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Global Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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Global Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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| Masters of the Business Apocalypse | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Dawson’s Safe Portal | |
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At What Cost America's Spreading Ignorance?
If You Think Education Too Costly, Or Ought To Be Run By Congress, Think Again. America’s Ignorance Is The Source Of Their Power
The American school house is not at all what it once was. Some believe this to be a good thing, but history suggests otherwise. For since the first forays into politicizing America’s public schools during the Lyndon Johnson administration, federal interference into the how, what, when and whys of public schools have substantially depowered the institution.
In the last fifty years, K-12 education has turned from broad fields and public interest curriculum models, aimed at turning out useful and productive citizens, to what is becoming largely the mastery of factoids and test taking skills.
Not all of the problems facing public schools are due to federal mandates and congressional efforts to overcome or correct problems in society by the overtaking or redirection of school functions and purposes. The disengagement of parents, who frequently see public schools as little more than governmental day care, and increasing cultural bias against education in some urban districts, underscores the depowerment of teachers. The politicizing of curriculum — especially at the hands of state government — along with the commercialization and standardization of curriculum by textbook publishers has served to depower school districts and muddle the role of local option notions upon which American schools were once modeled.
What’s happening at most of this nation’s urban schools is standardization and testing at the cost of individual growth, discovery and development. While there is over a century of solid evidence concerning the uneven rate at which students mature and learn, the importunement of politics and the commercialization of curriculum have combined to produce a one size fits all education strategy that ill serves most students for the benefit of the few.
The outcome has been decades of white flight, development of charter schools who remain immune from most but not all outside interference even as they have substantially failed to deliver an equivalent, let alone a higher level of educational achievement. As frantic parents have opted for charter schools and voucher rights, the outcomes still fall short of what’s promised. And the impact of concerned parents opting out of public schools while retaining control to transfer most of the annualized funding has served only to weaken the public schools further. No wonder; public schools are America’s least understood institution.
Education scholars no longer focus on student needs, societal demands or public interests with the same intensity as before federal money changed both educational research and school funding. The problem isn’t that there’s too little grants-in-aid, federal dollars or other soft money among the Research One institutions, but because there are too many strings attached and far too little philosophical framing to direct such funding toward what matters most, not what’s politically expedient or trendy. Academically, today’s education scholars have become specialists in a narrow slice of educational policy largely, if not entirely, absent responsibility toward the public enrichment mission of education. Or, it would seem, sufficient knowledge of pedagogical foundations, psychological mechanisms and individual student needs.
Education does matter — especially in a democracy that depends on its citizens to keep government in check.
One result has been colleges of education in some ways abdicating their traditional role of being the teachers of teachers in favor of serving the needs of special interests with political clout and funding abilities. Women’s studies are in — as are inner city studies — and a long list of specialized interests and programs. All of these are important issues, but, by their growing presence, they are also dilutive of philosophical, historical and pedagogical studies.
Teacher training schools, largely assumed to be substandard by academics in other fields of academic inquiry, have moved beyond pedagogy and classroom management to scripted delivery skills and testing in lieu of teaching activities. But it goes further, for commercially produced and state-certified textbooks now define the curriculum in nearly all public schools across the country. It’s as if educators had no knowledge of having solved all of these problems many times before. Thus the same problems get studied over and over again. It’s as if doctors forgot the advances of penicillin every ten years and had to reinvent it over and over again.
That’s because history of education is largely unheard of today — especially at the undergraduate level, although Professor Robert Hampel recently confirmed that his history of education course is still a required undergraduate class at the University Of Delaware. Robert Hampel is a serious and accomplished historian as well. Education studies deserve more men of Hampel’s experience and understanding because education theory and practice was not something recently invented by politicians and government.
Since the onset of federal funding for American schools arose during President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society era, the local autonomy of American schools has substantially eroded. In their heyday, the public schools in this nation were our single most influential institution — for it was the public school that has educated the vast majority of American citizens. As a result, most Americans think themselves to be experts when it comes to public education, while in reality, our public schools are perhaps the least understood American institution.
Education historians who have sharp disagreements on the accomplishments attributable to the progressive era in education ( 1890 – 1970 ), find as much or more to criticize in today’s troubled school systems. Judged against public schools prior to 1970, today’s public schools appear to have failed. Yet arguments that public education has materially declined in terms of student achievement don’t hold up according to Cato Institute studies that argue there is little or no change in student achievement as measured by what are known as the Long Term Trend tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
While the concept of locally autonomous schools remains popular in the United States today, the reality is very different. Today’s schools, from Kindergarten to graduate school, are no longer the principal source of education — for the pervasiveness of modern media, print, broadcast and online, have massive reach and influence. Today’s students spend more hours with, and media more effectively delivers its powerful messages. Very often media content projects very different values than schools. But as a nation we have effectively turned over a substantial role in K-12 education to for-profit media.
Someone opined recently, “We have become a nation of cheap whores, willing to do anybody at any time as long as it makes us a buck.” Being an education historian makes me know that such a claim is vastly overstated, but one need spend only a few minutes with today’s young adults to know how significantly for-profit media have damaged and misdirected today’s young adults.
History of education is largely unheard of today — especially at the undergraduate level, although Professor Robert Hampel recently confirmed that his history of education course is still a required undergraduate class at the University Of Delaware.
Money and power means political involvement in today’s America. The politicization of education for the benefit of politicians, among both parties, who pander to political constituencies and sometimes scapegoat our children to empower special interests. Absent an understanding of either curriculum balance or pedagogical foundation, the political establishment seeks to use public education to address social, economic and lifestyle problems in the community at large, not the schoolhouse. Their leverage is not in having a clearer understanding of educational policy or pedagogical foundation — it’s having the money in hand with which to induce, bribe or demand specific actions or programs.
These politically motivated organizations have been successful because America’s struggling public school systems are demonstrably underfunded. But there is no free lunch, for the problems that have arisen from federal aid to public schools in the last 60 years has been increasing intervention and meddling by a powerful Federal Bureaucracy. One result has been mandated programs and policies that effectively treat K-12 education as a commodity based activity when it is inherently an individual one. At its worst, congressional intervention into our schools has openly politicized public education while seeking to selectively solve narrow problems while largely ignoring a creeping and debilitating spread of institutionalized ignorance in American society, culture and attitudes.
By failing to provide an intellectually rich public school education we put in place a failed learning model that devalues the worth of the individual, damages our communities, and promotes disrespect for intellectual pursuit. Historical notions of education as a means of learning how to think for oneself, or solve life’s many problems, or be a productive member of society have been replaced by notions of standardization, blandness, and absence of critical thinking. Today’s rush to promote information in place of critical thinking, cooperative problem solving, thoughtful analysis, or social interaction has produced a generation or more of citizens who see their own personal gain as independent of the growth of society, community, or the economy. For them, being an American is absent a sense of community, personal responsibilities, or shared burdens.
Education's New Money Tree
Our public schools have become a sham and a national disgrace — little more than day-care for large numbers of underachieving and largely unmotivated students. Our continuing misadventures in education, where political expediency runs roughshod over pedagogical fundamentals, has substantially added to our nation’s institutionalized ignorance. In its broader implications, public ignorance about what matters most in American life has become the foundation for our embarrassing institutional failures, unparalleled greed and culture of corporate criminality.
There is a clear present racial bias in public education today, for while the best and brightest, or socially gifted, or those from suburban backgrounds have substantially better schools, and the option of a private school experience, the least prepared and poorest amongst us are processed on an assembly line whose terminus is ignorance, anger and distrust.
Education is about ideas as well as skills. History is as important as math, but given so little attention in most upper schools, and so poorly presented it is claimed that children find it devoid of meaning in a world of screaming, lewd or pandering media.
Over time, failed schools produce failed outcomes. These failures are not measured by the skills of those students destined for success, but by those least motivated, least supported and least capable of test taking.
We are a rich, proud and powerful nation. We must do better for future generations. Piling our debts, failed institutions and get rich quick mentality on top of providing them a third rate education is something for which our shame shall follow us forever.
The lesson is clear: Education does matter — especially in a democracy that depends on its citizens to keep government in check.
