The fortress of school

Our world is not what it was, or what it might have appeared to be, 50 years ago. The forces of transformation, not always for the better, have been particularly active since the start of the 21st century. Aside from global issues such as our much-enhanced awareness of climate change, including our capacity to measure the effects of climate change, we have encountered a great deal of violence between states, within states, in regional spaces that cross borders, and in families, neighborhoods, and communities. Some might argue that we are encountering a new kind of violence, more brazen and less modest, in political rhetoric as well, where articulations of racism, exclusion, and rejection have become commonplace even in national contexts we have come to rely on for their stability, respect for human rights, and general tolerance for diversity. Economic security has been threatened repeatedly, and this time affecting not merely the least empowered social locations but almost everyone. Massive industries are collapsing or at least struggling to survive (including the oil industry, auto industry, and energy industry), while higher levels of unemployment have become commonplace nearly everywhere. Global migration, often in the form of refugee flows, have proliferated and in some regions of the globe are challenging the receiving nations to the limit.

All of these developments, although not new in character, have a significant effect on social relations everywhere. In North America and in Europe, these developments are encouraging a new political discourse that is worrisome; a sharp move to the extreme right, with rhetoric that is not entirely unfamiliar to those with memories of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and the McCarthyism of the 1950s in the United States.

Although change is all around us, one institution has proven surprisingly resilient. This institution has charted its own course, maintained control over its own destiny and, one might argue, rests cocooned in a make-believe world of its own imagination—school. Notwithstanding enormously creative and well-researched work in the fields of learning, pedagogy, and education, schools have hardly changed at all; they continue to be places of control and limited creativity, where diversity is seldom greeted with innovation and participatory transformations, but instead with reinforced and strengthened mechanisms of exclusion, control, and institutional truths. Far from promoting democratization, schools have built impenetrable walls of an “expert-culture” accessible only to its main functionaries—teachers, and the regulatory bodies responsible for the conditions in which teachers must teach. Far from celebrating the creativity, drive, and passion of would-be teachers to nourish and nurture young people, schools have rewarded teaching to the test, minimizing disruption, and undermining the radical potential of emancipatory education.

Research has repeatedly shown the privilege base of school politics. Parents with resources gain greater access to decision making in the education of their children than those without resources. Parents challenged by social dislocation are written off as irrelevant to the education of their children. Young people themselves are made to conform to the expectations, indeed, the norms, of the institution. Being different, or being unique, in a school context is a curse. The broader global and local contexts of children's rights do not appear to apply in School, and the notion that young people might have agency in the context of their own learning is routinely dismissed. Young people with autism, developmental disability, sexual identities that fall outside of the heterosexist norms of the institution, or racial, spiritual, or cultural contexts that require active engagement are welcomed so long as they learn to conform or at the very least to make as few waves as possible. It seems that this is the educational goal of school—learning to conform, to comply with teacher autocracy, and to check one's critical mind at the door.

It seems counterintuitive for children and youth to spend their formative years in an institution that is so fundamentally unprepared to face the realities of the 21st century. Conformity is hardly needed for the next generation. Neither is an acculturation into institutional stagnation. Communities across borders, cultural contexts, language groups, and identity designations struggle to shape a world that is liveable and a planet that may survive our current disregard for its well-being.

Although the circumstances of these challenges are new and unique to this time and these places, activists, many teachers, and scholars—John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Christine Sleeter, and dozens of others—have called for democratized education for a century. Still, the institution remains intractable and in the United States, we see 50% of new teachers leaving the field within their first 3 years. This institution is broken—and at some of its most foundational levels, not simply in terms of the dominant rhetoric in which school's effectiveness is measured purely by test scores and graduation rates.

We need innovation and new ideas pursuant to the learning and education of our children and youth. Such ideas ought to confirm the democratic values and processes called for since the first decades of the 21st century. They should prioritize participatory models of learning, in which the full diversity and the multiple identities within and between all young people find expression and voice. We need new ideas that are inclusive of young people labeled as damaged; we need education that does not teach but rather engages the multiplicity of narratives relevant to young people. Education should transcend the narrow modernism, including its features of capitalism, consumerism, and blind compliance to the expert cultures, not reinforce them.

To get there, we may have to overcome two core dynamics that have kept schools as fortresses. First, with all due respect, we must overcome the reliance on teachers as the changemakers and innovators in public education. Learning can never be limited to the boundaries of the expertise of one professional group, particularly when that group's livelihood depends on not rocking the boat. As long as test scores and completion rates are the measures of school's success and of teachers' effectiveness, and as long as these assessments are dictated from top-down legislation far removed from the realities of the complex lives of actual children, families, and communities, teachers will continue to shore up practices that reward compliance and obedience rather than those that hold emancipatory and democratic potential. Education must not be the domain of teachers—it is the domain of people, including children and youth; it is a public domain. As a group, teachers as a professional group are forbidden from imagining their craft without schools, and those who imagine anyway are far too often forced out of the institution by its pressures, its rigidity, and its intractability. We cannot expect new ideas from professional groups who are so dependent upon the very institutions needing transformation; in this case, as in many others, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house (Lorde, 1984).

Second, we need to be open to a question that no one dares to ask: Are schools still relevant institutions? Is the idea of hoarding children and youth into a building, sorting them by age and restricting any meaningful interaction among ages, and subjecting them to thought control and a highly censured representation of social relations and their histories across the globe, a relevant idea for the 21st century? Can school be reformed? Or is it time to commit this institution to its proper place as a historical artefact and to invent in its place approaches to learning and education that are in tune with this time in human history, with the diversity and multiplicity of identities seeking voice, and with the cross cultural formation of new communities emerging from the dislocation and displacements of millions of peoples, many of them children and youth?

As editors, we do not really have the answers to these questions. But we are curious, and our job is to encourage dialogue, new research initiatives, and innovation in the way we connect our ideas to theory, and our research to practice. We think that this is a good time to look more closely at the Fortress School. We think that when a world is transforming, we owe it to the next generation to critically evaluate our long held assumptions about how to live in the newly emerging world, especially when we know full well that we, who were educated in schools, have contributed substantially to the challenges facing the planet, and all social relations within it.

We therefore welcome submissions that seek to critically engage with Fortress School, defending its value or proposing its demise.