Reflections on Michael Strains, “Do Schools Exist for Students or Teachers?” from the National Review, June 28, 2021
There is a feel-good mantra educators often hear and too often glibly repeat: “It’s all about the students.” It is hard to imagine boards, faculty-teachers and the taxpaying public saying and believing otherwise. And certainly students mature enough to understand the question would assume “it” is, in fact, about them—their growth, development, safety, affirmation and preparation for the future, that is, about their holistic wellbeing.
Practice suggests a more complicated reality. Parents, older students, and a host of social critics have questioned the truthfulness of this statement. In doing so, they point to everything from inappropriate physical settings to the hours of instruction and misguided budgets, all of which suggest other priorities are at play in the system.
Michael Strain is one of these critics. In his short, thought-provoking article summarizing Joshua D Coval’s (Harvard Business School) fascinating findings related to our COVID-19 experience, he suggests that teacher-centric schools exist and the impact is deleterious for students and the public.
CATE supports the development of transformational education environments. Our tendency as educators pursuing transformation is to focus on the philosophic tenets of such an education and look for practical applications. This article invites our reflection on the systems we create and the structures we use to organize and deliver our service: who really is being served, how and why? It is easy for good but competing agendas to crowd into the learning environment so the existential purpose is forgotten.