For those of you who don’t know me already, I’m Brady Gilliam, founder of the Gilliam Writers Group. Since I’m also an M.Ed. student in Philosophy and Education at Columbia University, I spend a lot of time writing about education, pedagogy, and learning design. If those subjects interest you, stay tuned! You’re reading the first post in my new Substack series, provisionally titled, “How Else Could We Structure Schools?”
In this series, I’m going to propose a few alternative ways we could structure schools in today’s educational landscape. This is a creative thought experiment intended to help us think more critically and granularly about how America’s schools are structured, and why, and how else we could organize them. My justification for undertaking such a speculative project is that our schools are performing badly, and have been for a while. They’re failing to fulfill many of their supposed moral, social, and intellectual functions: teaching students to read and write, for instance, or fostering lifelong educators, or promoting human flourishing (this should really be the lowest bar for a school). I believe that our standard educational model is ineffective at serving most of the ends we project onto it, and that this model has not in fact served very clear or consistent ends over time. Its mounting insufficiencies are warping the development of students and teachers across the country. For this reason, it can’t hurt to imagine alternatives, and neither can it hurt to reexamine the question of what, exactly, the aims of our school system should be.
My aim here is not to glorify the past; I don’t think there was ever a golden age of American learning, a time when most schools had what they needed and teachers got everything right. In fact, “school” in the modern, universal sense is a relatively new invention – not long ago, most children didn’t attend school – and like many new inventions it has yet to realize even a fraction of its use potential. In other words, we don’t know what universal schooling can really accomplish yet, for individuals or our society, because universal schooling is itself an unprecedented historical accomplishment. To have nearly every child in a country growing up within the same set of institutions, generation after generation, and to leave so many of them hating it, wanting out, and not even receiving a serious education for their pains...it makes me wonder what kind of world we could have if we took more time to consider (rigorously, precisely, democratically) what it is we want schools to do for the young people we compel to attend them.
Schools have far-reaching effects; they are engines for the future. This isn’t a naïve belief. It’s naïve, rather, to ignore where America’s schools, in their current form, have been leading us. Most of them are factory-model institutions that serve not people but the hasty, abstracted logics of bureaucratic politics and capital. Education’s purpose should not be to harness children to these logics like oxen to the plow. It should not be to contain them in data mills for elected officials’ use. Education should bring us closer to one another and ourselves through participation in a transformative legacy: humanity’s dialogue with truth. Schools are meant to help us transform; they are our most effective tools for building a civilization that makes us proud, for developing a shared vision of community that inspires us. I use the word “inspire” here in the original sense, to suggest the possibility of a collective existence that gives life, gives breath, rather than draining it. What would that existence look like? How would it manifest in your own town or neighborhood? And how might its underlying principles be reflected in the design of a local school?
When discussing alternative structures for the institutions we call schools, I’ll consider a wide variety of factors, ranging from the material (e.g., financial models), to the interpersonal (professional hierarchies and divisions of labor), to the programmatic (time spent at school, how “level” is determined and classes are arranged), to the psychological (learning design and the student experience), and beyond. I will also try to clarify the ends best served by each alternative structure I suggest, that is, which purposes of education a given model might fulfill most effectively. Along the way, I’ll need to develop a working list of the most important purposes education serves, or should serve, in our society. These purposes are, of course, up for debate.
Because I study educational philosophy (my main research interests are institutional philosophies and enduring institutions in education), this series will pay close attention to the relationship between philosophical perspectives and assumptions, on the one hand, and organizational operations and structures on the other. I want to make the implicit, explicit by demonstrating that all institutions, whether they’re aware of it or not, reflect an underlying philosophy (or philosophies). By taking a good, hard look at a particular institution and its modus operandi, we can identify its true (as opposed to its alleged) philosophical foundations, and determine whether or not those foundations are appropriate given the institution’s stated purposes. (It is also common to discover that an institution encompasses various competing philosophies, or that its stated purposes should be reconsidered.) This method of “reverse philosophical analysis” – deducing an institution’s real principles from its outward form and behavior, and then comparing these principles to its ideal function – can help us design alternative structures that align ends, means, and values within a coherent whole.
Before concluding this introduction, I’ll provide a quick example of what I mean by “alternative structures” for schools. Let’s begin with a problem faced by many schools today: rapid teacher turnover, exacerbated by uncompetitive and even poverty-wage salaries, has become a blight on the American education system. To brainstorm solutions, we might look to professions that evidence infrequent career changes and less drastic rates of employee turnover, and examine how their best institutions (firms, companies, etc.) are organized. In some fields – law, for example – it is possible for workers to pursue lifelong advancement within a single institution (or just a few institutions), rising through the ranks via a system of peer review. So here we have the seeds of a potential “alternative structure” for schools: would it be possible to structure a school’s finances like those of a law firm, with teachers working their way toward partnership in the enterprise over the course of their careers?
This solution, writ large, might alleviate America’s teacher shortage by increasing salaries and improving career prospects. It would also expand teachers’ autonomy by giving them opportunities for leadership, and possibly strengthen job competition across the fields of primary and secondary education. But such a solution also raises questions, both practical and moral. For instance, what happens to teachers who aren’t promoted within their school? Not every lawyer in a firm can make partner, after all. Furthermore, if we agree that education should not ultimately be a commodity dependent on income, but if it's nearly impossible to test out alternative educational models beyond the private market, is it justifiable to go ahead with such tests in the hope that they will one day be replicated with public funding? Is it even possible to operate for-profit (taxable) schools ethically, in a way that prioritizes learning and student wellbeing over the profit motive (much in the way that law firms are supposed to prioritize clients’ best interests over other considerations)? If so, then why are most reputable academic institutions today still structured as non-profits? What histories lie behind that cultural norm? Who is currently contesting it, and should it be contested?
And so on and so forth. Before I begin proposing alternative structures for schools, though, I am going to make a clear argument for why it is useful to do so – an argument that upholds small-scale experimentation as an effective, and perhaps the most effective, catalyst for large-scale change in any field. I’ll begin outlining this argument in my next post…but for now, that’s all I’ve got.
Happy pondering,
Brady