Are Private Schools The Answer?

Once upon a time, educators were well-respected members of the community, and highly paid for their skills.

I’m lying, of course. From our earliest records, teachers have received little respect and the pay that one would expect. Socrates was put to death for making people think; while it’s not quite that bad today in the United States, it’s not a lot better in many schools, and in many countries teaching thought is indeed an act punishable by death. The treatment of teachers in American public schools is shameful, and the school system is often run by politicians who were “C” students at best (starting with the White House occupant), and who have no love of learning. Ironically, private schools offer two extremes in comparison: the best and the worst in education.

I won’t spend much time on the best, because we know those schools. In elementary and secondary education, or at the college level, these schools have built their reputations on being better than public schools, and they are not about to let students slip past their standards. They know that, in the long run, the best schools will survive because there will always be those willing to pay for both the excellence in education and the lifetime contacts these schools provide. I’m more concerned, as you should be, about the opposite end of the spectrum: schools whose primary motivator is profit, who give lip service to the idea of education but regularly provide diplomas to pupils who only marginally deserve the term “student.”

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with profits, presuming that you are providing the service you are paid for and not mistreating your employees. Unfortunately, in the world of education, it’s not always easy to judge the former, and that too often leads to the latter.

Ask the average student what they’re paying for and they’ll say it’s the degree. Of course, in a very limited sense, they’re right; all too often, the piece of paper has become the passport to prosperity instead of proof of proficiency, if not prowess. Educators know that a degree or diploma is nothing more than a highly subjective measure of a very limited portion of what is produced in a classroom.

One of the most memorable cartoons I’ve ever seen was by the late Jeff MacNelly. Perhaps I don’t recall it word for word, but the message was loud and clear. It featured the Professor staring out the window. He was asked, “I thought you were a writer? Why aren’t you pounding on the keys?” His response was, “Typists pound on keys. Writers stare out windows.” I suspect many general readers were confused, but I’ll bet every writer and every teacher of writing saw his point in a flash. Writing, good writing, is like most scholarly pursuits in that the task itself is less important than the thought that goes into it. Yes, there is certainly a place in our world for deadline-driven writing, and perhaps one can teach the most basic competencies of writing by focusing solely on the ability to spew out on-demand, task-specific, readable prose, but one need only look around to see the results of de-emphasizing the contemplative aspects of education, not only in writing but in any subject. Supposedly trained professionals make grievous errors that make even average thinkers wonders if they were thinking at all. Many of these “Just Do It” philosophers are the product of task-specific education, often the purview of the bottom-end private school. When the job market is tight, and employers are hiring anyone with a pulse, these schools flourish — and often rely strongly on taxpayer-backed student loan funds to enroll students who should never have graduated from high school, much less be thinking of themselves as college material. Yes, they can and should be trained to be productive citizens, but such schools often pretend to be what they are not: real colleges. Sometimes they even fool themselves, or at least mislead faculty hires by claiming they are seeking more qualified employees in order to reach a higher accreditation status. In reality, the faculty they keep are often discouraged, resigned to a system that punishes teachers for any attempt to bring high standards into the classroom.