Reforming the High School System

Introduction
Paulo Freire rejected the traditional method of teaching, which consists mainly of passive learning, and advocated a more active learning approach. The style of learning he said worked best at shaping students was something similar to the Socratic method of dialogue and inquiry. This made students more engaged. Instead of sitting in their desks like passive receptacles waiting for information to be downloaded into their brains, they become more like participants in their own education, taking ownership of the educative process (Micheletti). The focus on active learning and the Socratic Method is what high schools need now more than ever. Considering that the U.S. Department of Education has found that every 26 seconds a student drops out of high school for a total of 7,000 students per day quitting school before they graduate, one can see that there is a veritable mass exodus of children from the education system (DoSomething.org). Why are they leaving? Freire contends that it is obvious: they are not being challenged to take ownership of their own education and their own lives—so they are leaving to do it themselves, to take control of their futures on their own. If the schools are going to treat them like mindless automatons, tasked merely with sitting in a desk and receiving input while teachers apply the “banking concept of education,” it is no wonder they are leaving in droves. They are not being given anything that in their estimation is worth their while—and who can blame them? As Lickona and Kristjansson have noted, schools need to be reformed by focusing on character education, and the way to do that is to use the methods of the ancients—Aristotle and Plato—to help students learn more both about themselves and about their roles and duties in the world. This paper will show that the best way to reform high school is to combine the recommendations of Freire with the recommendations of Lickona and Kristjansson to empower students to take ownership of the educative process through active inquiry and dialogue with teachers.
The Oppressed
In Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the reformer notes that love and humility have to be at the root of reform: “if I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue…[and that] dialogue cannot exist without humility” (90). The teacher must have both in order to help students to take ownership of the educative process. A teacher who enters the classroom with an attitude of superiority as though he were the king of the castle is not going to click with many students. Students in high school have been in school for most of their lives by that age. They do not want to be treated like children anymore: their bodies and minds are maturing and they resent being asked to sit like docile five year olds waiting to receive their nugget of information. They have questions—millions of questions—and the teacher should be there to help answer them. The idea that the teacher is there only to stick to the standardized curriculum pushed on schools by the U.S. Department of Education is ludicrous. The U.S. Department of Education is not in the actual classroom dealing with actual real life students who want to know about everything—why girls are the way they are around boys, what it is like out in the real world, whether marijuana really is a gateway drug, why people get married, whether college is actually worth it. The U.S. Department of Education thinks of kids in high school as like little passive robots waiting to be programmed—and the schools at the local level play along because they want the money that the federal government offers them so long as they can show they are meeting the standards through testing. The whole charade is meant to make people feel good about the school system when in reality no one feels good about it at all because everyone knows it is a complete train wreck. If it weren’t, why else would kids be abandoning ship once every 26 seconds? That is not the sign of a healthy system? That is the sign of the Titanic sinking.
How to change it? Freire insists that teachers need to realize that they are teaching in a system that is actually designed to keep people oppressed. The idea of the classroom in general is one that is designed to facilitate the oppression. Socrates, for instance, who is the father of Western philosophy, did not teach in a classroom: he taught everywhere and he taught simply by asking questions and pursuing the truth. Today, people hardly know what truth means—or they imagine that everyone has his own truth—that it is something that only exists subjectively. They have no concept of objective truth and have not been taught this concept because their teachers did not have it. The whole of the modern era is fixated on denying the existence of objective truth. But what happens when you deny that and try to get others to deny it? They see through you and run away—and that is what is happening with today’s schools. The students see right through the waste of time that is modern education, teaching only to the standardized curriculum, ignoring the humanity of the students, and treating their questions with disdain. There is no dialogue, no inquiry, no discourse, no exchange of ideas, no pursuit of truth like what Socrates did when he was laying the groundwork for all teachers who followed. Today’s teachers imagine the only way to teach is to follow the program given them by the state. But as Freire points out, the state is not interested in liberation: the state is interested in oppression. The state wants to control minds, not make them free. The state, after all, put Socrates to death for his teaching. Yet his students and followers saw that his way led to truth and to self-empowerment, in spite of what the state tried to do. Today’s state is no different from ancient Athens. It too wants to prevent the Socratic Method from being used because it means the state is not in control of the process, is not in control of the minds and hearts of the students. Freire calls it a system of oppression, which is what it is: students are taught that the best course of action is to do nothing for oneself, to be passive all one’s life, to never engage or take ownership. Such a student is perfect for growing up and signing on with Corporation XYZ, collecting his pittance, and giving 25% (at least) to the government. There is no objection, no questioning, no thought. He goes home, turns on the television as part of his continuing education, and receives all the new information that has been developed by the Culture Industry to keep him in his state of somnolence (Adorno & Horkheimer).
To overcome this oppressive state in today’s high schools, Freire argues that “it is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as Subjects of the transformation” (p. 127). The purpose of engagement is to facilitate empowerment of the student, to create in the mind and heart of the student a passion for inquiry, for learning, for taking possession of the educative process and owning it. The goal is to help the student to stop being passive and to start being active. The goal is to allow the student to realize that he is there for himself, not for the state: he is there to better himself and to make something of himself—not to be controlled by the state, to be an inert zombie, to be a zero. Students leave school because they know they are being made into nothing—into soulless stooges of the corporate world—consumers at best—but nothing more than that. Freire rejects this idea, as do Lickona and Kristjansson. Freire contends, “Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets the dehumanizing state of affairs” (130)—i.e., the reformation of the school must focus on overthrowing that which is false and deadly to the humanity of its students.
Character Education
This is where character education comes into play. Character education must begin with active engagement: “dialogue, as essential communication, must underlie any cooperation” (Freire 168). For Lickona and Kristansson, it means going back to the old ways of teaching—to the Socratic Method and to the important role that the humanities play in actually teaching students about their humanity. Think about all the different types of questions that young people have that they want answers to: they are all about their own humanity. They want to know why they are the way they are, why the world is the way it is. They want to know about nature, human nature—not just the way the politically correct crowd wants human nature to be. They want to know what human nature is. They want to know why it is. They want to know what it means, what the big picture is, what the purpose of life is, where they should go for meaning. Even if they do not have these questions, Freire, Lickona and Kristjansson are all in agreement: they should be asking those questions, or at least they should be around others who are asking them so that they can be awakened from their slumber, for they are already at risk of being swallowed up by the machine.
High schools should incorporate character education by focusing on the necessary aspects of the humanities that need to be taught: classic literature, philosophy, religion. Instead of promoting and fostering division, educators should not be playing nannies and facilitators of delusions of grandeur. They should be presenting the cold, hard facts of reality to students—aka providing character education through the likes of Aristotelian studies, as Kristjánsson shows. Lickona is also advocates for the return of character education, arguing that the values and principles that led to the flourishing of Western civilization are being undermined by the same modern ideas of false liberalism that led to the destabilization of the West and the current predicament in which so many nations find themselves today. Culture, in other words, and the fragmentation of philosophical perspectives, the fracturing of values, and the splitting open of all moral foundations have created an environment in which a new era of barbarianism has arisen. This is exactly the point that Palahniuk makes in Fight Club: after decades of being “raised by women,” of learning to be good, emasculated slaves of the zombie corporations running the world, a group of men decide they have nothing left to lose and begin resisting the influences and authority of the state (i.e., the zombie corporations and their materialistic, anti-masculine culture) by committing acts of violence—both against themselves in order to strengthen themselves and against others in order to overcome the culture that they feel has oppressed.
Real enlightenment comes from understanding oneself and the nature one has been given—not attempting to change nature and force it to adapt to one’s will. The politically correct ideology of today does not have any interest in truth. It is more like the line of thinking shown by Euthyphro in Plato’s Dialogues: self-centered, fatuous, full of presumption, and unwilling to stop long enough to actually engage in serious self-reflection and self-criticism. Socrates went to his death in Athens thousands of years ago because he offended the “soft” and “sensitive” Athenian rulers who wanted Athens to be their own personal “safe space” where they would not have to ask questions like, “What is true?” and “Who am I?” Because Socrates was getting the Athenian youths to ask those questions, the authorities felt threatened and condemned him to death.
The humanities are good for young people because they teach them about humanity—i.e., what it means to be a human being. From the works of Hawthorne and Melville to Flannery O’Connor to Eliot and Shakespeare to Cervantes and Wagner and Beethoven and Brahms to Plato and Aristotle and Augustine and Dante and Dostoevsky and Chaucer—from all of them, one can see what it means to hold the mirror up to nature. Now more than ever a return to the humanities is needed to free students from the oppressive education system that wants them turned into robotic wage slaves for corporate America.
Interpellation
Otherwise, today’s high schools will perish by interpellation. The idea of interpellation is rooted in Marxist theory and contends that there are repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses. The ideology, Althusser argues, makes people into subjects. The authority projects the ideology and the people respond to it, thus making themselves subjects. The school, the police station, the family, the church and so on—they all project an ideology that the people subject themselves to because they respond to the calls put up by these groups. Thus, by interpellation is meant the idea of the authority projecting the ideology through the call, the messaging, and the person responding to it and participating in the act of recognition, thus becoming a subject within the relationship and essentially creating the authority-subject paradigm.
Adorno and Horkheimer identified this phenomenon in the work on the Culture Industry, which they viewed as essentially the means by which the ruling class (the authority) projected the ideology they wanted the people (their subjects) to embrace and live their lives by. The whole point of the Culture Industry is to get people to think, act, and live their lives in a way that does not threaten the supremacy or authority of the ruling classes, who govern the country and, more or less, the world at this point since globalization has occurred at every level. Thus, the Culture Industry serves the purpose of confusing the people about the fact that they are being oppressed by distracting them with meaningless spectacle and dulling their senses with imbecilic delights that never allow them to become enlightened or to perceive the truth. They are, in effect, like the people in the caves in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
In Plato’s allegory, the people are all living in darkness and they spend their time watching shadows flickering on the wall for amusement. They think the shadows flickering on the wall are reality and that there is no other reality. Every so often one of the people looks behind to see that the light creating the shadows is coming from somewhere—a source outside the cave. That person gets curious and begins to investigate the manner, sooner or later emerging from the cave into the blinding light of the sun. But the person has to know more about the source of this light so begins to climb upwards towards it. Plato makes the case that this is what true philosophy is all about and that most people do not pursue it because the pursuit is actually hard work and requires focus, energy, commitment, resilience and perseverance.
The school unfortunately is another place where interpellation is playing out. Students spend nearly nearly all of their first 22 years of life on this planet in school, sitting in a desk, expected to be docile and receive the information that is being given them without question. If they question or resist, they are deemed problematic and life is made very difficult for them. If they leave school, they find it hard to qualify for a decent job. There is little they can do to be successful other than subject themselves to the authority and accept the lessons of the school get the two or three degrees the industry now demands if the person wants to make good money. School should exist in this way. School should be there to empower, not to oppress. It should be a place where questions can be asked—not where they are shut down the way Socrates was shut down in Athens by the Athenian government. School should be a place where true insight can be gained and where innovation can begin.
Conclusion
Reforming today’s high schools is a necessary step that teachers must take. Every minute, another four students are dropping out. They are leaving because they are being treated like passive slaves who are there only to be groomed for the rat race, to be good consumers, to pledge allegiance to AT&T, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Facebook, and the S&P 500. They are not being taught anything about human nature other than what the politically correct crowd within the government wants them to “learn” about human nature—i.e., what they want human nature to be (not necessarily what it is). They are being denied the humanities, the works of classic literature that nourished generations of Westerners for hundreds of years. They are not being taught the noble ideas or the philosophy of the ancients. They are not permitted to ask questions, to be inquisitive, to challenge ideas or the establishment ideologies that are so obviously oppressive. And so they are leaving. They are escaping to go it alone. And unless schools are reformed by teachers willing to follow Socrates into death, there will be no change: but as Freire notes, that change must come.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 34, 2007.
DoSomething.org. “11 Facts about High School Dropout Rates.” https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-high-school-dropout-rates#fn1
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018.
Kristjánsson, Kristján. "There is Something About Aristotle: The Pros and Cons of Aristotelianism in Contemporary Moral Education." Journal of philosophy of education 48.1 (2014): 48-68.
Lickona, Thomas. "The return of character education." Educational leadership 51.3 (1993): 6-11.
Micheletti, Gabrielle. “Re-Envisioning Paulo Freire's “Banking Concept of Education’.” Inquiries Journal 2.2 (2010): 1. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/171/re-envisioning-paulo-freires-banking-concept-of-education
Plato. Allegory of the Cave. https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf