In 1925, Martin Buber was asked to address the Third International Education Conference whose subject was “The Development of the Creative Powers of the Child.” What the organizers of the conference failed to anticipate was the response of an authentic deep thinker to the assumptions intimated by this preassigned subject. He began his lecture with a refutation of its title: he said “of the nine words (in the title) . . . only the last three raise no question for me.” The alleged capability identified as the “creative powers of the child” he felt was not properly designated. Further, the concept of “developing” this alleged creative ability in the child might risk misdirecting an individual away from his/her natural instincts, in effect destroying what was original in the very child to be educated. Today, I feel, we still struggle with what we mean by education itself. There are perhaps as many definitions of education as there are respective roles in our education system. Obviously, there are the teachers in our schools. They seem to know what they are doing. But they conduct their profession in a public school system that is governed by administrators, regulated by political appointees/legislators, and influenced by the expectations of parents. These non-teacher entities are the representative public. But do they know which teachers to support and what best practices to be replicated? This representative public hires teachers, buys textbooks, provides resources like computers and teaching aids, often determines curriculum, and manages overall behavioral standards for the classroom environment. Like Buber nearly a century ago, I question whether this “public” has properly designated what it means by “education.”

What Buber had to say 90 years ago still has relevance today and can be further extended to our very concept of education. Let’s start with Buber’s assessment. Are children born with unique creative ability? Well, they are born unique with many undeveloped potentials. We can all agree with that assertion. But creativity is an actual attribute, not a potential. When my pre-school daughter scribbled on her bedroom wall, I did not recognize artistic genius—just my baby playing with crayons. The capability she demonstrated was not creativity but the power of an originator. She, like all children, discover very quickly that they are subjects in a world of objects: playthings and the various forms in their environment are presented ready-made to be destroyed, moved, changed or tossed aside. Generally, we see our children at play and admire their spontaneity, curiosity, and ingenuity in the way they tear apart or put together whatever forms they find before them. A teacher, however, presents them with the specific forms of a curriculum. He/she attempts to harness their innate capability to effect change in their environment by focusing their attention on course material and the manner in which it can be manipulated to achieve objectives. Great teachers seem to know instinctively how to attract the child’s curiosity to the subject matter to be taught and how to guide them through the steps to acquire knowledge and, yes, the ability to use what they have learned to create for themselves and to relate to the world in which they were born. Sometimes we assume that the young student is a tabula rasa (an empty slate) that the teacher must fill up with knowledge and test like a computer program that returns only what has been stuffed into its code. The problem with this assumption is that it replaces development with compulsion—a kind of force-feeding—which can only lead to boredom, rebellion, or learned idiocy. (In a fundamentalist environment, it leads to a blind acceptance of principles that subvert the individual to the dictates of others.) The teacher is the developer who shows the way and guides the students along the path to becoming creators and producers in the world they will inherit. What Buber had to say about the misnomers of his time can be extended to ours. For example, what do we mean by “education?” The word comes from the Latin ex, “out of,” and ducere, “to lead,” and denotes a specific quality of leadership. The teacher does not just lead by example or by authority, but mainly by teasing out of the students not only interest in a subject, but the discipline to learn and apply it in their individual lives. A tuned violin still cannot play itself. But the curious student can be led by an astute teacher to develop the skills he/she has learned in the classroom to make a better version of the self and a more productive member of society. This learning bears no resemblance to achievements in standardized tests. The later provide a statistical framework for evaluating our public school system in a very generic way. But they are not nearly as useful in judging the individual student’s assimilation of subject matter into his/her life. The teacher is in a better position to make this kind of judgment because the teacher is the educator, the activating principle in the student’s learning, the Pied Piper luring young students forward. The teacher is not the tyrant who commands or the demagogue who incites, but the learned practitioner of the art of persuasion and the trusted guide into the realms of knowledge and, potentially, wisdom.

Let’s move beyond definitions to specific concerns with our public school system, beginning with the role of curriculum in education. The subject of curriculum is a complicated subject because it encompasses many moving parts: objectives, scope, continuity/integration, and appropriate gradation through age levels. There are places in the world where curriculum is solely determined by politics or religious predilections. Here in America, curriculum is sometimes influenced by the same factions, though generally not controlled by them. For example, there are states where teachers are told to teach creationism as part of a science curriculum. Another example is the fact that many textbooks have little to say about the role of women and minorities in America’s history. Perhaps a more generic influence from the political sector is the exclusive emphasis on math and science. The result has been a progressive decline in funding for the humanities—history, literature, art, music, and philosophy. This emphasis comes from a politically magnified “public” perception of the importance science and technology play in the growth of America’s economy. But political perception is not a solid basis for building a curriculum and not conducive to education per se. The ability for young minds to develop critical thinking, to become self-reflective, to learn from the past, to not only articulate original concepts, but to create them comes from a curriculum balanced by the humanities. My voice is not alone in making this observation. Teachers seem to understand it. But our contemporary public school system seems oblivious, partly due to economic and political pressures and equally as a result of losing its way. Somehow, school district administrators have become more engrossed with other areas such as test scores as a measure of student and teacher performance, with physical infrastructure in the form of facilities and resources, or with public image that mirrors whatever conventional wisdom rules the day. The educator in the classroom, as a result, may have less to say about what is taught in the classroom than the politician, the administrator, or naïve public opinion. In the state where I live 40% of the education budget is allocated to school district administration; and my state ranks in the bottom 10% of student performance across the United States. Teachers and curriculum are managed by a top-heavy bureaucracy that is controlled by non-educative forces, the so-called “representative public.” If this bureaucracy continues to define compulsory education, then the emphasis will be more on “compulsory” than on “education.”

I remember talking to a high school math teacher about his frustrations with many of his students. In spite of all the support he received from the school district, his students did not see the relevance of advanced math classes to their lives. He often cajoled them about the future job market and their limited prospects without a strong foundation in math. Their response, according to him, was apathy based upon a conviction that they already had all they needed in terms of wheels (many had cars), sexual relations, and even an occasional “high.” They had no need of advanced math skills. Unfortunately, even in their myopic adolescent context, they were inadvertently right. Though advanced math skills may help them get a job as a particular type of programmer or engineer, it would not help them live a better life unless those skills were wedded to a greater sense of purpose and self-worth. My point here is that jobs do not define who we are. Instead, we either define our jobs and the relationships that come with them, or are doomed to hollow careers. These students had no broader view of life’s prospects. Instinctively, their resistance to learning math was a blind admission that there must be more to life than a better paying job. They just had no way of identifying that life. Their teacher also had no way of integrating what math had to offer with a broader curriculum that included a perspective traditionally proffered by the humanities. For example, math is not just about manipulating numbers but a way of identifying and calculating numerical relationships that both enable us to engineer change and enhance our perspective of the world. The harmony of the cosmos has both a numerological component and philosophic/poetic/inspirational agency. These students were not prepared to see math in the context of beauty or purpose or personal meaning. The fault here does not lie with the teacher or his students, for it was the system that failed them both.

Finally, a public education system has to be a form of community. All elements of that system—parents, administrators, politicians/legislators, and teachers—need to work together. The head of this phalanx is the teacher, for the primary relationship is between the teacher and the student. But the other members of this community have an important support role. Parents, for example, want to support their children’s education. But they tend to air their frustrations with administrators rather than in constructive dialogue with their children’s teachers. Administrators can play the role of diplomats, but they cannot replace the teacher in explaining relationships in the classroom. They may be quite ineffective in this context; and parents are likely to be frustrated in their desire to support the education of their children. Teachers can also be frustrated, because they too often lack the influence they need to develop/reform educational policies. They turn to their unions to advocate not only for them but for their students. But the unions should only be representing teachers before the school districts. Misapplication of their role in respect to students only adds a political dimension and a confrontational aspect to the constructive relationships that are required within this educational community. Politicians/legislators are also part of this community and have an obligation to manage and fund school districts. But they have little or no competence in defining curriculum or evaluating what happens in a specific classroom. Their management is at the level of overall system performance. The tools they have for evaluating performance are generic and need to be tempered by school district assessments. And it is at this pivotal administration level where this education community seems most in jeopardy. All elements of the community speak to school principals and district managers/appointees. Their job is integral to communication within this community, but not to actual teaching in the classroom. They can effectively assist the teacher in many ways, with constructive performance reviews, with training, with classroom resources, with student behavioral issues, with effective monitoring of parent/teacher meetings, and with honest representation of actual teaching requirements in funding requests. But they cannot function in any of these capacities if they are not clear on the meaning of education and the primacy of the relationship between the teacher and the student. School administration can become a bloated bureaucracy, a black hole of communication, and a political apparatchik that serves no interest other than its own preservation. Wherever this prognosis may be valid, there is no effective education community and little if any support for the teacher in the classroom and ultimately for student achievements in our public school system.

Children are both the beneficiaries of our education system and the victims of its shortfalls. We, their forebears, naturally want to leave our children better prepared than we were to live a fulfilling life. Human progress demands as much. But, currently, our public education system is in decline. Parents are frustrated with it. Politics and bureaucracy obfuscate its purpose and befuddle reform. Teachers are blamed rather than empowered. And students are less inspired than handicapped by unbalanced and unintegrated curriculums. This level of dysfunction is the status quo only when “education” is not education.