This post is a lecture I gave at University of Luxembourg in 2011, which was published in a book, edited by Daniel Tröhler and Ragnhild Barbu, Education Systems in Historical, Cultural, and Sociological Perspectives. To save you the trouble of buying the book on Amazon for $200, I’m reproducing it here. This piece draws on material from my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail.
Schools have long been asked to solve myriad social problems, but
WHEN IS SCHOOL AN ANSWER TO WHAT SOCIAL PROBLEMS?
Lessons from the Early American Republic
In modern societies, we ask schools to fix an enormous variety of social problems, both large and small. We ask them to reduce social inequality and increase social mobility. We ask them to provide the economy with job skills that will increase productivity, enhance economic growth, and strengthen the nation. We ask them to promote democracy, improve health, save the environment, and empty our prisons. And at the same time we also assign schools smaller missions, such as improving driver safety, reducing tooth decay, fighting obesity, and deterring teenage pregnancy.
We ask schools to solve all of these problems even though they have demonstrated time and time again that they are unable to do so. Increasing educational attainment has proven to have no effect on the rates of social equality and social mobility, and its impact on economic growth has proven at best to be indirect and limited and at worst counterproductive. So why do we keep turning to schools for answers they cannot provide? One reason is that they are available. Schools are publicly controlled, located in every community, and willing if not able to take on new public missions. Another is that asking schools to fix problems is a lot easier than trying to address the problem directly through the political system.
If schools are a weak mechanism for solving social problems, however, then the topic of chapter – the movement that established the American common school system – was the exception that CONTINUE READING: David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: When Is School the Answer to Social Problems? | National Education Policy Center