The motto of the boy scouts is "Be prepared." Legend has it that when Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the boy scouts, was asked, "Be prepared for what?", he responded, "Be prepared for anything." I think Baden-Powell's view of the boy scouts sums up modern education. The boy scouts program aspires to prepare boys with life skills and values of good citizenship. To advance within the boy scouts, each participant needs to accumulate merit badges to among other things demonstrate that they can navigate without a compass, serve as a cook during a campout, and transport someone who might be trapped in a smoke-filled room. By completing the required merit badges before the age of 18 and being an active member of a troop for a specified period of time, boys are prepared to move on to the next level and eventually become an eagle scout, which is the pinnacle of a boy's scouting career.
Likewise, the motto, "Be prepared for anything," rightly characterizes modern education. You never know when you will need to solve a quadratic equation, explain the function of the endoplasmic reticulum, or describe the origin of a word. No matter how long you stay in school if you don't collect your quadratic equation badge, endoplasmic reticulum badge, your word origin badge, and all of the other required badges, you don't get to move on to the next level and eventually become a Boston College eagle, Bridgewater eagle, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University eagle or any other form of college animal.
The boy scouts and modern education are also parallel in their lack of relevance to urban youth. In recent years, the national boy scouts organization has tried to expand participation among urban youth. It is a difficult challenge to help urban youth see the importance of learning to make camp gadgets out of rope. As a consequence, less than 11% of boy scouts are low income urban youth. Likewise, only around 11% of students at competitive colleges are low income youth. While a preparation for anything benefits the vast majority of society, there are far too many children in our society for whom a preparation for anything is actually a preparation for nothing.
In contrast to a preparation focused on everyone achieving roughly the same set of standards or merit badges, Ralph Waldo Emerson focuses on individual greatness as an essential component of a productive society. A key metaphor for Emerson's notion of greatness comes from a lecture given by professor Michael Faraday in 1848. Faraday explained the concept of diamagnetism, namely that each substance has its own unique polarity. Whereas, the polarity of iron tends to run from north to south, the polarity of other substances have their own unique direction. Likewise, Emerson believes that "every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind."
Emerson goes on to say, "A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind." In other words, school standardization is the antithesis of greatness.
It is unfortunate that at the dawn of public education in the United States around the middle part of the nineteenth century, the winning educational design that has stood the test of time over a century and a half is one that is predicated on a common set of basic standards that all educated children must possess before they can pursue greatness in college. Quite the contrary, the implication of Emerson's philosophy is that we should as quickly as possible let students pursue greatness. It is through specialization that students will learn the academic standards in a relevant manner. I would further speculate that a significant underlying basis for the income disparities in learning outcomes is not that higher income families can better support students in the pursuit of the standards, but rather that higher income families can use their financial resources to help their children pursue greatness with a specialized education that schools cannot provide.
The myth of the 20th century civil rights movement is that equalizing the education system for all would bring about equality. I think Emerson would have foreseen the abject failure of trying to create a system that is the same for everyone. Today's civil rights movement should abandon the pursuit of mediocrity through standardization and instead should focus on transforming our education system into one that uniquely supports all students in the pursuit of greatness.
