So on the AERO (Alternative Education Resource Organization) list I participate in, we have been going back and forth on why have none of the attempts to craft more humanistic educational alternatives caught hold with the public. That said, we may be getting close to a “tipping point” where we somehow achieve a critical mass for real educational transformation, rather than the ever present “reform”.

So why haven’t educational alternatives really appeared in the greater public’s radar and in the mainstream media? I don’t feel like I have the answer, but I spend a fair amount of time pondering the question, since I have committed myself to try and be an agent for change. Here at least are some of my thoughts on the subject…

First, we progressive people may have squandered our opportunity the last time the political pendulum swung to the left in the 1960s. Maybe we were guilty of hubris, or resting on our laurels, or putting forward our own version of a flower-power “one size fits all” world. Maybe all the mocking criticism (some deserved) of “free love” and “tune in, turn on, drop out” tarred the good educational ideas of the 1960s along with some of the hubris. I’m not qualified to judge… in 1969 I was just a fourteen-year-old wannabe hippy radical who had never been anywhere near sex or drugs or fighting against “the man”.

Second, our country has a profoundly conservative, religious cultural thread woven through our history, that they minimize in most of the secular history classes you get in school. That thread went underground after the Scopes Trial in 1926, when William Jennings Bryan and his biblical fundamentalism was publicly scorned. That religious conservatism reemerged started reemerging in the conformity and anti-communism of the 1950s, the Goldwater campaign for president in the 1960s and with a vengeance in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the Moral Majority, the Contract for America and so on. Again, progressives may have been guilty of hubris and not looking for consensus with, or a many paths sort of accommodation with this conservative thought

Third, even though we live in a democracy, it may be more of a hierarchical democracy than an egalitarian one. One can argue (as radical educator John Taylor Gatto does) that we still have an elite that have the majority of the power and live pretty much in their own ossified world. Consistent with the Prussian education system that was Horace Mann’s model for our public schools, the elite have their own schools and other learning paths, and the regular folk who join the elite generally do so by finding an alternative learning path outside of school (e.g. Bill Gates, Michael Dell, etc.). The argument continues that it is not in the interest of this elite to allow the “common schools” to change from their conventional one size fits all instructional model, because that change could produce more powerful individuals who could challenge the power base of that elite.

Fourth, we Americans believe (unlike Europeans) that the key tool for societal evolution is education rather than politics. Yeah we have a democratic country, but we don’t really fully engage in the democratic process that much to try and move society forward. Instead we try to socially engineer our schools to raise the next generation to be better somehow, however the particular powers that be define “better” at the time. So because it plays this critical political role in our cultural evolution, our education system falls victim to whichever political ideology is in ascendance in the country, and for the last thirty years, a conservative ideology has been in ascendance.

Again… I am not sure if any of these are the answer… but this is just what occurs to me based on my own experience and what I have read. I’d be interested in your thoughts on this if you would like to chime in and comment. The flow of history is such a complex narrative weaving together so many threads.