MODERN LIFE AND EDUCATION 1
MODERN LIFE AND EDUCATION
Modern life and education: A hopeful critique
Anuradha Padte
Advisor: Jordana Dezeeuw Spencer
Prescott College
Abstract
This paper starts by offering a critique of modern life in industrialized nations. Itargues that modern life is based on a narrowly focused set of values that espouse individual monetary success. The modern lifestyle has led to significant economic, environmental and social crises, placing humanity at a crossroads in terms of the future it chooses for itself. Following an overview of life values, the paper examines the impact that those values have had on education. An exploration of the issues facing education and their connection to global crises opens up a hopeful discussion of ways to transform education. A focus on the whole child that is defined by deep regard for the inner person of the child is outlined as a starting point for reconsidering education in the future. The paper concludes by connecting such a transformation of education as the basis of bringing a lasting order to life around the world.
Modern life and education: A hopeful critique
Modern life in Western industrialized nations - including the United States, Western European nations and Japan amongst other countries - is based on values of modernism. Modernism has brought much technological, medical and physical comfort to the lives of people in these nations. In doing so, it has become the model for life around the world to which nations, like India, China, Vietnam and even Tibet (Norberg-Hodge, 1984) aspire, despite the rich cultural traditions and deep life philosophies from which these nations have grown until this point. The intoxicating conveniences of modern life have come from a particular set of values that arise from a fundamental view of success being primarily defined in monetary terms. Work and commodities are valued over human relationships. Individual success is often insensitive to its impact on the larger living community, other-than-human and even human natural resources are commodities utilized towards ensuring ever-growing conveniences for a narrow segment of the human populations. Each person is in the pursuit of individual comfort and convenience to the point that at a deeper more implicit level they become separate from the larger context of life.
Values of modern living, like ways of living that came before them, are intricately connected to the education they espouse. This paper is an examination of values and ways of modern living and their impact on education with a view towards defining a new direction for living and educating. The particularly critical view of modern living and education explored in this paper is based on the work of Ervin Lazlo, Alfie Kohn, J. Krishnamurti and Sir Ken Robinson amongst other scholars. While the descriptions of modern life explored are visible in large parts of the world, for the academic purposes of this paper these views are attributed to living and learning in the United States.
The values of modern living
Close to half the U.S.population identify life and learning values aligned with what scholars, like Ervin Lazlohave named “modern”, and the people pursuing the modern lifestyle are called “moderns” (p.54). As stated by Lazlo (2006), some of the values that guide modern life include:
Making or having a lot of money
Climbing the ladder of success with measurable steps towards one’s goals …
Being entertained by the media
The body is much like a machine
Either big business or big government is in control and knows best
Bigger is better
What can be measured is what gets done
Analyzing things-dissection parts-is the best way to solve a problem
Efficiency and speed are top priorities (time is money)
Life can be compartmentalized into separate spheres: work, family, socializing, making love, education, politics, and religion
Being concerned with spirituality and inner dimensions of life is “flaky” and immaterial to the real business of living (pp.54-55)
Modern values have resulted in a materialistic, consumptive, reductionist and mechanistically narrow view of life in which all natural resources including humans are utilized towards the larger goal of monetary success and a way of living that is convenient and comfortable to the economically successful band of human society.
Modernism had its birth during the European Renaissance that led to the separation of church and state. The separation of church and state signaled at a deeper level the separation of the human heart (church) from the head (state). With the heart not interfering with the head, it was possible to innovate and create by bringing together “scientific knowledge and practical crafts” (Lazlo, 1989, p.38), and their union led to the emergence of applied science and technology. Technological innovations led to the removal of humans from what were essentially human processes and pieces of work in a craft-based creation process. (Schumacher, 1968) Instead, the efficiency brought on by technological processes placed humans in a role of servitude toward the goal of product-generation, the sale of which would ultimately lead to monetary profits. This, in a nutshell, captured the essence of industrialization and the industrial era of development in Western nations.
The industrial and manufacturing focus on product-generation invaded family and community life, as people became cogs in the machinery of industrialization, their life fulfillment coming from conforming to technological processes intended to bring them material success. Community life, which hereunto was based on relationships amongst humans and with the rest of the natural world, was refocused and even replaced by individual and group gratification being derived by product consumption. The modern era that began with the birth of industrialization in the seventeenth century continues even today in the United States and is rapidly spreading to nations like India and China that have historically had longstanding traditional cultures.
Impact of modernism on education
Industrialization alsoimpacted the foundation and goals of education. Its purpose became to produce citizens who would possess skills rightly suited to serving the machines of modern product manufacturing. John Taylor Gatto (2001) states this most emphatically in his critical and passionate overview of U. S. education:
After the [U.S.] Civil War, utopian speculative analysis regarding isolation of children in custodial compounds where they could be subjected to deliberate molding routines began to be discussed seriously by a growing realization that the productive potential of machinery driven by coal was limitless. Railroad development made possible by coal, startling new inventions like the telegraph, seemed suddenly to make village life and local dreams irrelevant. (p.37)
What superficially seemed like a process of education focused on fitting people into an industrially focused economy was at a deeper level channeled toward centralized control of a large population. This “… effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete strait-jacket of democratic traditions and historic U.S.[sic.] libertarian attitudes” (Gatto, 2001, p.37). It was and is in this manner that the larger U.S. population (and others that emulate its economic ways) has been utilized for the economic success of a narrow section of U.S. society. This same segment of people also holds power over governance of the nation state. Monies and governance centralized in this manner have led to the economic, social and political stratification of U.S. society all in reverence to the core value of money in modern life.
Modern U.S. education is not only geared towards the development of industrial-age skills but also focused on fostering obedience and conformance in its students so they might take their place in the larger social and political structure of the nation. These goals of U.S. education are fulfilled by resorting to the very assembly line processes of manufacturing that it aims to ultimately serve. As identified by Levine (2009):
It puts all students through a common process tied to the clock; children progress based upon the amount of time they spend being taught in a classroom, with all students required to master the same body of knowledge in the same period of time. Beginning at age 5, they are educated in batches of from 25 to 30 students for a period of 180 days a year for 13 years. In high school, they study five major subjects a year, each in sessions lasting 40 to 60 minutes, meeting four or five times a week for 36 to 40 weeks per year … (para.3)
In the time that students are being put through these processes, they are viewed as empty vessels to be filled with information that is deposited by the teacher. Paulo Freire (2000) was the first to name this form of education, as the “banking” (p.71) model. The “banking” involves depositingacademic subjects, like Math, English, History, Science and others, separately into students. The teacher is in the position of authority and determines the content to be deposited, the manner in which it is deposited, its quantity, when it is taught and how the learning is assessed. The child is placed in the passive role of receiving knowledge from the teacher, learning it and regurgitating it on tests to the satisfaction of the teacher and standards of education. There is a hierarchy within the subjects. “At the top of the hierarchy are mathematics, science, and language skills. In the middle are the humanities. At the bottom are the arts” (Robinson, 2009, p.13). This hierarchy mirrors the economic valuing of skills - a technologically driven economic valuing mathematical and scientific skills over the arts. “Within each subject, big things are broken down into bits, which are then taught in a very specific sequence” (Kohn, 2000, p. 3). The breakdown of subject matter is rooted in the same reductionist and mechanistic concepts that drive the technological and scientific industrial process of manufacturing individual parts to create a product. By fragmenting subject matter, students are being trained not only content specifics but also an entire way of reductionist thinking that involves breaking down problems to understand them. Finally, “the model also tends to include traditional grades, plenty of tests and quizzes, strict (punitive) discipline, competition, and lots of homework” (p.3).
The economic, political and social view of the U.S. population that led to the large-scale industrial model of education also has been supported by psychology. It thus has found scientific backing for its narrowly focused goals. Alfie Kohn (2000) identifies these psychological roots:
[This traditional approach of schooling is] an uneasy blend of behaviorist psychology and conservative social philosophy. The former, associated with such men as B. F. Skinner and Edward L. Thorndike is based on the idea that people, like other organisms, do only what they have been reinforced for doing. “All behavior is ultimately initiated by the external environment, as the behaviorists see it” (Dickinson, 1989, p.12).…Learning is just the acquisition of very specific skills and bits of knowledge, a process that is linear, incremental, measurable. It says the learner should progress from step to step in a predictable sequence, interrupted by frequent testing and reinforcement, with each step getting progressively more challenging. (p.4)
The basic ways of schooling created during the industrial era have stayed largely the same. “As educational historian Larry Cuban has argued, ‘Basic ways of schooling children have been remarkably durable over the last hundred years’. His review of almost 7,000 different classroom accounts and results from studies in numerous settings revealed the persistent occurrence of teacher-centered practices since the turn of the century” (Kohn, 2000, p.6).
The assembly line driven, banking model of depositing separated subject-matter content into students is mirrored and connected to the stratification of U.S. society that is perpetuated by economic processes focused on material growth. Classrooms and schools are categorized based on the deep social chasm between the “haves” and “have-nots.” This social chasm has become the focus of education policy-makers in recent years as they aim to address the “Achievement Gap,” a term used to identify “different standardized test scores by different racial groups, a definition that assumes scoring highly on a test indicates a person has met state standards and is, in turn, well educated” (Neill, 2008, paras.6-7). The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2000 put into action by the George W. Bush presidency and that is now in the process of being renewed by the Obama administration was development by efforts started in the 1980’s as explained by Edwin J. Delattre:
[NCLB] stems from a series of reports in the 1980s to the effect that America [sic.] is a nation “at risk” because of educational failure; from concern about America’s [sic.] prospect in international markets in the 21st century; and from a sense that many children in America [sic.] are unconscionably educationally deprived. The strategy is rooted as well in the conviction expressed by the National Council on Education Standards and Testing, chaired by the governors of South Carolina and Colorado, that ‘in the absence of well-defined and demanding standards, education in the United States has gravitated toward de facto minimum expectations, with curricula focusing on low-level reading and arithmetic skills and on small amounts of factual materials in other content areas.’” (1992, pp.4-5)
NCLB introduced higher and tougher standards the achievement of which would be measured through regularly administered standardized tests. The introduction of higher standards and tests has come under much attack as it assumes that the “response to failure is that more is better and more of the same is what is needed” (Kohn, 2000, p.21). The drive to develop specific skills that lead to greater economic success for the United States on the global scale is based on the modern values of technologically achieved success and competitively achieved victory (Kohn, 2009) that has led to the hierarchical nature of U.S. society and has resulted in the “achievement gap.” Additional evidence towards the perpetuation of the social divide that NCLB is meant to address comes from the argument that by requiring under-achieving students to meet higher standards places a demand on teachers to narrowly focus curricula on standards and the passing of tests. As Kohn (2000) states, now, “minority children are also more likely than their peers to spend time taking multiple-choice standardized tests and to be taught a low-level curriculum designed around those tests – all in the name of ‘raising standards’ of course” (p.9). The more that instruction is focused on passing tests, the less likely it is that minority students will rise to their greatest potential while their affluent counterparts get exposed to less rigid curricula that develop an understanding of ideas. This two-fold effect of NCLB that comes from minority students being held back by a focus on tests while affluent students get exposed to more vibrant curricula places modern U.S. educational reform into the cyclical pattern of perpetuating the very issues that it is meant to address. Only a deep inspection of the economic values, the accepted notion of success and the ambitions that define growth in modern life can begin the process of bringing about a transformation.
The need for transformation
Motivation for such a deep inspection of values comes not only from witnessing the failure of modern education but also the larger scale, global crisis affecting humanity. Education only mirrors social, political and economic conditions. As stated by Ervin Lazlo (2006), the roots of the issues facing continued modern life in the 21st century are evidenced in growing poverty, rampant depletion of the environment and social conflicts signaled by the breakdown of traditional family structures and the growth of terrorism. Today, the “….richest 20 percent earn 90 times the income of the poorest 20 percent, consume 11 times as much energy, eat 11 times as much meat, have 49 times the number of telephones, and own 145 times the number of cars” (p.16). The relative poverty of two-thirds of the world’s population is a condition not created due to the lack of natural resources on the planet but, rather, their inequitable distribution. The inequitable distribution is brought about by the lack of sensitivity and responsibility demonstrated by a small fraction of highly privileged citizens. The requirement of material goods by economically privileged citizens and the aspiring ask placed by economically deprived people places an unsustainable demand on the environment. The resulting environmental crisis is marked by two trends - the “rapid growing demand for the planet’s physical resources and biological wealth” and the “accelerating depletion of the planet’s physical resources and biological wealth” (p.25).
With an ever-growing focus on consumptive lifestyles that rely on external sources for individual gratification, traditional family structures are breaking down. The lack of connection between family members leads to poorer community life. The individualistic struggle for economic and personal success is magnified as discord between nations. Powerful and rich nations are demanding their individual growth and sustenance by placing greater demands on poorer nations that can provide natural and human resources. Many poorer nations are indignant at the disrespectful treatment dished out to them and are responding in diverse ways. Powerful nations, then react (or preemptively act) in oppressive ways leading to further separation of nations, communities and the heart of one human being from that of another. As education based on modern values only produces more citizens grounded in the very values that have led to these crises, one cannot but beg for a response that breaks out of this unsustainable cycle of modernism.