Child Processing

By Crispin Sartwell

Out here in rural Pennsylvania, there is an old one-room schoolhouse every few miles on the country roads. On the other side of the Susquehanna, in Lancaster County, many of these are still in use, and you'll drive by in your SUV and see Amish kids playing on the swings. But on this side, the old buildings are used for almost every purpose except education. Some have been converted into small dwellings. Others are antique stores, or storage sheds.

And one sits with a quaint, if bereft, aspect on the grounds of the Southern York County district school system, where, atop the hill, thousands of kids are housed in three colossal modernist structures. The children have recently celebrated their escape for the summer, as well they might. In another few years, summer vacations, as well as recesses, will have gone the way of the one-room schoolhouse.

These two forms of the school encapsulate not only two stages in the history of American education, but two forms of life, two concepts of truth, two relations of human beings to one another and their world.

The first is a group of local children placed into the influence of a single eccentric. The latter is a machine for processing human beings. One turned out persons. The other turns out products, or processes information.

In the contemporary machine school, children's space and their time are segmented to the maximum possible degree, channeled physically through a flow-chart, monitored and recorded continuously, and preserved as information. Kids are arrayed before screens, at which they learn by mimicry.

The books they read and the essays they write are dictated by centralized bureaucracies. Indeed, in what should be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of the ideas of writing and education and perhaps humanity, more and more school systems are grading essays by computer. Students are, of course, assessed through standardized tests, for which the whole process is designed to prepare them. And then they are sent forth to take up a place in further bureaucracies of state or corporate power, of which they have already demonstrated their acceptance, to which they have already pledged allegiance.

The one-room schoolhouse was suited to an agrarian culture, and was, as it were, a family farm for children. The machine style of education was based originally on the prison and the factory, but is now being transformed on the model of the computers it serves.

The basic approach is to destroy the autonomy of all agents in the process. This is often, with an exquisite irony, called "responsibility," wherein teachers and administrators are held "accountable" for the performance of their students on standardized tests.

But every year for the past, say, forty, what is taught and how it is taught has become more uniform, until it is bureaucracies that select texts, bureaucracies that teach teachers to teach, bureaucracies that measure their performance and the performance of their students. The actual responsibility of any individual has been systematically expunged. It's as if the personality or even the knowledge and enthusiasm of a teacher is to be regarded as an impertinence: something to be deleted at all costs in the service of uniformity and mediocrity.

If Republicans weren't so enthusiastic about it, one would simply call it Stalinism.

The most annoying things for the child processing machine must be whatever vestiges of humanity their teachers and students still display. One should wonder not why there's the occasional Columbine or bomb plot, but why there aren't several every morning.

Blowing the things up would be a mild, sensible response: instantaneous decentralization.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.