Marilyn Monroe Reminds Us Learnedness Is a Choice, Not a Policy
“If you’re ignorant, books won’t laugh at you.” Those are the words of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), and hopefully a spur to more humble approaches when it comes to “saving” education.
Education won’t be fixed in Washington, state legislatures, in school districts, or in think tanks. To suggest otherwise is to presume that activism, or laws in a book, can replace the individual desire to learn.
In a recent post, long-time think tanker and energetic educational reformist Corey Deangelis told his flock that homeschooling is the historical norm, while “factory schooling” (kids in classrooms) is the experiment that has failed. But has it?
While DeAngelis’s broader case is against the teachers’ unions, it’s evident he’s telling parents of the present to take education back from the “factory schools.” Not only is it doubtful that parents will do this, it’s also doubtful that doing so would mean a whole lot educationally.
Let’s start with DeAngelis’s assertion that “People were learning at home for thousands of years.” Ok, that’s probably true in a sense, but he might agree in a light moment that he was overstating his case more than a bit. As we know even from 19th century America, and on family farms like the one that Henry Ford grew up on, work was daylight to dark six days a week.
It’s a reminder that before “factory schools,” it’s not as though there was a school in every house. Desperate pursuit of survival amid chronic malnutrition rooted in the cruel fact that nearly all human effort was directed toward the production of one thing (insufficient food), meant that learning took a backseat for much of human existence. Which tells us that homeschooling was decidedly not the norm for thousands of years.
No doubt there was teaching in some households, but that’s the point: learnedness then and now was always a choice, and of bullish surplus that afforded free time, not an effect of schools.
Yes the “factory schools” DeAngelis denigrates did proliferate, and it signaled soaring production that had freed kids from the endless farm work that had previously defined their lives. And while he contends that they “failed,” it seems DeAngelis is mistaking causation. He regularly makes it about the teachers’ unions, but how to explain the myriad “government schools” across the U.S. that routinely place students in substantial amounts in the best colleges and universities, including “government universities”?
And while anecdote sucks, Richard Feynman, Baruch Samuel Blumberg, and Burton Richter all attended Far Rockaway High School, a “government school” in Queens. They respectively won Nobel Prizes in physics, physiology and physics. Were “factory schools” once not so bad?
If the question sounds flippant, that’s because it is. It’s asked to make the point that the most famous “factory school” in Queens wasn’t once great (it closed in 2011) as much those who formerly attended it had values consistent with learning that no school, public, private, or home, could inculcate in its youths. We see this truth through Marilyn Monroe.
While she never had much schooling of the factory, private or home kind, she was interested. As a new biography indicates about her, she was a voracious reader. As one of her photographers once observed, this was “a girl not satisfied with what nature or education had given her and who worked all the time trying to improve herself.” Amen.
If learning fails inside homes, factory classrooms, or private classrooms, it’s far more an indication of student failure as opposed to errant teachers. As Monroe’s story of learning reminds us, it’s a choice as opposed to something that can be fixed by policy. Not so to an American right intent on creating victims, and that’s too bad.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.