Leituras sobre a educação

O que vem abaixo é uma apreciação crítica, no Los Angeles Review of Books, de um conjunto de livros publicados, recentemente, sobre o estado da educação nos EUA. A abordagem desses livros caracteriza-se  por ser heterodoxa (ver o meu bold abaixo: fala-se de heresias). Penso que o artigo carreia elementos de informação úteis à reflexão sobre a educação em Portugal, malgrado todas as nossas diferenças. Transcreve-se só a parte de introdução.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The Educational Lottery

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush​ on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie​ famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II​, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission​ report, and the War on Poverty​ singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. “The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson​ put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates​ want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.

The advance of the education gospel has been shadowed from the beginning by critics who claim that education, despite our best efforts, remains a bastion of privilege. For these critics, it is not that the educational gospel is wrong (a truly democratic, meritocratic school system would, if it existed, be a good thing); it is that the benefits of education have not yet spread evenly to every corner of American society, and that the trend toward educational equality may be heading in the wrong direction. They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The higher education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption. Other heresies are more radical, and thus more disturbing to settled beliefs about the power of education.