Texts:1973 Universal Voluntary Study: Difference between revisions

<p>These legal parameters however need not define the issue, for just as schools are only one among many agencies of education, compulsory schooling laws are only a small part of a community's actual involvement in compulsory education. By attending to this larger process, a basis may be found for a revision of the laws.</p>

<p>Whatever the laws, education is vitally compulsory. This is not to say that to get ahead in life a person needs a particular kind of education. Rather, it is to say something much more fundamental: to live is to be compelled to acquire an education, be it good or bad, adequate or insufficient. Life <i>is</i> a compulsory education. There are no exceptions to this law. The child is born inchoate, immature. To live, she must give herself form; she must learn continuously; she must acquire the makings of a sage or a fool, a saint or a sinner, a citizen or a subversive, a hero or some variant of the muddling mean. And the community participates deeply in this education.</p>

<p>How this vitally compulsory education is faring in contemporary America is largely a mystery. There is a chronic ignorance about the way people, in their day-to-day self- education, are responding to their experiences with government, business, labor, religion, philanthropy, and mass communications. Polling does not reveal the formative actualities of inward personal response to the complexities of lived experience. What principles concerning the conduct of life do people adopt as a result of their constant exposure to the symbols exploited in advertising? What do they conclude from their experience of how prejudices are mobilized in politics? What lessons do they learn from the examples set by public officials on every level? What expectations do they form from the physical signs of wealth and poverty embodied in our buildings, means of transport, and fashions? What practices do they countenance after growing accustomed to the conventions that lead to advancement? One need not be a misanthrope to feel that much in our public world may not be suited to bringing out the best in persons, yet all of it, the good and the bad, constitutes a powerful educator of the public, with ineluctable effects whether we like them or not.</p>

<p>If life makes education compulsory, compulsory schooling may be a rather redundant, ineffective means toward the personal and social ends identified with it. Compulsory schooling laws were initiated at a time when many were still living precariously in a subsistence economy. It seemed that unless the state provided schools and required all to attend, many youths would be forced into the marketplace, never to receive an elementary grounding in the skills of self-improvement. Mass school systems were built up; first, for the sake of the young as persons who needed cultural skills to get ahead or even hold their own; second, for the sake of the community, which needed an educated citizenry in order to flourish economically, politically, socially, militarily.</p>

<p>Beyond such statements of faith, the precise features and results of universal voluntary study cannot be foreknown, for they would depend on what people chose to study. Hence, a fundamental requirement of institutional mechanics for the system would be that in their particulars the opportunities offered should be highly responsive to the wishes of the clients. But leaving aside questions of institutional mechanics, except for this one crucial requirement, we might speculate on the general types of studies people might desire, in order to form a rough idea of what it might entail in practice.</p>

<p>Provisions for early education would probably not be too unlike those we presently have. In the absence of compulsory schooling laws, the choice of what children should study would revert to their parents, and most parents would probably choose some form of elementary schooling for their children. But concomitantly, given the choice, they would probably induce a greater variety of schools than now exists. Furthermore, in addition to demanding a diversity of schools, a significant number would desire the  availability through television of a really good elementary curriculum, facilitating home education and the creation for children of special-interest groups in all sorts of areas.</p>

<p>More importantly, insofar as open study would broaden access to specialized knowledge, it would significantly democratize access to power in our society.</p>

<p>With this observation, however, we begin to encounter the difficulties. There are certain political difficulties in any effort to establish a program of voluntary study. Replacing the present system of compulsory schooling with a new one of universal study is much more than pursuing old pedagogical ends through other means. It involves making basic changes in the social system, furnishing new answers to the old question of who gets what, when, and why.</p>

<p>These difficulties and dangers do not prima facie make the innovations undesirable. Rather it brings us back to the larger matter, the way the community itself educates its members. Whether through compulsory schooling or in voluntary study, the way the state is involved in education is an undertaking of such magnitude that it has become a significant feature in our social surroundings. For the sake of raising the tone of our civic life, in order to infuse it with a renewed sense of shared purpose, it may be essential that we set about to redefine the educational responsibilities of the state toward its people.</p>

<p>We Americans have entered a period in which our public affairs have a degrading influence on whoever becomes deeply involved in them, regardless of the level of the involvement. This degradation does not result because the present is so much worse than the past. It occurs because we have lost our sense of a common future, and with that our sense of a shared purpose. The managerial revolution has been complete; pragmatists occupy every seat of power; expediently, they minister to the status quo, innocent of any inspiration. Even revivalists prefer to be guided, not by God, but by careful market research.</p>