A SOCIETY WITHOUT SCHOOLS
When American philosopher John Dewey visited Utopia, he once revealed, he discovered that the most utopian thing about it was the absence of schools. Oh, yes, they still had education, but without anything like schools. And it worked.

Children gathered in centers with adults who directed their activities, and you might right away say the centers were substitutes for schools. But when Dewey asked his Utopian friends what their purposes or objectives were, “the whole concept of the school, of teachers and pupils and lessons, had so completely disappeared” that it was as if he was “asking why children should live at all.”

The Utopians did help youngsters make their lives worthwhile for them and society, and they did see to it that they grew and developed. But the notion of special goals that all children should try to attain was completely foreign to them. Instead, Dewey found, the fundamental purposes of education--discovering aptitudes, tastes, abilities and weaknesses of each child--were thoroughly ingrained in the activities they engaged in. That was Dewey’s famous--or infamous, for a lot of people--Progressive Education. Learning by doing.

But how did these people know whether the children every learned anything? Once more the Utopians were nonplussed. Did he think it was possible for a normal boy or girl to grow up without learning what they needed to learn? Only “a congenital idiot” would do that.

Dewey was discovering that the “whole concept of learning as acquiring and storing away things had been displaced by the concept of creating attitudes, shaping desires, and developing the needs that are significant in the process of living.” The non-Utopian world, he was told, is dominated by the idea that education is a personal acquisition and private possession-which, of course, fits snugly into a society driven by accumulating stuff. It had “taken possession of the minds of educators” and controlled all of the educational system.

There was also competition and rivalry (like today's Race To The Top); the use of rewards and punishments, examinations to determine success or failure, and the idea of promotion. The Utopians viewed these as ways to produce achievements and successes in an acquisitive society; where learning and scholarship were considered private valuable possessions, even if they were little more than “useless or remote facts.”

Utopians had discarded objectives that every child was required to achieve, which they saw produced a brand of rote learning without enjoyment; instead “fear, embarrassment, constraint, self-consciousness. and the feeling of failure and incapacity.” In their place were the “development of a confidence and a readiness to tackle difficulties; of actual eagerness to seek problems instead of dreading them and running away from them.”

If it disturbs you to think of America without schools, it may be because you equate going to school with education--and maybe some other things along the way, like baby-sitting, sequestering youngsters in institutions that take on the character of prisons to keep them under control. After all, we have no other place for them to go. It also does the work of employers by house-breaking young people to take future jobs

But we all know--don't we?--that it's possible to become educated with little or no help from school. Just because you don't do what they do in schools doesn't mean you can't learn. We all know that. But it's just that we forget it when we think about schools.

But what Dewey saw was that nothing less than a cultural revolution would be necessary for a society to adopt what the Utopians had. The last time something like that was tried was 40 years ago or so, when UC Berkeley student Mario Savio uttered the immortal words, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious. . .you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears. . . you’ve got to make it stop.”

And you know how far we got with that!