EDUCATING CHILDREN OR TRAINING CIRCUS ANIMALS?
here’s a wonderful line in Michel Foucault’s 1975 masterwork, Discipline and Punish, in which the author asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
The question replayed again and again in my mind yesterday as I read The New York Times‘ front-page storyabout the city’s Harlem Success Academy charter chain. The article delineated in excruciating detail the Gradgrindian world of these schools, in which elementary students are known to wet themselves during practice tests (unclear if it’s the result of a no-bathroom policy or just sheer terror over yet another drill whose results will be publicly posted), sit cross-legged in carefully-prescribed postures (a teacher may be instructed to “reset your carpet expectations” when they do not), and public shaming of underperforming students the norm (one teacher reported being scolded by an administrator for failing to tear up a student’s failing paper in front of her).This is all justified, of course, by the chain’s great success in elevating test scores. According to the article, overall passing rates in the city last year for reading and math tests were 29% and 35%, respectively; the comparable figures for the Success Academy chain were 64% and 94%.
I don’t doubt the numbers. But the problem is that this “success” is based on the very dubious premise that the end justifies the means. And, perhaps worse, that these “means” are the only route to a very questionable “end.”
First, a word about the “end.” Raising student achievement and test scores is a laudable enough “end.” But when it becomes the sole goal of education, something is terribly wrong. These are not law school graduates in their 20s preparing for a bar examination. These are young, impressionable children, learning how to navigate their way in the world. They are learning — or should be — how to be around other people, how to solve problems, how to think critically, and yes, how to master basic skills that will be useful to them later in life. The ultimate goal of any educational enterprise should be to develop a love of lifelong learning that students can take with them when they leave the classroom. Should a child who fails a test be deprived of the opportunity to learn anything that’s not on the test? Schools should be places where, as the educational philosopher Nel Noddings puts it, children feel cared for and the individual needs of all children are acknowledged and attended to. All children deserve a complete education, not a training program that treats them like circus animals who can perform well on standardized tests. It’s hardly news, but there is far more to educational “success” than high test scores.
So the “end” of producing superior test-takers is, at best, questionable. But even if we accept the goal, how does that justify the “means” Success Academy uses? Would we accept it if a school used physical punishment to motivate students? If they hung children out in the stockade when they failed a test? Even if these methods routinely produced high “achievement” in terms of test scores? Of course not. So why do we accept such tactics as mandating posture, punishing students if they do not make eye contact with the teacher, posting the names of failing students in a “red zone” for all to see, merely because the school that employs them has a good track record of producing higher test scores? Is there no thought to the terrible consequences these methods may produce in the hearts and minds of these young children, consequences that may well outlive the results of any one standardized test? Is breaking a child’s spirit a pre-requisite for academic success?
Like most advocates of this model, Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz blithely dismisses criticism of the chain’s methods with the comment, “Maybe some people prefer chaos. We Educating children or training circus animals? | Totally Random:
