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Perhaps no group is as self-congratulatory as public educators whose claims on the importance and successes of public education are virtually endless.  For example, they say the system is responsible for the nation being a democracy (republic for the more exact), ignoring that the nation was founded as such by the Constitution of 1787 while the merest beginnings of a public system didn't come until Pennsylvania's Common School Act in 1834 and it wasn't until as recent as the 1950s before the majority of students got as far as 12th grade.

Yet criticism of schooling has always been plentiful, and largely ineffective.  And it not just been of K-12 schools, the public schools, schools in America, or just of the contemporary system.  And it comes from many of those for whom educators like to claim responsibility - the more successful among us.

Just listing such critics would constitute more names and columns than space or time would permit.

Let's begin with 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon who said of his days at Magdalen College "they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life."  A contemporary, future president John Adams bemoaned his time in school, from which he was rescued when his father removed him and arranged for a tutor. Charles Darwin said "school as a means of education to me was simply a blank."  Some, such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had little to say of school because they had little exposure to one.  Ralph Waldo Emerson judged that "We are students of words; we are shut up in schools and colleges and recitation rooms for ten or fifteen yeas and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."   President James A. Garfield said, "to me it is a perpetual wonder than any child's love of knowledge survives the outrages of the schoolroom."  Henry Adams "always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away."

Surely today, with vast amounts of money, compared with former times, and with generations of experience, schools have gotten better.    Don't bet on it.

Former Connecticut U.S. Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, in 1970, was quoted as saying that education in this country is as bad as it can be."  Albert Einstein, after a short time in school, said that "he was, for several years afterward, unable to do any creative work."  Entertainer Orson Bean "went to a public school in Cambridge, (MA) despising every minute of it."  Comedian Jack Paar dropped out of school and worked in a radio station because the school was "not teaching anything that I wanted to know."

Marlon Brando "liked to boast that he had been expelled from every school he ever attended."  TV newsman"Frank McGee had never gone to college and had a high school degree only because he finished a high-school equivalency course while in the service."  TV anchorman Peter Jennings went McGee one better and didn't get a high school diploma at all.

Rush Limbaugh stuck it out a bit longer but "always looked at school as if it were prison...the process was total agony for me."   Canadian singer Celine Dion "hated school on her first day in attendance and continued to do so
thereafter."

Occasionally an educator will join the chorus.  Michael Marks, president of the Mississippi Association of Educators, an National Education Association affiliate, said "If education were a business, it would be out of business.  We would shut it down and refuse to send our kids there."

That, of course, hasn't happened and there are no signs of it happening in the near future.

But if successful people think little of their schooling, what have their teachers thought of them. According to Mario Fantini, " Sir Isaac Newton (was) inattentive and a bad scholar; James Watt, dull and inept...Thomas Edison at the bottom of his class..." (and subsequently tutored by his mother). "Henry Ford, showed no promise; Edgar Allan Poe, expelled from school; Franklin Roosevelt, undistinguished..."  And so on ad infinitum.

With centuries of experience with schools, is this really the best we can do?

Must this always be so?

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"It might well be recalled that the state's obligations in education are to individual children and youth; these obligations are not to a school system or to educational institutions."  Virgil C. Blum, "Freedom of Choice in Education, NY: The Macmillan Co., 1958

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Copyright 2007 David W. Kirkpatrick
108 Highland Court,
Douglassville, Pennsylvania 19518-9240
Phone: (610) 689-0633