By Steven W. Simpson, Ph.D.
Ever since Columbine, schools have been careful to increase security measures, improve lockdown procedures, reduce harassment of students, and generally do what they can to avoid a similar tragedy. I have watched these efforts with mixed feelings and troubling questions.
Public schools continue to use the force of law and police power to make students attend. In Washington State, where I teach, the compulsory attendance law requires parents to force their children to attend an “approved” public, private or home-based instruction program until the child is at least 16 years old.
I have never been comfortable with the use of force as it exists in our schools. It is one thing to use force to remove students who disrupt the educational process. That basic police power is similar to that used in most free societies. People have free choice and sometimes they make bad choices. The use of force is to protect the freedoms of society in general. But the use of force to make all people send their kids to our schools is difficult for me to accept. It smacks too much of dictatorship, of a totalitarian demand that citizens accept a specific ideology, an “approved” curriculum.
If you teach, you know that there is a tension between students and teachers in public schools that is fear-based. The kids, as a natural part of growing up, becoming independent, rebelling against the bonds of adult control, fight against being forced to do what they are told to do in schools. They constantly test the limits, test the rules, and test the strength of the force being used to keep them in their seats in our classrooms. I wonder why it is the job of teachers to implement the force. We are educators, not police officers.
If schools were truly run as institutions of education, places where parents send their children to learn, much of the tension would be eliminated. The use of force would be by parents, who could decide what is best for their children. If they want them to attend a school, they would do what is needed to get their children there and to keep them there. If they did not teach their children appropriate behavior, the school would simply ask the kids to leave. It would be very similar to the way we operate our institutions of higher education.
People pick colleges based on the quality of the program, not because the state forces them to attend. Given the massive problems with quality and security in our schools, it seems like it might be time to reconsider the use of force as the primary method used to fill our classrooms. Perhaps by giving parents the right to send their children or not send their children to school, we could transform the profession. Security and administrative power would not be primary objectives of education management. Schools would be filled like any other market-driven company, based on the quality of their products and services.
Make schools available to all, free to all, but forced on no one. Start by allowing parents to pick which schools they want their children to attend. Education becomes a privilege, not an obligation. Parents who value education will educate their children. Parents who do not, will not. If education, as a social principle, is valuable, it will be supported. The focus will change from use of force to use of quality education. Good teachers and good schools will flourish; bad schools and bad teachers will be eliminated because no one will attend their classes.
I have always thought there is a fundamental conflict between teaching children to use their minds, to be independent critical thinkers, and at the same time forcing them into our rooms and seats, forcing them to read the books we pick for them and write essays on subjects we pick for them. Their future is determined, not on their evolution as creative and independent thinkers, but on their ability to do what they are told well, to say what we want them to say in the manner we want them to say it.
Until schools are transformed into truly free institutions, attended by students who are there as a matter of choice (their choice or their parents’ choice), teachers will always have to do police work as a part of their job. Creative thought, independence, personal responsibility and respect for ideas are the result of free societies. These characteristics are the enemy of a totalitarian state.
I believe that until we have the courage to fill our schools based on the quality of our programs instead of the use of force, our students will always perceive education as a police power rather than the privilege of free citizens of a democratic nation.
