Who needs school?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce is granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I’ve thought about this question often. A new year’s resolution prompted me to ask the question again. I had resolved to organize the zillions of photographs I’ve taken since I first acquired a digital camera. I needed a free, desk-top program with artificial intelligence capability. I did not want to use a cloud-based system where commercial providers use my photographs to train their algorithms and add to their repository of my personal information. I found what I was looking for. I found written and video material to learn how the software worked. There was a user group (they are called communities these days) where I could post questions and receive help in the form of crowd-sourced replies.

The experience reminded me of the many times I use the internet to access information and develop skills. I’ve had many successes and one monumental failure. My culinary abilities, such as they are, were honed with recipes from the internet. A couple of weeks ago, I learned how to replace a water filter. I cannot recall the last time I was unable to find something I wanted to know or be able to do. If information is freely available online, who needs school anyway?” 

There are some parents who are determined to eviscerate or at least control the substance of schooling and its important contribution to critical thought. In the US they are pursuing legislation to ban materials and teaching of topics that might cause psychological discomfort to students. The term “psychological discomfort” is code for anything with which the parents disagree.  

If passed, legislation such as the bill to which I referred above would make teaching about sexual orientation / gender-identity, racism, or any other contested topic perilous for teachers, schools, and school systems. If such legislation were to pass in British Columbia, the curriculum would require revisions to remove such competencies as “make reasoned ethical judgments about actions in the past and present, and assess appropriate ways to remember and respond.”  

Students cannot learn to make reasoned ethical judgments from the internet. It is too easy to find dogma and ideology -- the enemies of reasoned judgment – on the internet. If dogma and ideology replace reasoned judgment, school becomes unnecessary because one of the purposes of schooling is to acquire the values that make us human (empathy, compassion, etc.) and enable us to distinguish right from wrong.  

Schooling tries to cultivate the ideas that other people are no more or less important than we are and that our claims will be considered impartially along with the claims of others. This process often causes disequilibrium and discomfort when applied to non-trivial issues. For example:  

·        How could pious people who advocate for the rights of people enslave other human beings?

·        Are there justifiable reasons for permitting children to be taken from the parents and denied the opportunity to speak their own language?

·        Does my freedom allow me to behave in ways that cause harm to others?

·        Are there circumstances that justify taking the lives of others?

·        Was the trucker blockade in Ottawa an urgent, temporary, and critical situation that seriously endangered the health and safety of Canadians or that seriously threatened the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada?

·        How should a society balance the rights of individuals with the needs of the collective?

These are the kind of questions likely to cause discomfort. Ensuing discussion might include: “Would you change places with: the person who was enslaved? the child removed from her family? the person who was harmed? the person whose life was taken?” Other discomforting questions include: “How are you defining [freedom or some other key term]?”  “What is your evidence for that claim?” “Is what you just said consistent with what you said earlier?”  

If we do not want our children and grandchildren to learn what is required to make ethical judgments, we can leave their education to the internet. To put it another way, if we are content to live in a world governed by dogma and ideology, schooling as we know it is unnecessary. Discomfort is an inevitable by-product of the school’s effort to expose children and youth to an environment that is larger, more complex, less cohesive, and more diverse than their families.