Education in America

I was reading a series of short opinion pieces concerning the current fad for blaming the teachers of public schools for every wrong known to man in The New York Times this morning, something that they published under the rubric "Room for Debate." They published eight different views from "both sides" of the issue (God forbid that we ever take a look at a problem from a nonbinary, multidimensional viewpoint) and, outside of the first piece by Diane Ravitch, it was all twaddle.

My discomfort with the manner is which we talk about education in this country dates back at least to the reign of the first President Bush and perhaps before. The buzzwords have always been ones such as "performance" and "standards" and "testing," and everyone involved would nod sagely and agree that all three of these things in the US was substandard, in tatters, motheaten, weather-stained, a disaster, a corruption, a smear of the young, a shame to the old, a bleeding of the taxpayer. Since the days of Good King Bush II, the answer has repeatedly been framed in the guise of testing and punishment for those who do not perform, a vituperative, judgmental, punitive approach that wreaks havoc on schools in poor neighborhoods and rewards school in wealthy districts. It is now being used to vilify teachers and attack the concept of unionization. Were I a Marxist historian, and I am neither, I might be tempted to draw conclusions concerning the drift of sentiment by workers away from people of their own class and in favor of corrupt capital. Were I a Marxist historian.

However, as usual, I think we are stuck contemplating the symptoms rather than the illness that lies underneath. The illness has always been masked by the assumption that all education is merely job training, that the point of educating a populace is to merely mass produce workers who, through their drone-like sense of reality, will make the United States "competitive again." We're never, it seems, actually competitive at the moment any of these worthies is speaking. The Good Old Days are always just in the recent past, almost close enough to touch, smell, and taste, but drawing ever further away. Since we have, have had, and will continue to have, for some time yet, the world's largest and most successful economy is irrelevant. Despite unprecedented success on the world stage, our workers are overpriced, overpaid, overprotected, coddled, underachieving, lazy, and irresolute. And they are all these things because they have not been taught the proper "skills" to get the right kinds of jobs so as to be competitive with all the other workers in the world. Can the pigs who gorge themselves at the troughs of corporate governance be blamed for outsourcing jobs to India and Russia and Indonesia when the land that they depend on for their bountiful slop is littered with dimwits and nogoodniks? Of course not. Those who have nothing on their minds except the pursuit of money can always be trusted to look out for the best interests of mankind and not to wallow only in their own greed. I'm sure the Bible approves of it, and I'm also sure that you could pay the pastor of some megachurch prove it. He could probably start with the story about that crazy man attacking those poor moneylenders in the temple.

But I digress.

It seems to me, and maybe this is just the delusion of someone who is self-educated and therefore not properly trained to give the right answers to the right job-related questions, that education should be about something more profound than the finding of a job or the building of a resume. It has to do with the opening of the mind, not the limitations of job training. It has to do, I think, ideally, with another kind of training: a training in how to reason, in how to use one's mind to the fullest extent of its capabilities. The person who has been trained to reason, who has been trained in rhetoric, who has been trained in a true study of history rather than in a mere recitation of dates, can do many things. The person who has been trained to do a job can do just one.

However, it is not convenient for politicians to makes these assumptions, not even Good King Barack. It is in the interests of the political class to tie education to job acquisition because it is easier to rule a mob who cannot reason than it is to rule one person who can.

To view our children as merely potential workers is to view them as only potential machines. To view them as machines is to make them into objects. To make them into objects is to craft their ruin. Schools are not factories, and students are not products. We educate to ennoble; we educate to enlighten. We should educate to give each student, according to his or her abilities, the tools to deal with a complex and ever-changing society and world. We should teach them how to fish rather than train them to eat one particular kind of fish.

However, to do so takes respect. Respect for one's fellow citizens, respect for one's children, respect for one's opponents. And two things which we seem to be in short supply of these days are respect and the willingness to teach the things that people actually need to know.