“Customer Service “ disease in Education

Meanwhile, there have always been small numbers of highly innovative schools. Such schools are often inspired by new insights into child development or learning theory.

Yet few of them can sustain their innovations beyond the tenure of a few innovators.

Once a key person – principal, teacher (s) – leave, everything returns to the norms of “assembly line”.

There exist distinctive features of schools that make sustained innovation more challenging than in business.

The first distinctive feature is that primary and secondary education is more purely assembly line organized structures than business is. While business adopted machine-age ideas such as assembly line, it was not born with these ideas. Business has been significant institution for thousands of years, and the word of “company” in Latin means

literally a sharing of bread (compania, com and panis). The modern school started with one-room-building and developed into the modern urban school system.

Second, the school system is far more tightly embedded in larger social systems than business is. A lot of different institutions affect the schools. Different political winds affect school organism with pressures such as intensive control and more standardized tests.

The third distinctive feature is the connection to community; they are in many ways part of community. Business is not such. For example, businesses do not have parents as part of their system of governance. Businesses have investors who basically let the business run according to the ways they want so long as it achieves an adequate profit.

The fours distinctive feature is the customers – businesses have customers who care about quality of their product. Schools do not produce anything as businesses do. The knowledge cannot be viewed as a “product for sell”. Knowledge is individual and is a result of once learning process. This is fundamental for any school. If knowledge is a “product” what the “best before” quality will be. Businesses care about the quality of product and they chose the best quality of components. Schools do not make a choice. We take all students to our classes.

The fifth distinctive feature is democracy. Businesses are not democratic at all but school is.

Herein lies probably the most problematic distinction of the educational system, viewed from the standpoint of innovation and adaptation. Customer service ideas are just “re-painting” of machine-age-school. “Product” is the same – the machine world of teachers in control, students dependent on teachers’ approval, learning defined as getting “A” on the test. Learners develop their survival skills for industrial-age institutions in first and second grade (even in the kindergarten). They learn how to please the teacher, as they would try to please their boss. Children learn how to avoid wrong answers, habits that would later shape the ongoing organizational dance of avoiding blame and seeking credit for success. They will learn how to be quite when they feel lost – no questioning the boss in the official meeting, even when he/she makes no sense.

Coming to recognize how much the assembly line school lives in each of us can be sobering. But it also enabling. It is tragedy that school is not a place for deepening our sense of who we are and what we are committed to.