What are we doing here, Anyway?

I've been reading "music matters" by David Elliot and Marissa Silverman and I'm thinking about their invocation of eudaimonia- a greek idea of "human flourishing" as the real ethical aim of education, in their case as applied to music education. If education is the enterprise then eudaimonia is a mission statement.

What do schools think they are doing for their students, Is it fostering the human flourishing of an ideal education?  If Eudaimonia is a goal then how does that stack up to how schools talk about their goals in the form of  their mission statements and beliefs. How might the aims of a couple of different schools contrast with each other, especially when those ideas are constrained by public policy and funding and conversely when they are not.

I thought that an instructive thing to do might be to look at Philips Exeter academy, one of the top private secondary schools in the United States where tuition can run you 47k-65k and then SAU 16, the public school district that serves the people who live in the same town.

Exeter academy leads their information with their mission and student centered values. There is very little in the way of discussion about employable or even specific skills. Lots of talk about development of personal agency and inquiry, democracy etc. The idea that skills are developed is stated but left largely assumed.The function of schooling for exeter academy is focused on the person and the methods they tout are all engaged and constructivist practices.

SAU 16's High School doesn't have a mission statement on their website that is easily accessible. I searched for “mission statement” and got a goose egg. Their curriculum website talks about preparing students for the workplace though, as well as specific skills they will develop to make them both employable and successful in their communities (critical thinking is not listed).

While Exeter academy views their mission as “ unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives” SAU is concerned with competencies, evidenced by assessments, that can lead not to purposeful lives but productive ones as fit members of workplaces. “ These competencies support the overarching SAU 16 Vision for our Graduates: Each graduate demonstrates engaged learning and citizenship through the ability to solve problems independently and collaboratively with perseverance and resilience and communicates solutions with confidence and empathy." We’re looking for evidence of competence for problem solving, not evidence of humanity.

 I couldn’t find any but I kept looking for statements of belief from the public school and found that the elementary school did have a series of We believe statements that mentioned study habit development for elementary school students as a measure of " successful students" 3 times though.

Why are the wealthy students offered the opportunity for developing agency and thoughts in a democratic context, guided by a sense of student flourishing and the kids who live next door aren't?

This isn't to say that we should just do private schools, but rather to examine why the priorities of one are so different from the priorities of the other. The placement of these is telling too, because they are written for an audience. The people who are going to pay almost 70k a year to send their child to boarding school are looking for human flourishing. They want to be assured that the humanity and individuality of their child will be present in their education, they want to know the education is great but they are convinced of that by the student centered language. The marketing department knows who they are selling to and what they are selling with their mission statement. 

The public school also knows what they are selling and who they are selling to. They are not courting the capitalist parents they are dealing with the hoi polli of Exeter New Hampshire. Does the mission statement matter to them? They’re paying property taxes and they want something different. The administration thinks the public cares more about academic standards and readiness for work than the uniqueness of each child. They're right. People don't care about children, they care about their own child and without that child they care about their tax rates. They want to know that their child can get a job and not starve on the street. They want to know that we’re imparting good study skills to kindergarteners so they can one day get a college degree and engage in some kind of upward class mobility. The learning at the public school is about survival and it is presented that way. The folks at Exeter don’t need to worry about their employability in the same way as the folks enrolled in the SAU and their parents don’t have to rely on their neighbors to value eudaimonia over cursive writing. 

What the folks of exeter care about is " Is our children learning?". Show me the numbers that say they are. Will they be ready to work the counter at my store?  And the values statements reflect that. 

These two schools in the same geographical space are in completely different worlds. How are they  supposed to be preparing their students to compete equally?  How do these significant differences demonstrate differences in the perception of the world after graduation and the role of the students in it? Both schools are performing roles in social reproduction and both are doing so in ways that reassert the class barriers in our society. They’re guided to these roles and choose them.  They do it side by side. Eudaimonia for the rich, competence for the poor.