A Need for Human Logic in Education
By Bob Cornett
Introduction
Bob Cornett, a Kentucky grandfather and founder of the Festival of the Bluegrass, argues that we need to incorporate more human logic, not bureaucratic logic, into efforts to improve our communities.
A Need for Human Logic in Education
By Bob Cornett
Introduction Bureaucratic logic tells us that the way to improve education is to anoint bigger bosses, send more compartmentalizing mandates down through the hierarchy, require more tests, and otherwise try harder to make people do things.
Human logic takes us in exactly the opposite direction. Effective learning, according to human logic, requires integrating information from many sources, harnesses the active and enthusiastic energies of the learners, and needs imagination, not mere facts. By privileging bureaucratic logic, we are not serving our communities well.
Some questions to consider as you read:
- Which logic is usually at play in your community, bureaucratic or human?
- Has your community been able to balance the need for both bureaucratic and human logic? How do you do this?
- What examples do you have where either bureaucratic logic or human logic has been instrumental or an obstacle in community building?
Article Text The Situation
Hardly anyone is fully satisfied with the condition of public education in America. Dropout rates are too high, the "equity gap" is unacceptable, many excellent schoolteachers feel that they are being treated as robots on an assembly line, and there are still more deficiencies. The real problem, however—the underlying barrier to effective learning—is that we're expecting government institutions to do a job that such institutions can't do by themselves.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has used some terminology that I find helpful: he contrasts bureaucratic logic with human logic. Bureaucratic logic tells us that the way to improve education is to anoint bigger bosses, send more compartmentalizing mandates down through the hierarchy, require more tests that put more fear in the teachers and students, and otherwise try harder to make people do things.
Human logic, conversely, takes us in exactly the opposite direction. Effective learning, according to human logic (and according to objective scholarship), requires integrating information from many sources, requires the active and enthusiastic energies of the learners, and requires imagination, not mere information. Effective learners, above all, learn to learn. In order to do so, they must be full partners in the learning enterprise.
Illusions
The poet W. H. Auden identifies our problem:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Auden prompts me to acknowledge two illusions of my own. First, I long took for granted that the way to improve learning was to improve schooling. I would have known better if I had stopped to think: we adults have spent only a small portion of our lives in school, and only a small part of what we've learned could possibly have come from school. But I did not know better; and, therefore, when I thought about ways to improve young people's learning, I kept coming back to my own image of schooling. I had been fortunate—I had the benefit of many teachers who were not only competent and dedicated but also were good role models—but the system itself, which gave little or no recognition to the learning that took place outside the classroom, was the product of bureaucratic logic. That system, as I now realize, had provided me with my frame of reference and, as a consequence, I was trying to use bureaucratic logic to do a human logic job.
The second illusion I acknowledge is that I had a high opinion of myself and of people like me. I have spent a big part of my career in and around governments at all levels. We were well motivated and competent (we believed); when we reached a conclusion, we were almost certainly right (according to my logic at the time). That was an illusion, of course, but it took a long time for me to get beyond this and other ego-based illusions.
I cite my own illusions, not because they are special but because they are quite ordinary. I've learned, partly from the writings of great thinkers and partly just by looking around, that my illusions are shared to at least some degree by most adults. And because the illusions are shared by so many people, they infect the body politic; and, from inside the body politic the illusions provide fuel that further entrenches bureaucratic logic. Pogo had it right: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Our illusions, I now realize, are the basic source of our problems in public education.
Solutions
Our nation's strength has, from the very start, been in our communities. But, having said that, I know of many of people who would, and do, put their illusions (and their bureaucratic logic) ahead of children's learning. Right now, as an important case in point, the debate in Washington over No Child Left Behind is being dominated by the illusion that better bureaucratic techniques will give us better education. While I'm in favor of jiggling the bureaucratic apparatus—it needs it—we will make real and permanent progress only when human logic and human values outweigh bureaucratic logic and bureaucratic values.
The application of human logic can be found everywhere in community-based endeavors that connect the generations. I recently witnessed a beautiful example in a small community park in Lexington, Kentucky, where several hundred people gather each Tuesday evening during the summer to participate in a bluegrass music "jamboree." All ages were there, from those in their 90s to small babies. The evening I was there, the band on the stage consisted of 10 young people from a rural Kentucky school; they were excellent. Those rural youngsters then helped start a jam session to encourage other youngsters to learn to play bluegrass music. I noticed one granddaddy showing his three-year-old grandson how to pick up trash and take it to the garbage can. There was no compartmentalizing, no hierarchies, no coercion—just people sharing their humanity.
I fully concede that where we are is nowhere close to where we need to go. In the case of that little neighborhood jamboree, as a typical example, there is no connection with the schools in the area but, even if some of the teachers and students were to have some involvement with the project, the school hierarchy would likely see the project as only marginally relevant to the school's mission. (Test scores would likely be the main concern of the school hierarchy.) Further, even in those situations where the school and the community have managed to develop an effective partnership, that partnership would almost certainly be invisible at levels where public policies are set—the big bosses in capital cities would be unlikely to know about such local projects.
Furthermore, as perhaps the most complicating factor of all, some degree of bureaucratic logic will always be needed: we will continue to need school buildings, buses, classrooms, assessments, and the like, and bureaucratic procedures therefore will continue to be needed to manage such things, including managing the money that will always be needed. And, aside from management issues, some public policies need to be set at high levels of government; as a reminder of this need, we had legally segregated schools until the national government ended that demeaning practice. Our objective, thus, cannot be merely to get rid of bureaucratic logic and procedures, we must create arrangements that effectively mesh the bureaucratic and the human.
Temptations
I warn that we will be tempted to get off course—I've learned that the hard way.
The most pervasive temptation is to make deals with bureaucratic logic; and money is most often the initial cause of that temptation. Some money is needed for just about any project, and the bureaucratic hierarchy has control of money. It is therefore entirely natural that citizens who want to start community-based projects tend to approach the hierarchy for money, and it is also natural that the hierarchy tends to say "no," unless the project serves a purpose based upon bureaucratic logic.
Inasmuch as having the political support of influential citizens is bureaucratically good, the hierarchy is likely to say "yes" to projects that are supported by influential people. Such quid pro quo arrangements, which is the regular order of business at higher levels of government, may be tolerable for most programs but, in the case of children's learning, they can do serious harm.
Another temptation is to pretend that what goes on in school can substitute for what goes on in real life. This pretense gives us citizens an excuse to avoid responsibility—we can sit on our hands without needing to feel guilty. And we don't even have to blame ourselves when the job doesn't get done—we can blame the "experts."
When we citizens absolve ourselves of responsibility, we open the door to another temptation—the temptation to tolerate intimidation. The bureaucratic hierarchy has power over public school educators—the hierarchy, after all, controls the paychecks (and the top-down mandates). When we citizens neuter ourselves, this leaves nobody to speak for the children and their communities except the teachers and their bosses. This, consequently, leaves the bureaucratic hierarchy free to intimidate as it will, which, in turn, means that connections between school and community must serve bureaucratic values.
Still another temptation is to be insensitive to the vulnerabilities of other people. I've experienced this temptation myself. I know, from my own experience in and around governments, that the political and bureaucratic hierarchies defer to "We the People" when we insist that they do so; and I therefore sometimes am tempted to help pull together coalitions of grandparents and other citizens to do some insisting. When I yield to that temptation, however, I run the risk of appearing to be no different from the bosses in the hierarchies; I can seem to be trying to use raw power to combat raw power.
I don't like to think of myself as being insensitive, but I now realize that my own experience, much of which has been inside the world of power, is fundamentally different from the experience of people who have been the victims of power. I don't believe I'm atypical; all of us find it hard to see the world from the vantage point of other people. Any time we're tempted to discount the culture in children's communities (especially including low-income communities), we need to remind ourselves of the Indian schools that our government sponsored not too many years ago. Student learning must relate to the local culture because that local community—and not the global village—is the context in which the student lives, relates, learns, grows, and matures.
The Crux of the Matter
We have no ethical choice. We are required by our deepest instincts to connect ourselves and our communities with the young people and their learning. This requirement extends to all children, rich and poor, city and country, black and white, brown and red.
We need community-based "public work" projects everywhere. And we need, as a matter of crucial importance, for dedicated adults in the communities to work as active partners with not only young people but with the best of the professional educators. By best I mean those educators, active and retired, whose commitment to children's learning is so deep and firm that their human logic and values protect them from yielding to bureaucratic logic. Such partnerships can combine the wisdom of years, the professional knowledge of educators, the grass-roots strength of democracy, the energy and creative skills of young people—and, above all, deep respect for the children.
I don't know just how to create the kinds of partnerships we need. And I don't know just what public policies will look like when our partnerships, with their human logic, assert themselves in the world of bureaucratic logic. I do know, however, that bureaucratic logic by itself will take us down a trail that nobody wants: Not even the corporate organizations that sometimes lead cheers for bureaucratic testing and other top-down controls really want passive workers who don't know how to learn—and whose creativity has been diminished through coercion. Further, nobody wants good teachers to leave the profession because they're forced to be robots on a monolithic assembly line.
I know something else: There are no grandparents, or people who think the way grandparents think, who would knowingly accept the notion that they have nothing to contribute to children's learning. Policies that separate we older citizens from the younger generation, as our present bureaucratic policies do, are educationally wasteful—obviously and foolishly wasteful. And I know one more thing: there are no politicians who would knowingly and openly suggest that grandparents have no useful role in children's educations.
Community-based partnerships do something that nothing else can do as well: They produce knowledgeable citizens, the kind of citizens that know what's going on. It is those knowledgeable citizens—plus the politicians who want to work with knowledgeable citizens—who will see to it that human logic and human values are respected. And once human logic and human values are respected everything else falls into place.
The Case for Human Logic In Education
I asked one of my friends to sum up the case for human logic. Here's his response: Every life is—and must be—lived in a community; adults and children alike. When hierarchies supersede or ignore those communities and their cultures (the major sources of the nutrients for living), they have diminished the preeminent life context which properly envelops each student's life and fosters his individual reality.
I rest my case for human logic.
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