STILL THE SAME 95 YEARS LATER
George Bernard Shaw on Education

Looking for audition monologues earlier today, I happened upon a 1910 Shaw treatise called "Parents and Children." Overall, the essay appears to deal philosophically with the problem of raising children in an industrial society. Interesting, but not enough to get me to read the entire piece--it's longish. But then a section on eductation caught my eye, and I just had to check it out. I found myself amazed that his criticisms of schooling then are so extraordinarily similar to my own today.

Look:

And this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced to learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was the phrase in my time--or let a master strike us with a cane and fall back on our pride at being able to bear it physically (he not being allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have been taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable routine.

And

To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to keep children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part in life as responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible to maintain freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of constitutional history, law, and political science, with its basis of economics. If as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us all understand Ricardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the face of the world would have been changed for the better. But for that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially subversive knowledge from us, with the result that in public life we are either place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.

Click here for the rest, and if you don't feel like reading the whole thing, scroll down to the section entitled "School" to get the bits on education.

Education is not about learning as much as it is about subservience to an institution or system which is hopelessly laden with the dual imperatives of authoritarianism and obedience. Indeed, the system itself is authoritarian, and "obedient" is the best thing that can be said of a student inside that system. Everybody involved in the public schools, from students to teachers to administrators to staff, believes that what they all do is for the purpose of learning. So pervasive is this view that many students don't think they're being educated if they're not slaving away on meaningless "worksheets" or other equally torturous, dead-end assignments--it doesn't matter if they're actually learning; it's the work that matters, getting tasks done in the specified way in a timely manner. Comprehension plays a role in that, yes, but a rather minor one in the grand scheme of things. Getting it done in the right way is what counts. That's what "learning" means to all these people.

But then, the day-to-day moment-to-moment reality belies such a belief. One has to realize that what actually happens in schools has very little to do with learning as popularly understood, that is, the mastery of certain bodies of knowledge and facility in analyzing and evaluating such information.

If school really was about learning, then all those days and moments would add up to an enlightened population. They do not. What they do amount to is a docile, self-interested public that knows nothing of our democracy or its role in it, but fully understands that if one is to get anywhere in life he must do as he is told. Just as we did in school. Education, as Americans know it, is simply a fiction: the reality is that the schools' main purpose is to indoctrinate children into the culture of obedience and authority.

You can call it whatever you want, but titles and names don't change what actually happens. And one of the most brilliant English speakers of the last couple of centuries knew this unsettling truth 100 years ago.

Why has nothing changed since then?

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