SCHOOLS BEHAVING BADLY

The recent teacher’s strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona have focused some attention on the public education system in this country, so it seems like a good time to talk about education.

When I was growing up public education was about basic academic skills, a few essential life skills and learning how to think. We got the three Rs (readin, ritin and rithmatic) in elementary school and were taught how to think in junior and senior high school. We also learned some civics, science, geography, U.S. and world history, and a foreign language along with a little art, a little music and some basic home repair and home making skills. Typing and drafting were optional, but everyone had to take gym class to get some exercise. The best teachers encouraged discussion, debate and dissent. Most test questions required you to fill in the blanks or provide a narrative answer. Essay questions were also commonplace and you had to support your arguments with verifiable facts. The purpose of the public schools back then was to produce educated citizens, which was considered essential to the functioning and survival of a democracy.

That has all changed. Our public schools now teach our children only what we want them to know. That is being done through “standards based education”, which means someone, or some group of people, decides what it is we want our children to know and that becomes the “standard” that every child has to meet as evidenced by passing a “standardized” test. The multiple choice questions on the “standardized” tests actually discourage thinking because there is only one correct answer to each question and you have anywhere from a 20% to 50% chance (depending on how many choices you are given) of getting the right answer if you just guess. The purpose of this new approach to public education is to produce consumers who are predictable and easy to manipulate.

I won’t go as far as calling it a conspiracy, but the shift toward corporate run charter schools over the past several decades and the current Secretary of Education’s stated agenda aimed at weakening, if not totally eliminating, public schools certainly suggests big business wants to control how our children are educated.

I’m not making this up. Look around. Talk to some young people. See for yourself how many of them know more about pop culture than they do about civics, geography, history and science combined. It's the dumbing down of America and a whole lot of Americans are actually proud to be ignorant. That may be good for business, but it is a death knell for our democracy

If you want to learn more about how schools can function to produce citizens who will sustain our democracy, as opposed to what schools are doing now, which is producing consumers who only feed our unrestrained capitalism, I highly recommend you read Democracy and the Arts of Schooling  by Donald Arnstine, Professor Emeritus of Education, University of California - Davis.... and then get involved with your local school board.