By BEN TOBIN

It speaks to the diminished role of our school systems that we are starting to see the emergence of student-led conferences. As the recent federal probe into Massachusetts’ special education system has laid bare, our entire system has absolved itself of the responsibility of serving students with disabilities.

Overall, the raw math and literacy data paints a picture of the continued reliance on an outdated, and never validated, constructivist approach to education that fails students and families — that has failed them for decades. There is no appetite for trying to revive or transform our broken education system; rather, the focus has turned to the promotion of an empty administrative narrative of success and innovation and the idea that the students themselves will direct their own learning now and they will do it all, including running their own conferences.

This idea of “student-centric” that schools are working so hard to sell as a positive of their branding efforts really just begs the question of why we need administrators who make six figures and elaborate bureaucracies just to say the students will do it all themselves. My question is, if students are directing their own learning and running their own conferences, why do we even need schools and principals and teachers beyond places to gather and socialize?

The function of the Horace Mann-era invention has become increasingly suspect as newer technologies emerge to take over the classroom and obfuscation of data makes it harder and harder to answer the why. Is there a reason for schools as institutions when there might be actual innovative solutions for challenges like the literacy crisis in our state?

While I think everyone can agree students should have agency when it comes to their learning, and ownership of it, like most things in the education world that get window dressed with warm, fuzzy language, it’s not what they really mean. Administrators no more want their students in charge of their own learning than an office manager really wants employees telling them how to run the office.

Having now worked in the field for a number of years, it’s always brought home to me that, ironically, the world of education hates to be direct about anything. Educators are trained to speak in circles to avoid any kind of truth that might be considered unpleasant or challenging and hope that others will come to that same conclusion on their own so that it won’t need to be said out loud by the educator. Education has become an elaborate dance around the truth, and it’s easier to make Instagram stories than confront the lack of purpose to these institutions.

Students running their own education is not about the students or the families, it’s about a message to sell the idea, the illusion, of freedom and agency. Just as the state emphasizes self-evaluations in tiered monitoring of the schools, the idea is to create a consistently positive echo chamber so we can’t talk about the challenges and the real work of education anymore.

George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language” (1946) does a very good job of pointing out how corruption of language in a phrase like “student-centric” can, and will, be used to distort the ways in which we think about what the language struggles to describe … just as some of Orwell’s more nefarious characters do in “Animal Farm.”

Orwell also proposed a solution when he said, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Ben Tobin lives in Williamsburg.