Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Remembering Structure in Progress

I’m so happy to have come across this recent article by David Brooks. In October, I wrote a piece for Oberlin.edu on the value of an Oberlin education. I wrote about how Oberlin equips its students to be fearless thinkers, to be innovative, to affirm that there is endless knowledge to gain. In this ode to Oberlin, I neglected to explore context, and to question whether Oberlin prepares its students to be all of these things while navigating the institutional frameworks that define our society.

I’ve talked a lot already about what it means for a school to prepare its students for the real world. This point comes close to home for me because I’ve never felt fully equipped to work within the institutions that shape the structure of my life. Whether this is a fault of the educational institutions I attended or my own is not really relevant—what does matter is, did Oberlin do the best that it could to build my awareness of institutional persistence? Did it appropriately prioritize individualized agendas and critical, innovative thinking against the way our world actually, mechanically, works?

When I started at Teachers College, I had a general sense of the kinds of things I would learn and the arguments I could expect to hear in the classroom. What I didn’t expect was to encounter readings by Tyack and others that remind us of the immense challenges of educational reform based on the permanence of our institutions. As recent college graduates with fire in our eyes and passion in our hearts, former teachers empowered by too many years of lacking power in their schools, and mid-career changers seeking a new spark, we are buzzing with thoughts we think have never been uttered before. We are scathingly, unforgivingly critical of the very system that brought us to where we are, picking apart the details of a school day, the educational units that define and bind a degree, the notion that children sit in a room together to learn. Yet as one apt writer once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Institutional theorists, those brave, seemingly negative souls, strive to bring us back to the base, to remind us that the system just doesn’t change as much as we think it will. Radicalism may be what it takes to see the change we need, but the change we need might not come from a total restructuring of the institution of education itself.

David Brooks’ words offer an important reminder. “In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us.” He continues:
“As we go through life, we travel through institutions—first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do…New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve.”

At the end of his article, Brooks calls for renewed faith in these institutions. In a way, he’s telling us not to bite the hand that feeds us. These institutions are here to stay—just as a writer derives her argument from engaging in another’s and a teacher structures her lessons around the core curriculum that has shaped millions of students before hers, we live in our world through constant engagement with the past and the present and the future via these institutional mechanisms that contain our interactions. Our institutions don’t ask us for complete conformity; they ask us to acknowledge the progress of our ancestors and to pass on a usable framework to those that follow us. In doing so, they allow us to continue forward, learning ever onward, finding comfort and strength in consistency and in our ability to critically, thoughtfully, and wisely understand where we stand against where we have been and where we could be.

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