C is for Conflict.
We all love peace. Educators and school board members are no exception. Board members especially are prone to the utopian belief that if we are all doing our jobs, then there should be no tension, no conflict among our constituents or between constituents and ourselves. If someone is upset, the theory goes, then there must be something wrong. There is danger in this belief. Attempts to put an end to tensions, to ban conflict from the conversation, can lead only to banality. And the conflict will continue in some modified form.
Education is conflict, bred of the tensions between the past and the future, between competing political interests, each with its favored 'history', favored 'science', favorite reality. And those are the good days.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension between a single family's aspirations for its own child(ren) and the need to share.
Education is conflict, bred of the gap between the expert judgment of practitioners and the common wisdom(s) of consumers. This tension is exacerbated by competing 'expert' paradigms and wildly divergent 'wisdoms' among consumers. It reaches critical mass due to the utter certainty with which each expert as well as each consumer holds that his or her private expertise or personal wisdom is uniquely correct.
Education is conflict, bred of the fact that in spite of the expression of myriad varieties of expertise and wisdom, each particular school can only be a compromise among competing perspectives. It can never be anyone's ideal of 'perfect', and it will always reflect the practical reality that some folks will have more influence than will others.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension that when some teacher, somewhere, says 'no' to some student, that student will sometimes respond as though 'no' was an entirely novel concept.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension that results when the word 'student' is replaced by the word 'parent'.
Education is conflict, bred of tension caused when the common core requirements of today are seen as a criticism of the education of previous generations. It is exacerbated by the fact that sometimes this is actually the case.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension created when the daughter of a lawyer, who aspires to be a cowgirl, sits and a calculus class with the son of a fisherman, who wants to be a doctor.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension created by the demand that all children be educated and the fact that little or no thought has been given to what that even means.
Education is conflict, bred of the tension between our best democratic impulses (No Child Left Behind) and the reality that some children are more able than others and that there is (thankfully) no technology for eliminating those differences. (Though the vast majority of schools are currently organized so as to prevent our most able students from fully realizing their potential. At the same time, Title I and Special Education programs are typically designed to prevent our most challenged students from realizing theirs as well).
Education is conflict, bred of the fact that even in a democratic society, there are no democratic means by which to resolve a single one of these conflicts.
Education is conflict. Always has been. But it is not war. In education, nobody wins. Not decisively. Not finally. There may be battles, and there may be lulls. There may even be celebrations by 'victors'. But the tensions persist, even if they are below the surface for time. The tensions are the nature of the enterprise, and they are irresolvable. They are the framework within which all schools must operate, and they are ignored or denied at the expense of the mission.
