Discovering the Purposes of a School

The four broad purposes of schools discussed in this chapter of your textbook: the intellectual, the political, and the economic, and the social, will help you form a useful framework for examining what schools are and how they can operate. As you begin to examine schools more closely, you'll see that these purposes exist simultaneously, even overlapping each other. The more you begin to practice observing schools from those perspectives, the more you'll be able to see what at first glance seems invisible.

Another way to begin to see how these purposes converge is to examine the formal, public documents every school has.

Formal Statements

The most direct approach is to read official statements of purpose. Like most institutions, our schools have occasioned many official attempts to explain what they are all about. In 1986, a report sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, reasserted an old theme about American education-the link between education and the common good:

From the first days of the Republic, education has been recognized as the foundation of a democratic society for the nation and the individual alike. . . . School must provide a deeper understanding necessary for a self-governing citizenry. It must provide access to a shared cultural and intellectual heritage if it is to bind its citizens together in the common will. It certainly must enable the citizens of this Republic to make informed judgments about the complex issues and events that characterize life in advanced economies. . . . The cost of not doing so might well be the gradual erosion of our democratic birthright.1

Formal statements such as this one are typically eloquent and valuable, but they are also quite remote from the daily grind of life in schools. Stating a goal such as "schools will provide a deeper understanding for a self-governing citizenry" does not indicate how that will be done, only that that is what schools are expected to do. Broad formal statements do not help a teacher to select just the right story when students are restless or bored, or to decide how to deal with a distraught child whose parents are in the midst of a traumatic divorce.

Formal statements of purpose also may mask contradictory practices. What we say and what we actually do are not always the same. One therefore needs to look beyond the formal statements on paper to see the true, operational purposes of schools. Take, for example, the contradictory messages teachers receive about what to do to help their students. In a study entitled Teachers at Work, one researcher describes the frustrations of teachers caught between their desire to teach what they feel the children need and the drive by school boards and school administrators to have tangible evidence that students are making progress toward established standards in areas such as mathematics and reading. One method of stimulating teachers to attend to student achievement is to make the results of standardized tests publicly available. The researcher quotes one teacher who was angered by recent comparisons of achievement scores in local newspapers:

We just had all the state testing at grades three, seven, and eleven. A year ago, when all this was introduced, it was: "This is to help you better understand what you're doing for the kids. It is not designed for comparison." Yet in the last three weeks . . . all they did was compare. It is extremely depressing to pick up the newspapers and read about schools being weighted by their CAT scores, their SAT scores, when at the same time, we're being told by so-called experts . . . that we have to do more hands-on work with the kids, get out of the schools more. It's the same people saying these things. "Scores have to go up. Get them out in the world." Yet, if I don't have them here and can't sit down and work with them, I can't help them with their skill problems.2

Personal Experiences

If formal statements by official groups, even presidential and other blue-ribbon commissions, can be misleading, why can't we simply rely on our own experiences to discover the true nature and purpose of a school? After all, we have all spent a large portion of our lives in schools, and each of us has a rich mental storehouse of ideas and impressions to draw on. Although personal experience is a very important source of data to help us define what a school is, it has two limitations: the uniqueness of the schools that we, individually, have attended and the uniqueness of our own personal experiences in those schools.

The Variety of Schools The United States is a huge nation with a great mix of religions, races, and social and economic groupings. While schooling across America has much in common, our schools, for better or worse, vary substantially. Before going further, take a moment to jot down five or six phrases that you believe capture your high school.

Now contrast the word picture of your school with these two images:

strong smell of disinfectant and human sweat in the air
gritty sound of chalk scraping blackboard
fear of getting beat up on the way home
drab, greenish paint everywhere
asphalt playground with basketball backboards, but badly bent hoops
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bright colors and cheerful, sunny rooms
same alphabet cards as grade school on top of board knowing everyoneall 105in the school
bonfire pep rally for whole community before regional football championships
rows of computers in each classroom

Clearly, the authors of these word pictures went to different schools. The first description suggests a rundown school in an urban slum. The second could be a new school in a rural area. The point is that the same word, school, conjures up different images in two minds. This is because schools vary so enormously in our country. The resulting difficulty is that since each of us has known a very narrow range of schools, each of us has a narrow range of vision, which constricts our ability to understand fully the purpose of a school.

Our Personal Angle of Vision Besides our narrow range of vision, there is a problem with the uniqueness of our angle of vision, the way each of us sees and interprets our school experience. For instance, note the differing angles of vision of one seventh-grade history class we once observed. Many students finished the year confused and upset because their teacher had raised serious and unanswered questions about the widespread homelessness and structural poverty in our country. But the teacher felt that unsettling the students and goading them to ask new questions was exactly what should have been accomplished. The principal, on the other hand, thought the teacher was turning the students into malcontents. A foreign visitor observing the class saw a teacher who told the students "so little and asked them too many questions." And parents, who had to rely on their children's perceptions (or secondhand angles of vision), had wildly divergent views of the true purpose of that classroom.

The simple word school conjures up a great variety of people, motives, activities, and outcomes. But the narrowness of our experience and the angle from which we perceive it color both what we see in a school and the judgment we make about it. We have to make up somehow for these limitations if we are to really know what a school is. However, the school experiences of people in this country share many commonalities, which are explored in this and other chapters of your textbook, as well as at this web site.

¹ Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1986), pp. 14-15.
² Susan Moore Johnson, Teachers at Work (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 142.