Should I Stay or Should I Go? Education as Liberation and Constraint

Education constrains us. Education guards us. In the transmission of culture and the production of citizens, education works to fence things as they are.

Education liberates us. Education frees us. In the power of literacy and numeracy, in exposure to the ideas of others, education pushes us out of the nest.

Education always occurs between these two poles, simultaneously guarding and liberating. I believe it was the historian Bernard Bailyn who first pointed this out.

In the past few days, I’ve had occasion to enlarge this conception beyond the education of an individual, a Horace Mann, a Frederick Douglass, a you, or a me.

Take an independent (private) elementary school that decides to add a high school. The elementary school has spent years, even decades, growing to a sustainable size. It has a lot to protect, and now it is considering taking a large risk in growing to include grades 9-12. It has to, deliberately, shift its school culture and the appropriate activities of its board of trustees from guarding to liberating. This is asking a lot.

Waldorf schools are relatively unique in the U.S., at least, in that they see themselves, often, as comprehensive schools that include pre-K through high school grades. In their growth from risky beginnings to stable elementary schools, they shift, at an institutional level, from the entrepreneurial, creative work of liberating to the stability and risk-minimizing work of guarding what they have developed, what they have. This is good and healthy—trustees are responsible for safeguarding the institution they hold in trust. But if this institution now tries to grow again—to add a high school—the institution may well find itself at war with itself, a civil war of guards against liberators. Will the high school receive full support, or conditional support? Enough to survive it’s own risky growth? Good luck to it.

Or, think more broadly of an organization like the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), which assumes responsibility for guarding the trademarks “Waldorf” and “Steiner” as they apply to education. In guarding what has developed over the past decades in the couple of hundred independent Waldorf schools, is it possible that AWSNA will decline to assume the risk inherent in promoting all the growth it might? I would say it’s not only possible, it’s almost inevitable. In the 1990s, AWSNA deliberately decided not to include charter or public Waldorf schools as members, and, ever since then, has had an uncertain relationship to this new approach to the Waldorf method.

Enlarging a conversation about guarding and liberating to an institutional or associational level necessarily generalizes but the general drift and potential conflicts among constituents, remain, I believe.

And, when times are tight, we are apt to guard more and risk less, even if tough times call for greater risk.

We recognize that the work of liberation is risky.

We should recognize that constraint is risky, too.

We can do ourselves in by overreaching. And we can do ourselves in by failing to grow. By maintaining a healthy and necessary tension between the poles of liberation or growth, and constraint or stasis, we actually minimize risk.