Schools Aren't Failing. That's the Problem.

Dr. Caleb Collier is the Director of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning and Ambassador for the National Hybrid Schools Project.

Every few years, a new report lands, a new political figure makes a speech, and the same conversation starts again: our schools are failing. Test scores are down. Kids are falling behind. We’re losing ground to other countries. We need to reform, reinvent, reimagine.

I’ve spent my career studying education, and I want to offer a different take. Our schools are working exactly as designed. That’s what makes this so hard.

Jonathan Kozol, one of the sharpest critics of American education, wrote fifty years ago that the U.S. education system is “an ice-cold and superb machine. It does the job for which it was originally conceived.” For Kozol, schools weren’t broken; they were doing exactly what they were designed to do.

Schools don’t exist in a vacuum. They were built by society, for society. Their job, at the most basic level, is to take the values and structures of the present generation and pass them along to the next. John Dewey put it this way: we’re all going to die, so schools exist to ensure the things a society cares about survive past a single lifetime. Education is how a society reproduces itself.

That’s by design. The problem is when we stop asking what kind of society we’re reproducing.

So, a question: what has a generation of accountability-driven, test-score-focused, “stay globally competitive” schooling actually produced?

On an individual level, the results are mixed at best. The U.S. ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack on global happiness indices, trailing countries with far fewer resources. The wealth gap between the richest and poorest Americans has grown sharply over the past few decades and accelerated during and after the COVID pandemic. Horace Mann, who championed public education in the 1800s, believed schools would be “the great equalizer.” They haven’t been. Not even close.

On a civic level, things are harder to measure, but you can feel it. Political discourse has become more brittle, more tribal, less capable of the kind of disagreement that moves things forward. People struggle to engage with views different from their own, struggle to find common ground, struggle to see the humanity in someone who votes differently or prays differently or grew up somewhere else. These are skills schools have never prioritized, and it shows.

Schools were built to produce workers and citizens who could function in the society that already existed. They’ve done that job with precision. So if we’re unhappy with the society we have, maybe the question isn’t how do we fix schools. The question is what were schools built to do, and is that still what we want?

Here’s where I think education discourse keeps going wrong.

When we talk about reform, we usually mean doing the same thing better. More rigor. Better curriculum. Higher standards. More technology. Tighter feedback loops. The goal stays the same; we’re just trying to run faster toward it.

But what if the goal itself is the problem?

What if education were designed around a different question altogether: what does a good human life require? What if the aim of school was flourishing — for the individual and for society — rather than efficiency, workforce readiness, or global competitiveness?

This is an old idea, and that’s part of why I trust it. Aristotle asked it. John Dewey spent his life asking it. Educators and philosophers across centuries have returned to it again and again. And every generation, the machinery of compulsory schooling swallows the question whole and spits out standardized tests.

I’m not naively optimistic. I know how entrenched these systems are. I know that reimagining education means fighting against very powerful economic and political interests that benefit from the current design. I know that the history of education reform is largely a history of well-meaning ideas getting absorbed into a system that renders them harmless.

But I’m also watching something shift. Enrollment in public schools is declining. Homeschooling has surged. Alternative school models, once on the fringes, are multiplying. Families are voting with their feet, and while I can’t predict where the movement is headed, the underlying restlessness is real and worth paying attention to.

People are not satisfied with what schools are producing. They just don’t always have language for what they want instead.

This series is an attempt to provide some of that language.

Over the next five articles, I want to make a case for a different vision of education, one rooted in an old idea that keeps getting crowded out by newer, noisier ones. The idea is this: the goal of education is flourishing, both for the individual and for society.

The ancient Greeks had a word for it: eudaimonia. It’s often translated as “happiness,” but it means something richer — the kind of happiness that comes from a life well lived, from developing genuine wisdom, from being deeply embedded in a community working toward something good together.

I believe that’s what education can be for. I believe it’s what education has been for, in pockets and moments throughout history. And I believe we’re at a point where we have to decide, collectively, whether we want to keep optimizing the machine or whether we want to build something different.

The school system is working exactly as intended. That’s precisely the problem. And it means the solution isn’t a patch. It’s a new blueprint.

Next: What if we designed schools for happiness? An introduction to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia and what it actually demands of education.