Education Revolution

Growing up in Oregon, going to a teeny tiny, making-it-through-by-the-skin-of-its-teeth private school, I never knew why kids on TV complained about going to school.  Then I moved, and started attending a public middle school in 8th grade, and got my first taste of what everyone was talking about.  It wasn't until much later, though, when I got a job as a substitute teacher, and got to see the public school system at every level, from kindergarten all the way through high school, that I really understood.

The public school system has its roots in the 1830s, when Horace Mann brought back the system of the Prussian Empire in order to prepare children en masse for factory work in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.  The advantage of the system was that it was quite effective at instilling literacy in large numbers of children very quickly; however, the real reasons for the system's staying power may be much more insidious.

The Obedience Factory

There are many, including author John Taylor Gatto, who was awarded multiple Teacher of the Year prizes during his 30+ years as a teacher in New York City, who have come to realize and write very openly about the negative effects of our school system.  In his article"How public education cripples our kids, and why" Gatto points to several corrupt facets of the education system, evidenced by the 1918 writings of Alexander Inglis, in which are listed the six key functions of compulsory public education.  Paraphrased, these are:

1. To condition automatic responses to authority, so that obedience is not a choice.
2. To homogenize students and increase conformity.
3. To determine each student's role in life after school.
4. To prepare them for that role.
5. To weed out those students who cannot or will not conform to the above expectations.
6. To establish an elite group to control the others, and perpetuate the system.

This is to make people susceptible to manipulation by corporate bosses and the politicians who are in their pockets, and render the society docile, predictable, and complacent.  It was established to limit the potential effect of democracy in America, and make the masses pliable to the will of their corporate owners.  Schools are complicit in this, functioning as factories producing  a product in demand by corporations.  And as if this wasn’t awful enough, it’s even losing some of its relevance, as the biggest and most powerful corporations have so changed the industrial process that droves of obedient American workers are no longer required.  Most major corporations outsource most of their production process to other countries, where labor can be paid inhumanly low wages.  Those companies that do produce in the United States are largely mechanized, meaning that humans are largely irrelevant at many stages of production.  So now, not only are millions of children being indoctrinated to be obedient workers, but they are being prepared for lives and careers that aren’t even there.

So the system has from the very beginning been designed to control you, and make you roll over to the whims and mind-control of the corporation owners.  But even this does not give the full picture of just how fucked up the system is, and just how badly education in America has gone wrong.  The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union represented a colossal standoff of superpowers, with the entire world at stake.  The United States could not afford to lose.  So the capitalist masters pushed the schools to focus their studies on English Language and Mathematics, to produce large numbers of high-quality spokesmen for capitalism and engineers and rocket scientists to win the Space and Arms Races.  This made sense at the time, but the Cold War ended over twenty years ago, and yet we focus on English and Mathematics with more fevered intensity and exclusivity than ever.  Why haven't we reverted from this outdated policy?

Part of it can be traced to the Reagan administrations 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" which due to a mathematical error misrepresented public school performance on standardized tests measuring math and English skills.  Though performance had improved for each demographic group (divided by income levels) the larger size of the low-income demographic, which consistently has lower average test scores than higher-income demographics, skewed the data to appear that performance had dropped, and schools were failing.   YES!  Magazine goes into detail on this.

So, while America played chicken with Soviet Union in its final years, at home, our education policies doubled down on the policy of focusing on English and Math, and over the past thirty years have put steadily more pressure on schools to perform in these areas, as they are what the standardized tests measure.  This was worsened by No Child Left Behind and the adoption of Common Core curriculum in recent years.  So now schools have gradually cut programs to focus with tunnel-visioned exclusivity on only two criteria that are now being used to define success.

The State of Things

As a substitute, here is what I have observed about the curriculum offered at each level of public education:

Elementary School: Elementary school is where the above is most pronounced of all.  From grades 2 to 6 English and Math are virtually the only subjects taught.  Students are being urged to learn basic algebra in third grade; something I never learned until middle school; and I went on to take calculus, so I'm no slouch in mathematics.  Per the Common Core, teachers all across the district teach from the same set of books, and are expected to teach the same lesson on the same day.  Once or twice a week, students receive PE, and once a week, they have computer lab, in which they learn...English and Math.  Art classes are nonexistent.  Music is nonexistent, with the possible exception of a Christmas concert.  Dance is nonexistent.  Theater is nonexistent, except for one or two optional after school plays a year.  If you don't care about the arts (which you should) then you should at least care that students are hardly taught a thing about history or science, and when they are, they are taught poorly.  These subjects are taught as lists of facts for students to memorize, rather than skills and perspectives for them to apply and take with them.  This leads to student boredom and disengagement.  Many students are burning out by the end of 6th grade.

Middle School: From a teaching standpoint there are ways that Middle School is the worst of the worst.  I have seen droves of students who have absolutely no regard for learning or their education.  Many students who come from disadvantaged families are only interested in escaping from a bad home life, so are much more interested in chatting with friends than learning anything.  However, when they are quiet enough to learn, it is because they are cowed and afraid of reprisal or punishment.  In my district, there are no Art or dance programs, and the Drama programs are present in name alone.  The Drama class is not given in a conducive environment, and the students are not interested in it.  It is taken on the assumption that it is an "easy" class.  Music fares rather better, at least.  But by and large, students by this time have had drudgery beaten into them, and have lost any appreciation for the arts.  They have already had the creative spirit amputated, and seem incapable of forming original thoughts.

High School: High School is marginally better.  Though many of the behavioral issues in certain students have been amplified, the presence of actual science, history, and a variety of arts classes make a difference.  However, due to the effect of the system, these are still often taught poorly, and do not encourage student engagement or excitement, and students are more jaded and disaffected than ever.  Several are starting to become acutely aware that this system is not meant to be interesting or helpful to them.  Even now, despite the actual existence of history, science, art, and theater classes, none of these matter, per se, as the High School Exit Exam, the SATs, the ACTs, and virtually all other measures of how well a student has done in school, still measure only their abilities in English and Math.  By the time they graduate, they will be able to describe the inside of a leaf, use the quadratic equation, and identify a synecdoche, but they will not know how to pay their taxes, apply for a mortgage, or balance a budget.  They will not have any valuable job skills, as each level of education they've gone through has prepared them for nothing but the next level of education, and most of that consists of knowing how to take a test. 

Revolution!

A series of incremental and gradual reforms will not do.  American society has for over a century been dominated by a system that encourages sameness, and has entrenched us in a culture of indolence and complacence, where we may complain about the problems, but never do anything about them.  Instead we trust our elected officials to handle things, which they never do, because they are in the pockets of the corporations, and the corporations don't want that.  We must stand up for ourselves and for our children!

We must change the way we teach our kids.  Throw off an oppressive system and prove to kids that we appreciate their differences, creative talents, and their passionate endeavors. Give them the opportunity to express themselves, and to find the joy in learning.  Teach them to experiment and discover, instead of replicate.  We must save them from a system that will break them, and inure them against individual thought or innovation; make them fear the unique, the creative, and the different; and hamstring their ability for critical thinking.

This system has entrenched us in partisan politics, where we blindly follow our chosen party down the road to oblivion as we swallow their lies again and again, and choose awful candidates on the premise that they are better than the alternative.  You have been tricked into accepting this false dichotomy and to believe these authority figures when they tell you that this is the way it is, and it cannot change, but it can.  All it needs is your action.  It needs all of our action.  So step forward and do it.  Do it today.