Should education be compulsory?

Emile, Rousseau’s treatise on education was published in 1762. In it, he reflected on his several decades of trying and failing to educate the sons of the rich.

He speculated that if only he got the child early enough he might have been able to make a difference. I think in the end he didn’t really believe it: even after educating Emile well, the rest of Emile’s life went downhill. The problem all along was not that the ratio of teacher to student was bad (it doesn’t get much better than one-to-one). The problem was that the students were not that interested in being “educated.”

Schools in Encino start this week. Have things really changed?

In posing that problem today we have a situation in the U.S. where education for children is compulsory and school is boring. It is a vicious circle. Those who run public education (that’s politicians and school boards and corporations, backed up by the media) seem to be interested in control and surveillance, not making school interesting. Many school administrators, teachers and parents appear to agree with them. How else to explain the praise for frequent standardized testing, school choice and teacher accountability? It has always struck me as odd that no one points out that the better private schools (mostly for the rich) do not apply those same educational principles. We could have a long debate about what that means and why that is, but I stand by my question: why are these principles being forced on the urban non-rich?

What we have now is a hangover from the post-war period when the middle class believed in a broad liberal education and had the money to pay for it in taxes. As the gap between rich and poor widens, those on the left say that we need more money in public education and that poverty must be addressed before teachers can really make a difference. But they have lost the debate. Those on the right send their kids to private schools and then, because they don’t want non-rich kids out on the street turning to crime, they insist on increasingly draconian control and surveillance. You know a school resembles a prison when it has cameras and a chain link fence around it.

So is it time to ask whether education should be compulsory? If it is to remain so, more thought has to be given to apprenticeships and trade schools as alternatives from 9th grade onwards. That does not mean it replaces what we have now; it means a broader mix with less emphasis on academics and more on vocational skills. School needs to become relevant again.

Photo: Wikipedia/PCHS-NJROTC