Looking at Unschooling as a Solution to Elite Education and Apartheid Schooling

Hannah Davidoff 

This was my Self-Directed Learning project. In this project I read two books (Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite and The Way To a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol) and I created a critical essay on these two looks that also examine unschooling. This is the work I was most proud of this year and found most interesting, which is why I'm sharing it. 

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite and The Way To a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol examine opposite ends of the spectrum in schooling and reveal the problems that the American schooling system has altogether. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite and The Way To a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz was published in August of 2014 by a former Yale professor and is a longer version of an essay he published in 2008 titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” Jonathan Kozol The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is published in 2005, three years after the No Child Left Behind was created. Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is very much a sequel to his previous book Savage Inequalities, in which Kozol writes about schools he visited in the 80s and early 90s and showcased the discrepancies between public schools that hold White students and students of minorities. Both monographs reveal larger trends in the American education system and prove that only a deep rebuilding of the system, moving towards the direction of non-traditional schooling, particularly unschooling practices, is the only true fix for our failures.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite and The Way To a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz examines many aspects of elite education. Deresiewicz divides his book into four parts, “Sheep,” “Self,” “Schools,” and “Society.” In the first part, “Sheep” Deresiewicz examines what elite education does to the students. Deresiewicz argues that students who participate in this kind of education may be the nation’s brightest minds but are amiss in finding passion and being able to critically think.  Deresiewicz paints a picture of high school students who complete crazy feats of several APs, IBs, and Honors classes, on top of impressive extracurricular activities to be able to get into the elite college of their dreams. While at college, Deresiewicz continues, students quickly pick majors, in for example economics, that have no real passion to them but they see as ways to ensure that they will be able to one day make a lot of money. According to Deresiewicz, this leads to them picking unfulfilling jobs, having unfulfilling lives, and in some cases depression. From there Deresiewicz moves into this second part, “Self” where he examines what one could do to escape the dangers of elite education and lead a meaningful life. Deresiewicz argues for students taking gap years to find themselves (and gap years that are truly meaningful not just further résumé boosters) and picking majors and classes for the enjoyment of education, rather than what one thinks it will lead to in the future. Deresiewicz’s section “School” is a continuation of the “Self” section, and Deresiewicz examines what schools one should be going to get a deeply rooted education, and fights for small liberal arts colleges that honor critical thinking.  Deresiewicz raps up his book by discussing how elite education only has a benefit on the rich and the white, and examines the lack of true diversity (which he argues is gained from people in different socio-economic classes not just people from different places). Deresiewicz sums up his monograph by showing that elite education is having a truly negative effect on society as a whole.

Deresiewicz puts forth a lot of compelling information and fully analyzes the situation at hand with elite education.  But, Deresiewicz’s argument that liberal arts education is the solution to this elite problem is not true. Although Deresiewicz points out that it is second tier liberal arts schools that aim the most towards focusing on learning rather than just getting an education (and cites Kenyon as a school to pick!) there is still only little of that going on in liberal arts schools. Students that are privileged to be at liberal arts colleges went through the same system of elite education, the APs, IBs, Honors, hours of extracurricular activities, to get into liberal arts colleges that students would do to get into an ivy league, especially as liberal arts colleges get more and more selective. Furthermore, these students who are caught up in elite education rarely consider not going to college and do not pick liberal arts colleges because they feel that they are places where they will be able to spend four years truly learning. There is such a demand to get a job out of college that liberal arts students look for majors that are the most marketable to future employers rather than majors that would really interest them. Going to a liberal arts college does not help escape the elite education system, to escape this system you need to start at the roots and place students in systems where they can question elite education as a whole. Students need to be placed in systems where they can truly decide for themselves if they want to be going to college, if they want to be taking advanced classes, and be able to choose extra curricular activities that actually interest them.  In an interview with children who went to a Sudbury Model School the children discussed their plans for after high school, most of them agreeing that they would rather travel after high school rather than going to college, or at least straight to college. These were all children whose backgrounds would have usually made college “not an option” in the sense that it was the natural next step in education.  Unschooled students (a type of schooling in which the students pick what they want to learn and when they want to learn it. This can either be found in a homeschooling setting on River Valley Schools, schools that focus on "free" education with a mindset that children can learn whenever they want and that the children should run the school in a democratic style) focus on their passions in life and what internally motivates them, rather than what they are told should motivate them. Also, unschooled students who do go onto higher education focus on what truly interests them, because they are internally motivated to learn. The unschooled approach to focus on internal motivation rather than the externally motivating awards of Ivy League schools and jobs with six figures, truly allows students to escape the ideals of elite education.

http://theprincetontory.com/

Jonathan Kozol’s monograph focuses on Apartheid education, the education system in America where white children and Black and Hispanic go to different schools, are taught differently, and are given different amenities by the government. Kozol focuses on how the American schooling system has re-segregated and how once again American schools are separate and unequal. Kozol starts off showing the differences granted to white children and minority children by showing the differences in how much a school receives per student when the school has a majority of white students or when a school has a majority of children of color. Kozol cites that in the South Bronx, in a school called P.S. 65 where the majority of the children of are from low-income families and are Black or Hispanic the school receives roughly 8,000$ per student and in a near-by suburb, Manhasset, where only 5% of children come from low-income families and only 9% of the students are Black or Hispanic the school receives 22,000$ per student. He then goes on to explore the discrepancies between pre-school and early education; citing that rich New York parents send their children to full-day pre-schools that cost as much as 22,000$, while children of low-income receive little or no pre-school, citing that in 2001 more and more children were denied access to Head Start, despite that their parent’s incomes previously qualified these children.  Four years later, when the children take their first state tests, these children have received two years less of education than children in New York City who were able to pay their way to into expensive pre-schools, yet these children are still expected to perform just as well as the rich children, and are looked down upon when they do not.  “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an eight-year old “accountable” for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam, but does not hold the high officials of our government for robbing her of what they gave their own children six or seven years before” (53) says Kozol. Kozol then examines inside the classrooms of P.S. 65 and likewise schools. He explains how the schools run in an almost military fashion to have their students stay on task.  Every class is run through protocols, every student is ranked somewhere between Level Four, the highest level of success, or a Level One, a failure, and all their work is ranked on the same scale.  Kozol then discusses No Child Left Behind and the testing that comes from it. Kozol shows that testing starts as early as Kindergarten and he discusses the anxiety the children feel from taking the test. He talks about what the results of the tests mean, how if a test leads to a child being held than they are statistically half as likely to graduate, and how because of tests schools are slowly starting to abolish recess and even summer breaks. Kozol takes the second part of the book to describe in depth the apartheid education system in America talking about how a fifteen-minute bus ride separates Black children from getting a good education.  He talks about how there was an idea to be able to transfer students to different schools but that most eligible students ended up not being able to. He says that we are “playing games of musical chairs with children’s lives, when half the chairs are broken and the best chairs are reserved primarily for people of his [George Bush] class and race” (204).  He then discusses why integration is necessary, that it is necessary not because we want to raise the test scores for African Americans but because we want to be able to give all students an equal chance at success. He argues that students who attend apartheid schools are not protected by the state but are still expected to be held to national standards and be functioning citizens in our society; essentially we are holding them to the standards of citizenship without giving the equal rights to be able to do so.  Kozol concludes his monograph by proving that our education system is separate and unequal and that there needs to be change.

Kozol makes a strong argument, although some of his data is outdated, through out The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America that the American schooling system is separate unequal.  But, Kozol does not offer a solution to this problem. He writes a little bit about having teachers march on the streets in protest of what is going on, but he does not offer a solution for structural change. Kozol writes about “free” schools and brushes them off as a possible solution. Although Kozol has argued against the military practices seen in public schools he dismisses “free” schools as lacking substance. But, unschooling practices do not lack substance; rather it gives the students the ability to create the substance they want to be learning. Right now in public schools across America students are told that they need to be reading at a certain level by third grade, that if they cannot multiply up to twelve in third grade they are dumb or a “level one,” but studies show that this is not developmentally appropriate.  For reading, there is no actual need to be teaching reading, when a child decides that she is ready to read she will learn to read. Math can also be taught organically and children will learn it as they go through life experiences. The main obstacle with unschooling practices is that it is assumed that the children have enough support at home and can come from literacy homes, which helps children develop.  In its fullest sense that would mean that low-income children or children of parents who are illiterate or non-english speakers could not benefit from unschooling. But, there are ways to add in unschooling ideals into a structured public school. Adding in free play and free exploration times are excellent ways to include unschooling into classrooms.  Children do not learn best in a military structured classroom and instead need to have an environment where they can get unstructured learning time.

 jonothankozol.com

There is an epidemic in schools across America were students are failing to really learn. In elite schools students have stopped caring about the subject of learning and focus only on the end goal of a selective college and one day getting a good paying job. In apartheid public schools, students are second-rate education and given a military style education that feeds into the school to prison pipeline.  Our school systems need to be encouraging internal motivation not tests scores, and the only way to do that is by rebuilding what our system stands for.  Increasing free play and free exploration time in schools, and other unschooling type practices, could ultimately change the schools for the better.