On Improving Schools

We do not know how to improve our schools, and their will never be better teachers than the teachers that came before us. These are the paradoxical axioms of school improvement, and their dissonance must be accepted before actual improvement can even be imagined. The discourse of education tends to alternate feverishly within this dialectic, however, and most of us find ourselves serving an interest that is vested in stasis and the maintenance of revolving arguments. The history of education is often described, by educators, as being like the swinging of a pendulum—a handful of themes alternating between domination and contemptibleness over time. Such a history can never be progress, it is true, but it will always to be reassuring if we wait long enough. Nevertheless, the back-and-fourth of education is a game of catch between our left hand and our right. The problem is that we have long since dropped the ball.

The ball, in this case, is the project of school improvement. The only thing that can be said about this project with any accuracy is that all—or rather, both—of our answers are wrong. The conflict within education is indeed a dialectic that sustains things as they are—our essays trade thesis and straw man in order to make the same grade. The one thing we can be sure of is that none of this shit is publishable. Which is not to say that educational discourse is worthless. Our mistake, rather, is to have misread the genre of our discussion. What we read as a researched-based project manual is, instead, a form of profoundly unliterary escapism. In the battle of pedagogical Sci-Fi versus facilitator’s Fantasy we have forgotten that we are all geeks.

But we are not just geeks, we are teachers; and we do not forget, we actively ignore these horrors that cannot be comprehended in good health. We are the human eye exposed to blinding light, and our souls require something to consider while we blink the stars out of our eyes. Such are the considerations we have amassed on the topic of school improvement. But we saw what we saw, and we know the kind of knowledge that can only be denied. We know that we are reading and writing and arguing atop small, unmarked graves. Our discourse, then, can never be trivial. Even our most misguided claims are claims of responsibility by teachers. With these, we accept our responsibility for the problems of all the world and say, “We can take care of you in our school.”

Perhaps, though, we do not speak so clearly as this. Many of our schools in need of improvement need to improve their students’ apprehension of this message. Before we savage such schools, however, we should bear in mind that they are always built on burial grounds. These schools are the schools where the blinding light shines brightest—the light of human yearning for all the things that humans need.

These needs have never changed, and they are the same everywhere. There will never be better teachers than have already met these needs, and we do not need to expect more of teachers than teachers have already provided for us. Teachers know very well how to teach, and students know how to go to school. What we don’t know, and that means everybody, is how to improve the schools that teachers and students go to.

Even the strictest definition of a school requires more than teachers and students. Let us take the minimum possible criteria: a physical space for teachers and students to work in. Schools in need of improvement, however they are designated, need better physical spaces. This is an empirical matter, not one of definition. Show me a school in need of improvement that does not need a better concrete environment and I’ll show you a bucket of pastel paint in Rio de Janeiro. The empirical question of improving schools, however, is the question of how to improve the world. That is to say, whether teachers take responsibility for it or not, what we’re dealing with is changing the world. And whether we take responsibility or not, it will take more than teachers to make that change.

But teachers are human, too, and it is a noble effort for any human to improve the world. And if much of that can be done by good teachers in good schools, all the more reason to try. But pendulums are not pyramids, even if they help to build them. As teachers, we should look to the past as much as we admire the old teachers we still want to be. As educators involved in schools, however, we must recognize that most of our discourse can only serve to reduce the infinity of what can be done wrong.

Think big about your schools.