I mention this difference between the fantastical as it existed in olden times and today, which some may think a trivial one, because we are or ought to be coming to realize that acknowledged fantasy, of the kind the movies have inherited from science fiction, is a different kind of thing from fantasy that doesn’t know it is fantasy…. But if there is no longer any attempt at imitation of reality but only the aptly-described “magic” of the movies making new realities, then there is no longer any such thing as art as it has been understood for the last three thousand or so years in the West.

Then again, when someone writes of myths they believe in this is usually not considered fantasy is it? Such writing would surely be considered religious texts. Bowman misses a much larger and more important aspect of fantasy which is that it is – at its best – an elaborate allegory. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was not something he believed in, per se, but it was most certainly a vehicle through which he could explore his beliefs. The myths he borrowed from may have been more Pagan than Christian, but the themes Tolkien was exploring were certainly in the Christian tradition. As Michael Weingard notes in his excellent essay on the dearth of Jewish fantasy:

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape. In contrast, the Christian imagination found in Lewis and Tolkien often moves, like Beowulf or Sir Gawain, through an older pagan world in which spirits of place and mythical beings are still potent. Nor is this limited to fauns and elves. This anterior world can be dark and frighteningly alien, as Tolkien has Gandalf indicate in The Two Towers. “Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves,” the wizard says, “the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.” Lewis sounds the same note in Perelandra when, far below the surface of the planet Venus, his protagonist catches an unsettling glimpse of alien creatures, and wonders if there might be “some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”

Fantasy is, after all, an exploration of our history and of – to put it somewhat crudely – what it means to be human. The fantastical often serves as contrast to our own humanity. The ‘other’ serves as a sort of mirror. Tolkien’s elves are a glimpse at a sort of perfection we humans cannot attain – at least here on Earth (or Middle Earth). The humans in Narnia have a very special role in the determination of events there. Magic is a window (indeed, a house full of windows) into all the ways we could be, or wish to be, but are not and never will be. In a sense, fantasy takes new worlds and false histories and creates little laboratories of experience. It is more inward looking than science fiction, which is by its nature a forward looking genre. It requires that we see beyond the fantastic to get to the deeper meanings.

What it does not require, in any sense, is a belief in the fantastical worlds it creates, either on the part of the writer or the reader. Bowman misunderstands the very nature of fantasy. Tolkien’s exploration of power and loss (of the war-torn, fast-changing world he existed in, the death of the agrarian society and the rise of the machine) could have as easily played out in a non-fantastical piece (though perhaps it would not have been quite so memorable). He did not need to believe in his creation to believe in the meaning behind it, any more than he would need to believe in any other fiction he created – on our own world or in some other.

Bowman writes elsewhere:

What I objected to in our contemporary fantasists — the question of their predecessors was too complicated for me to go into in such a short article — was that they deliberately and as a precondition of their art cut me off from any possibility of belief in the worlds they represent to me because they do not believe in them themselves. And if they don’t believe in them, why should I? And if I can’t believe in them, why should I care about them?

To draw a comparison between the fantasy of our modern world and the fantasy of some ‘olden-days’ is to miss the point of fantasy in the first place. Homer did not write fantasy novels, but the works of Homer, like the folklore and myth of so many cultures, provides the inspiration for much of what fantasists do today. If we believe in our own myths, after all, then they are not really fantasy.

Why should we care about these stories if we cannot be bothered to believe in them? I would say, quite simply, because the truth of a story is not always found merely in its narrative. If Bowman cannot see past the fantastical – something that even Homer surely wanted his readers to do – to see the humanity beneath it, then he is not reading either myth or fantasy in the way it was meant to be read. Nor Homer, for that matter.

Furthermore, we should read because we enjoy a good story. If we cannot enjoy a good story because the author who wrote it did not ‘believe’ it, then we should stop reading fiction altogether. Like perfection, a critic can easily become the enemy of the good.

Fantasy will never be like the ‘olden days’ and nor should it.  At least not in this world.

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Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years.  I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the books I read as a child were by far the most influential – far more influential than anything I read later as a college student or the ones I read nowadays.  So here’s a list, from memory, of the most influential books I read as a child.

The Lord of the Rings – This one is the obvious choice for a fantasy reader, I suppose.  I read it in fourth grade for the first time and loved it, and have read it several times since. It is still the definitive work of epic fantasy, I believe.  The only downside is that so many people attempted to imitate Tolkien when they should have been writing their own ideas.

The Prydain Chronicles – Lloyd Alexander was never as well known as Tolkien, but his Prydian books were wonderful young adult fantasy novels steeped in Welsh myth.  So while some of the characters mirrored those in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the stories themselves were unique and interesting and lively.  I read these ones countless times.

The Dark is Rising Sequence – This series taps into the old Welsh and British mythology fairly heavily, mixing the modern world and Merlin and time travel together in an epic clash between good and evil.  One of many books I read and loved that transports us from the mundane world into one much darker and more fierce.

A Wrinkle in Time – This was one of those books that really stopped me in my tracks. Free will, conformity, and the seduction of evil are all present here.

The Giver – Another glimpse into totalitarianism and conformity and the dangers of ‘sameness’ and ignorance of history.  Less fantastical than my typical childhood read, but sort of shocking also.

The Bridge to Terabithia – They made a movie about this book recently.  Please don’t watch it.  Sometimes movies can enrich the book experience, but not when they are mangled by over-Disneyfication. Terabithia helped me understand tragedy and loss better.

The Castle in the Attic – To be honest, I can barely remember this book, but like Narnia it helped transport me into another world – something I did a lot of as a kid.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – This was a good, funny, cynical take on the King Arther stories.  Very helpful to round out all that heroism and chivalry with some good, honest, witty realism.

Narnia – Like the Lord of the Rings, these books are simply staples of young adult fantasy.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table – I have read so many King Arthur books at this point I can barely keep track of them.  This was one of the first.

I Am the Cheese – This was far more dystopian a tale than I typically read as a child, and still sort of haunting whenever I think about it.

Some honorable mentions:

Watership Down, Lord of the Flies, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, The Wind in the Willows, The Last Unicorn, the Redwall books, the books of Roald Dahl and many others…

I should probably put child’s things away at this point and read more serious works of fiction and non-fiction – more philosophy, theology, et alia.  And yet … perhaps it is having children of my own now, or perhaps it is simply that I read to escape, but when it comes down to choosing I still find myself with some fantasy novel in hand, or some work of science fiction or mystery.  Yes – I do dip into non-fiction at times.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is certainly one of the most influential histories of my adult life. A Short History of Nearly Everything has been one of my favorite non-fiction reads in the past few years.  Crime and Punishment is hardly fantasy, and has been one of my favorite works of fiction that I’ve read since high school.  I blazed through a great deal of literature both contemporary and classic during college.  Some of it was quite good.

But the books that I’ve really loved have been Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell; the George R. R. Martin books; even the Harry Potter books.  True – much of the fantasy genre is fairly awful. Perhaps that’s why I’m so glad whenever I do find something good – even older children’s fantasy that I missed somehow as a child, like the work of Diana Wynne Jones.

What I’d like to read soon are the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. And Jane Jacobs. And Diane Ravitch’s latest. And Joe Abercrombie (who, like Banks, is mysteriously missing from the local library…) And some Chesterton.

I’m currently reading  the sprawling Malazan books of Steven Erikson (now on House of Chains); and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre – though I do not spend enough time reading (and I have a suspicion that this will remain the case until my children are older.) I’ve also got Mieville’s The City and the City lined up, though I admit to being a little stuck in Erikson’s series, making it hard for me to move on to other things.

So much to read, so little time.

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Kyle writes:

[F]or decades, we’ve allowed students in need to get federally subsidized loans to attend both public and private colleges and universities. Some states, even provide scholarships and grants that can be used at private institutions of higher learning. So how is it that for years we’ve used public funds to support sending needy children to private schools and the public university system has yet to collapse under the weight of such anti-public measures? Nor has public support for public universities declined in the interim.

First of all, comparing our public education system at the elementary and secondary level to our system of public universities is a lot like comparing apples to arugula. Whereas public schools let anyone sign up and attend for free, public universities are still exclusive institutions, and charge a fee in order to attend.

Second, who says that all these loans and grants have actually benefited poor students?  Many private institutions already had (and still have) their own scholarship programs for low-income students.  There was no need for government’s to subsidize their tuition further. (Actually, many private schools have similar programs at the elementary and secondary levels….)

All that extra federal cash simply allowed public universities to keep raising their tuition higher and higher and higher over the years. That’s the thing about subsidies. The more you subsidize something, the more expensive it becomes.

Who’s to say private schools accepting vouchers wouldn’t simply start charging more for their tuition as well?  I’d say that is a very likely outcome.  Meanwhile, public schools – which don’t charge admission like public universities and which must accept every student who comes knocking – will have fewer resources at their disposal.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t rethink public schools.  We might even find ways to make entire districts operate more like a batch of charter schools, with far more independence and autonomy and creative license.  But providing subsidies to students will only make good education more expensive.  It won’t necessarily destroy the public school system.  But I don’t think it will help it much either.

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Rick Hess makes a great deal of sense in his critique of Diane Ravitch (and this bit echoes what Mark Thompson has pushed in the comments, arguments I also find compelling):

A lack of choice can force educators to simultaneously serve families with very different demands and responses to discipline or calls for parental involvement, making it difficult to establish common norms. A lack of autonomy makes it difficult for principals to assemble a team of teachers who embrace shared expectations and instructional principles. The institutional and political turbulence endemic to school systems means that superintendents change jobs every few years, and district priorities and initiatives change along with them. Bureaucratic and contractual rules governing discipline, the school day, or professional development can trip up district leaders seeking to emulate effective school models.

Organizational focus and instructional coherence are made vastly more difficult than they need to be by our K-12 systems, with their "little-bit-of-everything" mission, geographic monopoly, industrial era contracts and staffing arrangements, ill-defined aims, balky governance structures, contested disciplinary arrangements, and the rest. Choice and accountability, at their core, are an opportunity to create systems where focus and coherence are easier to come by and where robust curricula, powerful pedagogy, and rich learning can thrive.

I think this is all very true.  But on the flip side, I think that in the push for more accountability and more choice, we open a Pandora’s box of sorts, really allowing room for more federal involvement in our schools, less autonomy, and so forth.  There is a very real chance that in our Race to the Top, we end up racing directly to a new level of mediocrity.

There are a number of other very real detractions from the school choice movement, including the way the government could insert itself even into private institutions (see: Canada) as well as the very real possibility that the most talented students will be siphoned out of the public school system into an ad hoc network of charters and for-profit schools.

That being said, I’m all for re-structuring our schools to be less like industrial-era monoliths and more responsive to parents, students, and teachers alike.  If school choice really does lead to more autonomy and fewer standardized tests, I’m all for it.  If it really can avoid the dangers of a national curriculum, I’d be sold on it.

I just think, like Hess mentions, that school choice has been seen as too much a panacea and not as a means to an end.  And not enough public schools have learned from the success of their charter counterparts, either.

There is no silver bullet in education reform.  I will stick to my mantra: Education is local.  That includes school choice!

P.S.

Kyle asks:

You’ve persuaded at least me that trade schools should have a bigger role in our overall educational system, but wouldn’t their expanded prominence also attract students with aptitude for those trades? How is siphoning off the pre-college smart kids into a school focused on the continuance of academics study not just an academic trade school?

That’s a good question.  However, I’m much less interested in trade schools, per say, as I am in the concept of apprenticeship programs.  What I envision would be schools partnering directly with the local community to develop on-the-job apprenticeship opportunities for students who weren’t on the “academic” track.  This would take place in 11th grade.  They would still attend some classes in school, but would spend a portion of their day working in the community and learning relevant skills as well.

I think that ‘mainstreaming’ students works as long as their are extra opportunities for ‘gifted’ students to be challenged in higher level courses at a certain point in their education as well, and special-resource classes for ‘challenged’ students.  I don’t think 100% mainstreaming would work for a variety of reasons, but I do think we should move toward greater integration.

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[updated]

Here’s the part that gets me – if, as is assumed in this critique (an assumption I largely agree with by the way) that it is not possible to adequately measure performance via testing, then by what standard is it appropriate to say that parents shouldn’t have the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education, and then act on that criteria to send their child to the school that best matches that criteria? ~ Mark Thompson in the comments

Here’s how I see this.  Standardized testing is a shabby substitute for actual community and parental involvement in our schools.  It’s a crutch.  Inevitably, it’s a crutch that empowers bureaucrats and enfeebles teachers and students and schools and families and communities.  If we want our schools to be more ‘accountable’ and our teachers to perform adequately, then we as a society need to reintegrate our schools and our communities. No man is an island, as Donne so aptly put it.  Well, no school is either.  Nor should they be.  School should be a piece of the larger community.  We should hold our schools accountable by holding ourselves accountable first, by being a part of our children’s education. 

There are many ways to do this, including more community partnerships and, as I’ve said before, apprenticeship programs.  In some places, this means we need to reevaluate how much influence teacher’s unions have.  Not everywhere, by any means, but in those places where bad teachers get preferential treatment over their students.  It strikes me that more and more we feel that all of this should be done for us.  How well are our schools performing?  We don’t know because we aren’t involved in them so we’d better have them take lots and lots of tests!  How are our teachers performing?  We don’t ever see or speak with our teachers, or really with our kids, so we’d better grade their performance based on these tests!

If parents want ‘the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education’ they should simply be more involved in that education.  Some school choice probably won’t hurt here, but I worry that school choice in general will be used as an excuse not to really become involved in the first place.  ‘Well we picked a really high-performing school for our kids, so everything will be just fine!’  Again – I think some school choice is probably not a terribly big deal.  It may do some good.  But I think it only addresses one tiny sliver of the problems our schools face*.

In a sense, this is the problem we’ve seen with retirees in places like Sun City who want to avoid paying taxes to pay for public education.  That is more malicious, obviously, than simply wanting to pick a better school for your kids – but both actions undermine a commitment to our communities.  And that comes back to haunt us.  In the end, I think you get what you put in.

Another question that has been raised is the idea of gifted-students classes.  I’ll be blunt.  At this point in my life I’m against both gifted and special-needs classes being separated from the mainstream.  What classrooms need is a diversity of ability.  If gifted kids need more of a challenge they should be able to get it through electives or after-school instruction.  If special needs kids need more help, that should be provided.  But placing all these kids together will enrich the entire experience.  Hell – I’d say we should go back to one-room schoolhouses if I thought we could get away with it!  Segregating students based on age is just as silly to me as separating them based on ability.

In any case, segregating classes based on talent misses so many fundamentally important things about how we learn, how we socialize, how we learn to get along, that in the end is ultimately a disservice to everyone involved.

I’ll have more elaborate thoughts on the brain-drain concept later.  For now, suffice to say that I think we have been suckered into a grand illusion that centralizing our best and brightest is the only way, indeed the inevitable way – and that, I believe, is entirely untrue.

* P.S. I agree with Freddie on this point as well – most American schools are doing just fine!  Indeed, most Americans think their own school is doing just fine, even if they think everyone else’s is awful!  For instance, take a look at this chart from Gallup:

UPDATE.

Max Socol asks:

Not to argue from authority but just out of real curiosity: have you worked with special needs students before? Have you spent any time in any kind of classroom? (As a teacher, I mean.)

The answer is yes – a little.  I have taught in special-needs classes, both behavioral special ed and traditional special ed.  And I have had a great deal of experience with educators, talking about these issues – including the issue of special education being “mainstreamed” – as well.  The fact is, to adequately mainstream real problem kids or really handicapped kids, you need to probably have teacher assistants on hand.  There is no way that these kids will learn at the same rate as others.  Some severely handicapped kids need one-on-one instruction.  There is no perfect way to integrate them into the larger class.  That being said, segregation is a really backwards way of treating people with different learning ability and even different basic intelligences.  Of course, if you try to have everyone learn at the same rate, well you’re going to fail.  Then again, I’d say that applies to “normal” kids as well.  But who ever said all kids in a class should have to learn or achieve at the same rate?  That’s sort of an odd way of thinking, actually, even if it is firmly ingrained in our psyche.

Also, I like Greg’s ideas for measuring school success.  I bet we could come up with more if we tried:

College admittance rate
Trade school admittance rate
Military enlistment rate
Number of incidents that require police intervention
Winning academic prizes or scholarships to college, etc.
Hours volunteered by HS students
Number of grads who get jobs straight out of HS and they avg pay

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By chance, I happened to be driving and listening to NPR today when Diane Ravitch had a guest slot on the Diane Rehm show.  I only caught parts of the program, but what I did hear jived very nicely with some of the things I’ve been thinking (and writing) about on the subject of education lately.  A quick list of the points she made:

• School choice has a brain drain effect, drawing the most talented and motivated students out of their communities and placing them in high-performing charters, leaving public schools loaded up with the lower-performing students (and creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in the meantime).  Same goes for students with disabilities.  The most expensive inevitably end up at the public schools.
• Charters and private schools put public schools out of business, making schools in some communities non-existent.  Essentially she said that the idea of an education market was misguided because it kills the neighborhood school in favor of the “best deal”.  I tend to agree.  I would go even further, in fact.  If I had it my way we would work to reverse the brain drain at every level, including higher education.
• At the same time, Ravitch sees schools becoming more like businesses.  Instead of educators running schools and coming up with creative ideas, corporate suits are beginning to dictate how we should run our schools.  The ‘rainmakers’ behind charters are often paid exorbitant sums, while the teachers are over-worked and burn out quickly.  Instead, we should have teachers assuming administrative roles and taking leadership positions.  Not politicians or businessmen.
• One area I very much agree with Ravitch is her stance against rigid testing.  She claims the states cheat on their scores anyways, and that there is no evidence this sort of testing has led to any gains in performance.  Quite the contrary in fact.  NCLB, she says, has been a huge failure.  Schools were improving before it was enacted, and have regressed since.
• I also liked the idea of collaboration vs. competition.  I think we need much more of an open-source model for teaching, connecting teachers and schools across the country in as organic and natural a way as possible, allowing for the free exchange of ideas and techniques.  Rather than seeing it as a competitive process, we should view it as a collaborative process.  Indeed, Ravitch mentions that charters were initially intended to act as tiny R&D laboratories but that mission quickly turned to one of competition.  Also on this note, I’d like to address the notion of a national curriculum.  While open-source education would allow for tons of innovation and different ideas bubbling to the surface, a national curriculum would do just the opposite – creating a rigid, inflexible, and ultimately stifling (and easily captured!) curriculum.  A commenter asked if I would support a local public school’s teaching of creationism.  While I would leave that to the courts, let me just say this: I would rather have a handful of local schools teaching creationism then a national curriculum under the sway of the religious right.  That’s the danger with a national curriculum.  Well, that and the whole stifling of innovation and crushing of the very soul of our American education system.

(P.S. at this point I’d like to just add that while I advocate local solutions and “localism” writ large, that is not the same thing as saying I support all actions of local governments.  Local governments can be very tyrannical, very corrupt, etc.  I just think top-down solutions are generally ineffective and can actually exacerbate local problems.  Nor do I think that we, as a nation, shouldn’t come up with as many good ideas as possible.  That’s part of open-source education, after all.  I just bristle at the notion that we should somehow implement these ideas from the top down, as NCLB did.)

I didn’t hear the whole program, and I hope to listen to it the next chance I have.  You can stream it online here and read a section of Ravitch’s book, as well as some highlights from the program.  I wonder about a few things that this anti-school-choice position leaves open-ended:

• What about unions?  There are some very serious problems with too-powerful unions making it almost impossible to get rid of bad teachers.  Leaving aside the question of merit pay, what about simply getting rid of these awful teachers?  Something needs to change, especially in heavily unionized areas.  Again, this is a local problem.  Schools in Arizona do not have the same union-related problems that Californians or New Jerseyans (Jersyites?) face.
• Along these lines, how do we get more, better teachers into the system?  I think more creative autonomy is more important than more money – and I think this touches on something Ravitch said, which is that we need to make teaching more professional.  I agree, but it’s only one part of what I think will be a much more difficult problem.
• Schools are facing serious budget issues, and will need to cut back on the excessive budgets of the housing boom years.  How can we do this without causing a great deal of pain?  In my home town we voted to raise property taxes to help ease the pinch, as the state legislature oscillates between sheer madness and sheer stupidity in their attempt to pass a damn budget.  More and more I think we need to make schools less dependent on state and federal governments, but it won’t be easy.  Autonomy for schools and teachers is key here, but how do we implement autonomy?  The nature of the beast is to take it away!

As always, I appreciate your thoughts on all of this.

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Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve read against Walmart is the very same argument that one hears against sprawl – namely, that it is the result of a vast network of government intervention and central planning.  The very nature of Walmart is one which requires a car culture, and as we all know, the car culture would not have been possible without enormous amounts of state subsidies, draconian zoning laws, and so forth.  In other words, without the highway projects, the protection of the auto industry, and the many zoning practices in place in modern America, Walmart would not exist – at least in its current form.  As it stands, given our car culture, given our sprawl, Walmart acts as a benefit to many consumers.

That is the stumbling block I come back to when I consider my own distaste for Walmart.  In a real free market economy, sans all the government regulations and subsidies, Walmart would not even be an issue.  The many more diverse and denser places in America would not wanted or needed a Walmart to come set up shop.  But given the world we have created for ourselves, what is the alternative?  Can we very well deny poor people one of the only places that they can afford to buy cheap goods at?  Or, more to the point, should we demonize what is quite obviously a symptom of the larger problem?

Taking a closer look at the problem, we turn once again to Austin Bramwell, who has penned a brief response to James Howard Kunstler’s take on John Stossel on the subject of sprawl.  He writes,

Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.  If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development.  First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle.  Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.

Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million).  If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.

At this point ‘choice’ becomes a very tricky thing indeed.  Now that we’ve been, essentially, pushed into the suburbs – where cars and big boxes are simply a matter of life – what should we do about it?  Should we choose somehow to limit the existence of these big boxes?  Would this help us in our addiction to vehicular transport?  Many of the restored walkable communities around the country are either prohibitively expensive or Disney-fied versions of the America that once was.  Those who benefit the most from Walmart and its big box counterparts in this sprawling world of ours are also the poorest among us.  Would they benefit, also, from some other world?  I think so – but getting there is fraught with danger.

To put an end to the sprawl by mandating its destruction…  Far more sensible and humane, I think, to limit the government that has brought us here instead.  Quit subsidizing roads as heavily, quit subsidizing fossil fuels, work to reform zoning laws across the country to allow more freedom, mixed zoning (a term we now use to describe simply how places used to be built) and other ways to remove the artificial influence of the state from how we build America.  At this point – so intractable is the mess we find ourselves in – I’m not sure how it can be done.  The infrastructure of sprawl stretches over everything now, a vast web of concrete and sameness.  The year I lived in Denver drove this home for me, as does every trip to Phoenix.  “There’s no place like home,” has become my mantra whenever I’m in other places.

And people have come to like the sameness.  Even I take some comfort in it.  Or else it has simply become easier for us to stay at the Motel 8 than to find the local establishment.  Norman Bates would never work at a Motel 8.  I don’t begrudge Starbucks or Barnes & Nobles.  I just prefer the local joints, the used book stores, the organic landscape of an America without such cheap gas and such abundant roads.  We have imagined ourselves a much more boring, repetitive America.

One last point – there was really never going to be an extraordinarily strong central government in this country without this sort of interstate network of roads we have built (nor such strong corporations, for that matter).  However haphazard our sprawl has been, it was no accident.

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Lots of interesting feedback on my last post.  Kevin Drum and Ryan Avent  both focus on the notion that the sort of choice Bramwell describes is only available to higher-income families, leaving poor Americans and their children to waste away in subpar schools in broken neighborhoods. (Avent called my defense of public schools regrettable, though I think he focused entirely on Bramwell’s argument instead…)

My point, however, while riffing off of Bramwell’s initial argument, was simply that schools are a secondary issue, and won’t be fixed until the neighborhoods and communities are fixed first.  Without fertile soil for public schools to grow and improve in, all the school choice in the world will have negligible effects.  Even the sort of choice Bramwell claims we already have.  A couple quick thoughts:

• School choice not only undermines public schools by draining their coffers, it creates a “brain-drain” on communities, often pulling the most determined, driven students out of the local school and placing them elsewhere.
• Notably, many voucher-proponents are wealthy, and as is the case with many charters, it seems likely that the already wealthy would benefit the most from any voucher program. 
• School choice does not address the problems of affordable housing, restrictive zoning, and lack of business investment in many of these communities.  Avent makes a really good point about zoning in particular:

But that doesn’t mean that the issue of affordable housing should just be forgotten. It’s really important. The quality of schools isn’t the only thing capitalized into the price of a home. So too is the value of neighborhood amenities, including things like public safety and convenient grocery stores. And of crucial importance to home values is access to employment centers, and the stronger the local labor market, the higher are home values. You’re not just paying for a building or a piece of land; you’re paying for a location that secures for you certain opportunities and a certain quality of life.

I just think it’s strange — and really troubling — that writers of all stripes shrug off the huge set of regulatory and legal restrictions that hold down housing supply and density in the country’s strongest economic centers. There are serious consequences to these rules, and we should take them seriously.

I think that while many Americans can move across town to a better school, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a charter or magnet nearby as well.  Some school choice, I believe, can be a net benefit to a community.  Too much, and I think you’ll start to see an even greater divorce between schools and communities than already exists.  Focusing instead on creating cities that have mixed zoning, better opportunities for low-income families to live in nicer areas, and better climates for business investment in areas that are currently low-income will do a better job at addressing the problems with our public schools than simply busing students off one by one to better schools elsewhere.

Here in my hometown we have a pretty good public school system, but we also have several charter schools at the elementary, junior high, and high school level.  These provide people with a bit more choice than they would have otherwise had, but not so much that there isn’t still a strong public school system fairly well wedded to the community.  Things could be better, but they could be much worse as well.

Furthermore, the poor neighborhoods remain stuck with the poorer schools, and the families in those neighborhoods tend to not make as much use of the charter system as more well-to-do families.  This may be simply cultural and may touch on what Bramwell meant when he said that families who placed a higher value on education were more likely to put their kids in a good school (even a good public school).  Of course, this gets right to the heart of the problem with cyclical poverty.

I’m not sure that vouchers, charters, and all this school choice would actually lead to much of a different outcome than what I’ve seen here, either.  It’s possible even that the poor schools would simply suffer greater than the relatively well off schools as money is siphoned out of the public school system and into charters, vouchers, and so forth.  That’s not a foregone conclusion, but it’s not really going against the grain of history either.  Misguided egalitarianism and unintended results have gone hand in hand for some time, after all.

Apart from all of this, my larger point is that education is local, and that school choice plans tend to come part and parcel with efforts from the federal government to exact more control, more standards, more tests, and so forth over local schools.  I think autonomy is the best remedy for schools – creative control over curriculum and teaching methods, fewer restraints over teachers and schools by not only the state but by teacher’s unions as well.  Unfortunately, while school choice seems to do a pretty good job at getting at the problem of teacher’s unions, it does a terrible job at getting rid of federal interference and, as NCLB has shown, creates a system of teaching to tests that is antithetical to the way American schools have always been run, and how American teachers have always taught.  (I think we can still do merit pay without the standardized tests, by the way.)

This country is too big and diverse to teach to a national standard.  The one thing we have unifying us is our commitment to a vibrant – but diverse – public school system, and I think we should keep it that way.  We will not achieve equality, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work to improve schools across the board.  To do that we need to rethink how schools and communities interact, and find ways to rekindle failing communities.  Pulling out the best and brightest students from these communities isn’t the answer.  Far better to think of ways to make these schools better partners with their communities and vice versa.  I suggested reawakening the very old tradition of apprenticeship programs.  Why not partner schools with local businesses and allow students after say, tenth grade – if they so choose – to go learn a valuable trade?  Not everyone is destined to be a doctor or an English professor.  Why should we encourage this myth?

In the end, no matter how egalitarian we would like the world to be, not everyone is going to be very good at school, and nothing we can do will change that.  Not every school can both be excellent and equal – far more likely that equality will come on the heels of mediocrity.  These are just facts of life.  So why not focus on making communities stronger first?  If all this federal interference into our schools isn’t really helping, why not focus instead on bringing jobs to these deflated neighborhoods?  I think mixed-zoning, fewer building restrictions, more and better public transit, and fewer barriers to entry for small businesses (including lower business taxes!) are all great ways to improve our worst schools.  And none of them have anything to do with education.

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Bramwell writes:

America’s public schools are one example of how even governments, when subject to market discipline, can produce a superior product. Compare Soviet arms during the Cold War.  The Soviets excelled at producing weapons because otherwise foreign governments wouldn’t have purchased them.  Similarly, some public schools consistently excel, because otherwise they could not attract the best parents and students, thereby allowing those schools to excel, thereby attracting more good parents and students, and so on in a virtuous cycle.  In both cases, governments — in contrast to the usual rule — have had to compete for customers.

The “accountability” movement, however, wishes to match customers with schools as planners, rather than the customers themselves, deem fit. School vouchers, for example, a favorite policy of “accountability” proponents, punish those very school systems that have already worked very hard, thank you very much, to attract the best students and most civic-minded parents. (It’s no surprise that vouchers have proven to be politically unpopular, including if not especially among Republican voters.) Similarly, shutting down failing schools and redistributing their students punishes those schools that have performed marginally better and thereby attracted marginally better students and parents. The “accountability” movement, in short, wants to equalize the quality of educational products, no matter the price paid for them.  Whatever this merits of this policy, it surely does not show much faith in the free market.

[…]

Similarly, there is a hidden mechanism that makes the American School System work, and which modern planners ignore — namely, freedom of movement, which creates a well-functioning market for public education.  Planners such as “accountability” advocates who want to turn bad schools into good ones (and, often, by implication, vice versa), no matter what their scheme, are doomed to disappointment.

No matter how you spin it, American education is and always will be a local issue.  One-size-fits-all solutions mandated at the federal level will simply fail despite their many good intentions.  School choice may have some benefits if it’s home-grown and cultivated in an organic fashion by local communities. Some districts may truly benefit from the addition of a few good charter schools. But no race to the top federal program based on sticks and carrots will achieve this anymore than weakening public schools through vouchers will.

Perhaps we should stop thinking that all schools should be equal, or that all students will get an equal shot at a good education.  Maybe they all should, but they certainly won’t, no matter how much we wish it were so.  That may sound terrible, but there will always be better and worse schools, and there will always be more capable and less capable students, and luckier and less lucky draws.  And in many ways it’s odd that school choice advocates should be so egalitarian in their thinking, so starry-eyed and optimistic.

If we really want better schools in the areas that have the poorest results, we’ll have to fix communities first.  And communities will need to do that from the ground up, not Washington down.  That’s no simply task, but it is at least more realistic than thinking we can fix schools through federal legislation or by issuing standardized tests or pushing all students toward higher education or by sucking money from the public schools and redistributing it into private ones.

Maybe some kids would be better off learning a trade rather than finishing four years of high school and attempting college.  Maybe that’s another way we can bring schools and communities back together – by reviving the long-dead apprenticeship model and getting kids working in valuable trades and accruing that much-needed work experience.  That’s only one idea, and it will work in some places and not in others.

Just like the problems facing schools and school districts around the country, the successes lie in local solutions.  One district may be crippled by a too-strong teacher’s union; another school may have incompetent administrators; still others may have spent too much for too little and are now facing huge cuts and budgets on the precipice of collapse.  All these problems are unique and have unique solutions.  But keeping education local also means that we have thousands of little laboratories to measure the success or failure of various reforms.  No one solution will ever be the magic fix because no magic fix exists.

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I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

P.S. In the comments, Sam writes:

Maybe because it’s a bad idea to be texting while you are driving a bus or running a blast furnace? Such a bad idea that if you screw up while making kissy-face with pooh-bear, someone is going to die? Wait, no. That can’t be it. It has to be because everyone’s human rights are being violated. She mentions down time. Is there wide-spread evidence that people are not allowed to text or use a cell phone while they are on lunch break? I do know that I have been on many, many city buses being driven by people who are engrossed in a Blackberry or cell phone. And I have worked blue-collar jobs where cell phones have been banned from certain individuals because they simply would not, under any circumstances, stop taking calls while working. I worked with one guy who openly made vast vicoden deals while swinging a sledge hammer. Human rights violations. Sheesh.

Totally agree – nor did I mean to really focus on this part of Marcotte’s post.  Mainly I was attempting to focus on the idea of communication technology as a means to counter atomization vs. communication technology as a cause of atomization.  I don’t think there’s a terribly clear dividing line, and certainly both can be true, but it’s an interesting topic.  More interesting than whether personal call restrictions are human rights violations.  This is also why I find that sort of language so counter-productive.  Posing the theory that separating work and family life has bad social outcomes is interesting to me, but suggesting that it constitutes some nefarious rights violations just sounds silly.

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