Small Schools

Are they better?

US Today article (quotes Diane Ravitch of the Hoover Institute)

I know, my classmates despise her, but Diane Ravitch makes a good point in this article. She says that small schools do not have the resources to offer students higher level courses, foreign language, and other specialty courses.

This article made me think of that commercial where the two-man company is stuck, and the start asking, "What would Smith Company (ok, I made up the name) do?" This leads to a chain of companies, in search of a new idea, and as the commercial goes on the companies get larger and larger. The final company, with some sort of word in the title like "Worldwide international" asks, "What would those guys at Hammerstein do?" The commercial pans back to two-guy company, where one guy says to the other, "I got it!"

Our narrative now incorporates this idea of smallness as the source of ingenuity. What are the "evil" corporations? Microsoft. We used to love Google when it was just two guys letting us search the internet and saying "don't be evil," but now we don't like them, either.

What is it about small schools? In the US, where we love our Hummers (ahem) so we can pretend we're taking over Mogadishu while driving to the grocery store, are we suddenly peddling in reverse? My high school had over 4,000 students. It was the second largest high school in Florida. Then I went to a college with 1,300 students - a bit of culture shock, especially since most of those kids had gone to elite private schools in Atlanta, South Carolina, and across the South. Was smaller better? They didn't seem better prepared for college than I was.

It all comes back to - what values are we trying to teach our children with our educational policies? What symbolic messages are we sending them?