Top Down
Top-Down
When education is top-down it fails to fulfill its most important aspiration, which is that education is a practice of freedom. A top-down approach to education can deliver beautifully on the first of its attributes, namely, qualification for contribution within the economic sphere or domain of society. The roles and realities of society lend considerable weight to a second attribute or goal of education, namely, socialization. However, the third attribute of education, which carries the esoteric name, subjectification, can only arise from within an individual and demands individualization. That is an education that can only be bottom-up.
The recent effort to fix our education system through the passage of an education amendment to Minnesota’s Constitution, is the misguided exercise of an egregiously authoritarian top-down approach.
The proponents of the amendment seek to “close the gap.” This is inherently top-down. Yet closing the so-called gap, will demand new thinking about education, a new paradigm for education, and a new system designed to educate everyone, personally or individually but in a collective or communitarian sense. This later means that education is not just about children. Education is life-long and childhood begins with conception by two adults. The education of those adults is paramount. Adults must make choices because no child ever chooses their parents or the region (the zip code) into which they are born.
Agency in our society is enormous. The acquisition of agency may arise in multiple ways and through many means. Denial of agency is exercise of authority. Those ways and means for acquisition or denial of agency are too frequently awarded from the top of a societal hierarchy. The authority trickles down socially, economically and randomly to a lucky few who get a few breaks physically, mentally and spiritually. The breaks are genetic to be sure, but for every genetic determinant there is plenty that can go badly if environmental attributes are poorly aligned. No top-down authority can ever guarantee perfect alignment.
So much happens to child development from conception to around age three, that make attention to the environmental conditions of a school mostly irrelevant and e\even the best intentions of committed schoolists make schooling a mere selection process. Education’s evolution in this sense means continuing conditioning of a system of schooling. This is not to say that community efforts to advance capacity for additional development are irrelevant. However, those efforts should be part of a social continuum that assures every child has a champion. The champion is not an individual but a village.
The village consists of its own systems for provision of water, food, shelter and safety. Those attributes all have a history and are generational. The village is the locale for belonging and bestowing esteem—a feeling of being important. It is the village that delivers the most important elements and enduring education ecosystem, which provides relationships, responsibility and reasoning, none of which are learned but all of which develop within a village.
If we wish to reform education, it will be most effective to take up an approach that honors and emphasizes the villages, the neighborhoods, the communities. A constitutional amendment on education is not an answer.