The Purpose of Education is not Social Reform
One of my biggest points of disagreement with the progressive approach to education is their view of education as a means of social reform. While I seem to encounter this most from the left, it is by no means limited to the left. I have also seen the right attempt to use the schools to promote their particular viewpoint on many occasions. Their attempts are just as offensive and destructive.
I'll have more to say on this in the future, but the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch put this very well several years ago:
Like Mann, we believe that schooling is a cure-all for everything that ails us. Mann and his contemporaries held that good schools could eradicate crime and juvenile delinquency, do away with poverty, make useful citizens out of "abandoned and outcast children," and serve as the great equalizer between rich and poor (XII:42, 59). They would have done better to start out with a more modest set of expectations. If there is one lesson we might have been expected to learn in the 150 years since Horace Mann took charge of the schools of Massachusetts, it is that the schools can't save society. Crime and poverty are still with us, and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Meanwhile, our children, even as young adults, don't know how to read or write. Maybe the time has come--if it hasn't already passed--to start all over again. --(Revolt of the Elites, 1995, 160)
Our responsibility as teachers is to equip students with the core academic skills and knowledge and that is all. The attempt to do more has been a disaster. People from both the left and the right have burdened the schools with impossible demands, and in so doing have helped prevent them from performing their basic function. This does not condemn us to despair, but the hard truth of the matter is that we all need to work every day to build a better society. We cannot expect the schools to repair the results of all of our shortcomings. We've tried that. It failed. I'm second to none in my belief in the efficacy of education. But any positive social effects are an indirect result of learning, not its primary purpose.
