Each of the sides of the triangle has arrows at both ends, indicating that the influence goes in both directions. So ideology affects schooling, and schooling affects ideology. Political economy affects schooling, and schooling affects political economy. Finally, political economy affects ideology, and ideology affects political economy (Tozer, Senese, & Violas, 2013). This analytical framework gives us a simple model of how schools and societies are related. Models are one of the most useful ways of understanding complex systems, as we’ll see.

Let’s focus specifically on the corner of the triangle labeled “ideology,” which we can think of as the “controlling system of ideas” in a society (Hirsch, 1996, p. 15). How does American ideology impact American schooling?

To answer that question, we need to understand our own thinking. That’s not always easy. Ideologies are often implicit and not clearly articulated. For example, many contemporary teachers and school administrators use a simplistic behaviorist conception of learning that was widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries. For this reason, some people involved in schooling may not grasp the true complexity of learning. There are other components of ideology that affect schooling, many of which we will explore in this book. Along the way,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Schooling We Have
• 2  The Nature of Nature
• 3  Systems
• 4  The Complexities of Schooling
• 5  Learners and Learning
• 6  Teachers and Teaching
• 7  The Schooling We Need
• Epilogue: Emergent Principles of Democratic Schooling
• Bibliography
• Index