The Purpose of a School

This blog post is taken from a response to a comment on my guest column for Tom Hayden’s FOIA Gras Substack. I recommend reading the entire exchange since it provides some context and catches me at a moment not acting my absolute best. I have put my response to the original question: what is the purpose of a school below, lightly edited to remove references to the original commenter.

I honestly think the purpose of a school is mutable, subject to the changing priorities of the culture at large. However, assuming a context in which adults have to work to earn a living, at a fundamental level a school is a building where children can be safe while their parents are at work. Once this basic foundation of safety is established we can think about what these children will be doing all day in this building while their parents/caregivers are earning a living. They’re probably going to be interacting with one another, making friends, getting into arguments, playing, basically figuring out how to navigate a world in which they share space with other people. In other words, they are learning to be social beings. These children cannot be unsupervised all day so they need adults to be in the building with them to make sure they are interacting safely with one another. These adults should be specially trained in the unique needs of children who do not think or behave like adults while their minds and bodies are developing. As the years go by and these children grow up, their activities in school will progressively resemble the activities of the adults in their society, such that when they reach the age of maturity they are prepared to take their place among their fellow adults. This is my abstract model of a school absent any cultural context: a building where children can learn to socialize safely under the care of adults who are specially trained in the needs of children and their development, and where children can develop a foundation of skills that will help them navigate and thrive in the adult world.

My personal views on the purpose of a school and its relationship to the student experience in our modern context are shaped by my readings of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Barbara Ehrenreich and Paolo Freire. That philosophical framework is informed, reinforced, even changed and amended by my personal experience in student teaching assignments and in the various jobs I have held in my adult life. The sum total of my education and experience has led me to the conclusion that in an era of increasing social isolation, digital information dissemination and privatization the school serves a vital role to a community, that of a truly public space. It is increasingly difficult to define “the public,” much less the public good, but the schools are becoming the place where we are collectively defining those terms every day. It has not been easy, as the last few decades of changes in public education policy have demonstrated. Regardless of changing cultural norms and priorities, I believe that there are three broad sets of skills that remain consistent when it comes to my previous claim that schools should prepare children to function and thrive in the adult world. Those are literacy, number sense and socialization. I admit that is not as catchy as “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic” but I think the skills necessary for navigating our (arguably) democratic society are contained within those broad categories. I use the word literacy to refer not only to parsing a written text and organizing one’s thoughts into words but also to the set of skills necessary for navigating the world of media. Just as children in the past had to be taught of the dangers their society faced, whether it was wolves or how to tend crops so there would be enough food, children today need to have some understanding of how the various media sources they come in contact with work and try to influence them and claim their attention. When I talk about number sense I am referring to how a child conceives of numbers, as opposed to the rote memorization of arithmetic tables that may have been sufficient in times when that was all that was required to navigate the world. Today our relationship with numbers and math requires members of the public to have at least a general concept of how numbers and statistics work and impact their lives. Elementary school math instruction should be done with this in mind. The last category, socialization is more vital than ever. Our opportunities to interact in groups, in-person are dwindling. In the past, when public life was more robust, the purpose of schools could be more skills-based since social interaction took place out in the public sphere but now, when skills instruction is more widely available but social interaction is increasingly scarce, public schools are becoming greater hubs for the interpersonal contact that is necessary for human beings in a pluralistic, democratic society. The student experience should be explicitly tailored to reflect that.

Now that I have established both a broad, underlying framework for the purpose of a school, and defined my personal opinion on the skills necessary for students to function in contemporary American society, we can ask the question: what is the purpose of a school in Evanston/Skokie District 65 in the year 2025? An answer to this question could fill several books. I hope to answer it collectively with my fellow school-board members and the community at large. Each of us will have to keep our individual models of the purpose of a school in mind as we establish a framework that will allow the district administration and educators to determine the day-to-day mechanics within the schools that will allow them to serve their greater purpose. These day-to-day procedures, policies and tools will have to take into account the unique history and situation of District 65 schools, which I have addressed in other formats (Evanston Roundtable, Evanston Now [might be behind a paywall], and my campaign website, to name a few). Our job as a school board will be to empower the district’s educators, those specially trained adults I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, to determine the student experience. It will take a lot of work, mutual trust and respect and yes, an understanding of what we all believe the purpose of a school to be.

I hope I’ve been able to articulate my thoughts on the purpose of a school in a way that makes sense. This is a topic that I genuinely love to think about and discuss and if anyone wants to reach out and discuss it, please do not hesitate to do so.