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So what to make then of broadsides from radical deschooling intellectuals (see below) questioning the very basis of our whole education system. Broadsides like these: “Schools fail to teach what they pretend to teach. Most of their inmates spend years failing to learn things like Mathematics, Science and French”[1] ....and: “An illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is a result of teaching.”[2] //
Which brings us to another question: to what extent does our formal schooling system survive because society needs it as opposed to because the Education Industrial Complex needs it? One trenchant criticism can be levelled at all bureaucratic institutions is that it is not in their nature to notice whether the purpose for which they were originally created is still a valid one. They are never going to do a Lone Ranger and ride off into the cultural sunset... “job done”. And education is no exception – it has become “a major service industry creating demands for its own services and validating its own activities”[3]. //
But I’ll finish this brief survey of deschooling literature with an amusing excerpt from a dystopian imaginative piece about the prospect of ‘Permanent Education in 1984’ because I find it eerily prescient of our 21st c. Therapeutic Culture. “A child is born in the United States in 1984. He can never look forward to getting out of school. From the ‘infant school’ he starts attending at the age of six months to the ‘geriatric learning centre’ he dies in, he finds himself going to school all his life ‘for the good of society’......and so we bid goodbye to this lucky man, the minister chants, ‘firm in the conviction that he will go to heaven where he will attend a ‘school for angels.’”(John Ohliger) //
The evidence seems to show that:
Neither schools nor parents can have much impact on a given child’s capacity for academic achievement because it is so so hard-wired into their genetic inheritance.
But the school peer group will have a big influence on how they turn out in other respects.
In other words, it may well be that formal schooling seriously fails to live up to its Education rhetoric but nevertheless has an important role to play in a child’s Social development.