|
March 21, 2002
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
March 21, 2002
How Change Is Wrought:
First Through Education
By John Chuckman
A number of thoughtful American readers have
asked what might be done about the problems I've described as
disturbing the planet. This is a daunting request, because the
problems are part of the warp and woof of a gigantic, complex
society.
But there are three areas where patient
work must certainly yield a more humane and democratic society,
one that regards its responsibilities in the world thoughtfully.
These areas are education, campaign-finance reform, and Constitutional
change.
I start with education, which is, after
all, the start of society for each individual.
Everyone intuitively appreciates in a
democracy the value of an educated electorate. It provides some
assurance of soundness to what Winston Churchill called "the
worst form of government, except for all the others." In
America's special case, this assurance necessarily spills over
into the affairs of the globe.
Education has always had economic as
well as political importance since a good education has real
market value. Globalization raises the economic stakes. Simply
put, globalization is the gradual emergence of a single world
market for many goods and services, including human skills.
It is actually the latest stage or phase in a fairly continuous
process that has been going on over the last six hundred years
or so since the Renaissance, a period which includes such other
notable stages as the Enclosures and the Industrial Revolution.
Finally, there is the importance of critical
education in evaluating the innumerable, questionable, and even
false, claims made daily in a society driven, even in its politics,
by advertising and marketing.
Perhaps the greatest structural problem
in American public education is the concept of local schools.
"Local schools" is an emotionally appealing phrase
but an outdated, nineteenth-century concept. Quite apart from
many other problems with the concept, in a globalizing world
there is truly only one standard for education in any subject,
and that is a world standard. What local town officials think
is an appropriate curriculum grows more irrelevant every day.
Why should birth in certain parts of
the country automatically condemn a child to a poor education?
That is and always has been the result of local schools. Economic
differences between areas, even in the same city, are immense.
A long walk across a single, large American city offers a tour
of many of the varieties of human settlement one might see on
a tour of the planet, from hovels to palaces. And the differences
in the quality of public schools closely parallel these other
differences. Schools are the first thing American real estate
agents discuss with their middle-class clients.
The problems associated with gross inequalities
in education are not new to America. I experienced them firsthand
living in different neighborhoods as a child on the south side
of Chicago at a time when the concept of neighborhood schools
was treated with absolute reverence. If you moved even two
doors away, two doors that happened to cross one of the many
school-district boundaries, the kindly folks at the Chicago
Board of Education immediately sent you packing to a different
school. Ties of friends, teachers, and neighborhood made no
difference whatsoever.
In one school I attended, windows were
broken every day. They didn't even try to replace the shattered
panes, they just put new glass on the inside and swept up the
mess. The result was a cracked and shattered view that represented
accurately the general quality of the school and most certainly
influenced the outlook of students. The bull-like principal
kept a baseball bat within reach in her office. When my working
mother could finally afford a tiny apartment in a better neighborhood,
I thought I had died and gone to heaven to discover school without
fear and teachers actually dedicated to teaching.
As a nation, America does not seem to
have learned much from such clear experience. Exactly the same
phenomenon continues today. It's just mapped out on a different
scale. Instead of tiny urban school districts, a series of communities
sprawling out from the decayed center of a city defines the
boundaries. So affluent communities with richly-equipped schools
exist just outside the boundaries of communities without the
resources to patch leaking roofs or repair the ancient gas lines
that should feed the Bunsen burners in useless laboratories.
Some states recognize the problem and
are attempting to find remedies to the degree a highly divided
and contentious political environment permits, but the problem
remains a vast and pervasive one. In a number of cases, even
financing at the state level cannot be adequate to compensate
for the disparities because the states themselves are too small
or too poor. There are federal programs - and this kind of
national balancing of resources between regions for a vital
public service is an entirely appropriate role for a national
government - but existing programs are totally inadequate to
the size and persistence of the problem.
The situation provides a genuine measure
of America's commitment to the ideal of every citizen receiving
a good, competitive education. And right now the conclusion
is inescapable that no such commitment exists.
Another basic problem is that teachers
in America today have no authority. They are subject to the
whims of both parents and school administrators, and they receive
little support or protection from school administrators. Indeed,
school administrators stand out as one of the most ineffectual
and politically correct groups in the country. Listening to
some of their words is to be reminded forcefully of just how
pliable the English language can be.
To compensate for working in a treacherous
environment, teachers depend on their unions more than they
ever did forty or fifty years ago. Unionism has been a declining
phenomenon in American business, but in education it remains
robust. This fact alone tells us something. Strong unions generally
provide prima facie evidence of a history of poor management,
management which in the past neither anticipated genuine problems
nor successfully handled them as they arose. Nowhere is this
truer than in education. Indeed, many of the remedies proposed
for the schools over the last ten or twenty years, from privatizing
them to using vouchers, are in part simply back-door efforts
to reduce or eliminate the influence of teachers' unions.
I do not blame the unions for this situation;
they truly do work in a treacherous environment, although they
clearly also do little to help repair it. A glance at the statistics
in any state showing the tiny number of teachers dismissed
for incompetence in a year should warn anyone of the sincerity
of words about getting rid of bad teachers. In this respect,
American public education acts very much like the Roman Catholic
church does with priests who are discovered to be pedophiles;
it simply moves them around, hoping a new situation will present
less opportunity for problems, or perhaps just less complaints.
The feeling of drift is a common one
to experience in public schools. There is often no clear sense
of anyone running anything. Principals cannot fire poor teachers.
They cannot even fire poor clerks. No parent, no matter how
irresponsible in his or her demands, is ever considered to
be in error. And teachers have little genuine authority over
students.
Everyone in the educational establishment
voices platitudes about parental involvement, but the plain
truth is there are a great many poor parents in the country.
Not just irresponsible parents, but angry parents, ignorant
parents, superstitious parents, mentally-ill parents, and generally
poorly qualified parents. That's why America, according to a
fairly recent study, has about half a million cases of serious
child abuse each year. Most of it done in the family.
Upholding the unqualified notion of parental
involvement is a barrier to progress. It also reflects a regrettable,
stubborn insistence on illusion being fact. We have everything
from parents who abuse teachers for not recognizing the unrevealed
excellence of their children to parents who come to help in
a classroom and end up fawning over their child to the detriment
of the class's sense of fairness and a proper learning environment.
Teachers need real authority to protect both themselves and
the atmosphere of the classroom against predatory parents.
Many corrupt practices in education,
from social promotion and inflated grades to undemanding and
unfocused curricula, owe their existence to a generation of
parents whose devotion to political correctness and hazy, television
and advertising centered thinking does not accept the legitimate
needs and demands of education. A recent news item about a public
school in the northeastern United States, and this in an affluent
town, revealed that 71% of the students were on the honor roll.
All sense of recognition for hard work or exceptional talent
is effaced by such practices, as is the ability of higher institutions
to distinguish the graduates worthy of acceptance. The phrase
"honor roll" becomes a warm, fuzzy slogan.
Classrooms where excellence means more
than a slogan are the exception in my experience, although I
have never taught in an affluent community. Children are praised
for doing very little. I have handed back papers where a grade
of 75% was given to work reflecting no effort and no thought
and was the lowest grade the teacher used. It hardly needs to
be said that three-quarters right should mean something. In
school systems outside the United States, 75% is a respectable
grade that reflects achievement.
Slogans are, of course, very popular
today in American education. Slogans and posters are displayed
in many public schools, huge banners sometimes in the hallways,
all marketed by school-supply outfits and all reflecting education-facultythink.
The least harmful resemble the chirpy participle phrases used
to announce public-radio sponsors. The worst resemble the anti-intellectual,
political claptrap you'd expect to find in places like Pol
Pot's Cambodia. In all cases, you just have to wonder why they're
there in place of the times tables and the parts of speech or
reminders of the rules of good school-citizenship or Magna Carta
and the Bill of Rights.
Getting back to the role of parents,
if we may make an analogy, doctors appreciate the support of
good parents, but were parents to interfere to the degree some
do in education, the medical results would be dangerous. The
case would parallel Christian Scientists who do not let a dying
child receive a blood transfusion. Parental support is good,
parental interference is just destructive. The elective nature
of local school boards makes it particularly difficult for them
to deal effectively with inappropriate parental pressures in
an era where "my rights" always come with no sense
of "my responsibilities."
And, of course, the insanely litigious
nature of American society in which irresponsible people sue
others over their own irresponsible or anti-social acts, and
sometimes win in court, contributes mightily to teachers and
administrators avoiding effective control of anything in which
there is either controversy or the need for a clear decision.
I recall a particularly touching example
of what parents can do to a child intellectually and emotionally
and how little freedom a teacher has in helping. A young student
came to me after class and asked in dreadful tones what I thought
about "the mark of the beast," a reference to dark,
delusional stuff in the Book of Revelations popular with Christian
fundamentalists expecting the end of the world momentarily.
She was looking for help and reassurance for a mind filled
with the most disturbing fears.
But I knew I could say nothing directly
bearing on her concerns, or I would have immediately faced angry,
idiotic parents shouting to a politically correct principal
about my interference in their religious beliefs. I said something
generalized to ease her fear, but I always felt I failed her
when she genuinely needed help. What a teacher should be able
to say is not that what her parents have told her is wrong,
but that there is more than one view on the subject and not
everyone agrees that there is a beast or a mark or anything
to fear. But this is impossible in America, at least in any
school I have experienced.
The authority of teachers is a difficult
subject. No one wants teachers rapping students on the knuckles
with rulers as they once did. But just as in the home, real
authority does not come from corporal punishment. Teachers need
a freer hand in deciding the consequences of inappropriate
behavior. They need the ready facility to have truly disruptive
children moved from regular classrooms, and they need greater
support from administrators in their battles with destructive
parental interference. Teachers, in turn, need to be responsible
for failure to use authority effectively and appropriately.
This runs counter to the sugar-frosted
silliness coming out of many American education faculties about
the anathema of "teacher-centered" classrooms. Like
all political slogans, this phrase is subject to innumerable
interpretations and essentially says nothing. The fact is, in
any relationship between someone who knows a thing and someone
seeking to learn it - whether in medicine, law, or plumbing
- there is necessarily at times a relationship of listener and
speaker. A sensible individual does not jump from that statement
of fact to the conclusion that someone is advocating a dictatorial
model for the classroom. The best teachers have always known
there must be balance in their approach, including lots of questions
and many other forms of student involvement. Indeed, teachers
who have established some sense of intellectual and moral authority
with children are far more able to step back often and take
on a successful role as observer.
A large part of what made many old one-room
schoolhouses successful, despite a lack of resources, was the
fact that something of consequence was always going on. Human
psychology has not changed in just one hundred years. Good
teachers know that even the discipline of a classroom depends
on children's perception of a steady flow of meaningful work
for which they will be held accountable. Yet, that is exactly
what is missing in many of today's American classrooms.
A tremendous problem is the fact that
teacher training has sunk in many cases to being not just poor,
but bordering on anti-intellectual and anti-scientific. People
with nothing to teach, with no understanding beyond being able
to read text-book crib notes, have little to give young minds.
And no one is more aware of this than the students condemned
to listen to such a teacher.
In many faculties of education, unproven
and questionable concepts are presented as intellectual content.
Some of these honestly border on being superstitious beliefs,
as for example the notion of "multiple intelligences."
Better the subject of intelligence were ignored than this kind
of unproven, Aristotelian stuff taught. But it is taught and
put up proudly on posters all over America, just one of many
such totally unscientific notions.
All the social sciences suffer from some
tentativeness and lack of exactness. Yet the tentative notions,
interesting as they may be, of psychologists and sociologists
are often taken by education faculties as keys to understanding.
And what's even more, the summaries of these social scientists'
work, done by "professional educators" for the use
of teaching faculties, often distort the sophisticated and
subtle anecdotal insights they do offer.
One can get some idea of this last point
by thinking about the work of Freud, not that he is a resource
for many faculties in teachers' education. Much of what Freud
wrote is being displaced by new, hard scientific findings, as
for example his theory of dreams. Yet Freud was one of the great
original minds of the last century and is still well worth
reading for many insights and some inspiration. One can just
imagine, however, were his huge body of ideas and observations
part of teacher training, how it might be summarized for quick
consumption in a teacher's college by students who've never
read a serious book. It would be very fortunate to escape being
reduced to parody.
But the social sciences are also replete
with many intellectual "Elmer Gantrys," not just people
who prove eventually to have been wrong in their theories, but
people who are dishonest or full of pretensions. The best example
I can think of is Bruno Bettelheim whose reputation was shattered
not long ago by horrifying revelations concerning the ways he
conducted his studies. Yet his views and writings flowed as
a veritable fountain of wisdom on the subject of child psychology
for decades.
America's love affair with political
correctness and avoiding the truth plays a role, too, in building
an intellectually-questionable body of knowledge in education.
Concepts like "self-worth" and "teamwork,"
rather than being the natural outcomes of fair and rigorous
education, as when students talk to and help each other outside
class about a demanding project, are themselves given almost
the status of academic subjects. There are posters and banners
galore on this subject. This kind of stuff is like a very decadent
architecture in which form no longer has any relationship to
function.
The huge, almost impossibly desperate,
need to place people, any people, in the worst public schools
has helped create education faculties where platoons of young
people, with neither good academic credentials nor genuine academic
interest but who seek secure jobs, are run through academically-marginal
programs to fill positions. There are "universities"
in the United States where half the students are enrolled in
education. Such programs have become major revenue- producing
business enterprises for the institutions concerned. Their graduates
might well be called bare-foot teachers, resembling as they
uncannily do, the bare-foot doctors of Mao's China.
Any solution to the need for bare-foot
teachers is very difficult to see. Would any change make it
so that reasonably talented teachers who might obtain work in
other jurisdictions instead choose the violent, poor, and difficult
environment of the great urban reservations or rural backwaters?
It appears that some of the needed changes in American education
can only come through even more fundamental changes in American
society.
Again peeking at the past, the one-room
schoolhouse was a success partly just because the teachers knew
their stuff. They didn't have degrees, but they had a sound
grasp of the limited curriculum required, especially English
and basic math. And if they never taught much more than these,
at least students were equipped to read and analyze to some
degree for themselves after leaving school. This simple result
would be totally unacceptable in today's demanding and complex
economic environment.
Yet this result is more than can be claimed
for significant numbers of public-school graduates in America.
It is entirely possible after years of public school in America
to leave being functionally illiterate. And in great part this
is because many elementary-grade teachers know little themselves,
even though they have "degrees." Their students just
keep passing until they reach a point, say in high school, where
there is no hope of correcting the weak foundations laid earlier,
and they are passed on out of the system to become someone else's
problem.
The one-room schoolhouse was also a success
because many children were highly motivated. The alternative
to going to school was immediate and apparent in their lives,
endless, drudging labor. The nineteenth century farm was not
the cozy, sentimental place portrayed on television and in Walt
Disney films. The farms were small, undercapitalized industrial
enterprises that depended for their success on unpaid family
labor, and lots of it. Child labor was not an exception, it
was the rule. Many children could not be spared for school.
Those who were didn't have to be told they were receiving something
precious. School represented one of the only routes to some
choice in life. And hard work at school did not seem strange
to children who carried water, slopped hogs, and harvested hay.
This, of course, is not to advocate a
return to child labor as a stimulus to education, but we should
recognize that the expectation of hard work in school is a vital
part of education. This deceptively simple fact is often forgotten.
Just the number of days out of the year that students attend
class, less than half in many parts of America, is indicative
of this.
In every study of schools in advanced
nations and in every set of international tests over recent
years, American students exhibit mediocre performance. Perhaps
one shouldn't be quite so ashamed of finishing behind nations
like Singapore or Japan where people have an unusually severe
work ethic. But the fact that a poor little country like Cuba
is rated by observers as producing an elementary education superior
to that prevailing in many parts of the United States should
be a source of national shame for Americans.
Moreover, SAT scores in America over
recent decades pretty much show a flat line despite immense,
busy work at turning the latest educational fads into trendy
programs.
It is one of the nation's great shames
that so many young people are allowed to reach school-leaving
age with a complete lack of skills. These young people are virtually
doomed to desperate lives on the dark margins of society. Yet
America continues to produce millions of them, just as though
it were 1961, and lots of well paid, unskilled industrial jobs
were just waiting to be filled.
Great educators since Elizabethan times
have stressed the importance of the best teachers in the early
years. But the American system does just the opposite. Generally,
in high schools, teachers are required to have specific knowledge
of their subject, but in elementary schools, where the foundations
for all further learning are laid, we often have people teaching
subjects they know nothing about.
One gains some insight here just by paging
through some of the teachers' editions of textbooks in use.
They are heavily padded with primer materials, in effect preparing
teachers to present lessons they don't know much about. Quite
apart from the frequent incorrect teaching that occurs around
such subjects, children know when someone doesn't understand
and their respect for teachers is automatically reduced, further
complicating problems of discipline in class.
Mainstreaming and special education have
been unproductive concepts in American education. These concepts
represent claims to rights by particular individuals or classes
of individuals, backed by the fear of lawsuits, working against
the interests of just about everyone else in the community.
One appreciates the good intentions here, but the realities
can be nightmares. Public schools now have many students who
do not belong there, and who contribute disproportionately
to the destruction of an academically satisfactory environment
for others.
Some schools have children so mentally
disturbed, truly psychotic sometimes, that an adult minder is
assigned (frequently an unfortunate substitute) to accompany
the child through the day. I have seen special- education rooms
that amount to holding facilities for angry, disturbed, or
psychotic children. All of these children would do better if
they went to specialized facilities staffed with properly trained
people, but even more importantly, the school environment would
gain immensely by the departure of those incapable of normal
responsibilities and control of their behaviors.
Health care is another important, often
overlooked, complication in American schools. As a nation, there
is no rational means of financing health care with the result
that many children have serious health problems that go unattended.
So basic a measure to health care as proper immunization is
often not attended to, one quarter of the young children of
the United States not having received the proper immunizations.
The United States still has the highest infant mortality of
any advanced country, despite some progress made in recent years
through special programs. And with so many children having serious
mental and emotional problems, plus the plague of conditions
like asthma, how can they expect to receive the serious help
they require when such basics as immunizations are not even
looked after?
These structural problems are so profound
in their implications that no simple fix can put them right.
Testing has been much touted as a cure for public education,
but already the cracks in the foundation of testing are obvious.
Teachers in some poor schools, perhaps just to save their jobs,
have been caught giving answers to students. In better- off
jurisdictions, cram-for-the-test consultants are already hard
at work for large fees, rendering any comparison between these
students and those without such services questionable. And then
there is the well-known phenomenon of teaching to the test:
"Oh, never mind that point, Martha, they never ask that
on the test!" This occurs in any jurisdiction where a test
is extremely important, and it has nothing to do with education
and even less to do with curiosity and imagination.
There are many less-than-dramatic ways
to improve the system were it possible to implement them in
the face of so many institutional and cultural barriers. A superior
way to train new teachers might be to accept only those with
good academic credentials, including some specialization in
an academic subject, plus strong personal motivation and have
them perform as substitutes for two years. Along the way, they
would be coached and evaluated by the most experienced teachers.
This would be a high-grade apprentice
system, which has always been the best system for learning crafts
and trades. It would solve schools' serious problem in obtaining
substitutes while giving candidates extensive, real-world exposure
and training. It would permit educated people at different stages
of their lives to easily enter education. And it would assure
us that every teacher was grounded in either math, science,
language, history, art, or music.
It is a great mistake to believe there
is any one or group of good teaching methods, but there are
many little tricks and helps that are best learned while doing.
Each good teacher comes into his or her own method over time,
just as writers do. Teaching is far more an art or craft than
a profession, because there simply is no specific body of hard
knowledge comparable to the law or human anatomy that must
be learned. But the contents of what is taught are largely factual
matters that require real knowledge.
Even in the best public schools what
I like to call critical education is often haphazard, and often
it is missing. And it is so understandable in view of the risk
a teacher takes in going down this path without being strongly
supported by administration. Some parent, oblivious to the
educationally-destructive role he or she is assuming, is sure
to cause trouble for a teacher who selects the claims of a certain
product or political candidate to dissect and analyze in class.
Critical education is essential to nurturing
better-informed, more- involved citizens. It is important for
citizens to be a little practiced at recognizing and analyzing
the often-false claims of marketing and politics. Actually,
it is one of the most regrettable aspects of American society
that these two concepts, marketing and politics, are beginning
to merge seamlessly. One does not even hear the title, "citizen,"
used much anymore, connoting as it does responsibilities and
obligations. Even politicians talk about "consumers,"
as though it were a nation of open mouths waiting to be convinced
to buy this or that brand.
There is another aspect to this line
of thinking. The tendency to turn everything into a business
transaction in America leaves very little room for idealism
or inspiration. But doesn't a vital, exciting political system
necessarily encourage idealism? And isn't a young person's working
through the strengths and weaknesses of various idealistic
positions an important learning experience, an education of
both mind and sentiments?
The educational establishment is contaminated
with this reduction-to- market thinking. One can find it in
the questions of the national teachers' examination, an examination
purporting to measure several types of knowledge applicable
to teaching and required for teaching in some jurisdictions.
My favorite concerned Shakespeare, and the right answer centered
on the idea that he was a good businessman. Well, it's true
enough that Shakespeare was something of a businessman, but
is that the reason his words live after four hundred years?
If you were going to ask a single question about Shakespeare,
would that be a good one?
I recalled at the time of reading that
question, the simple, penetrating fact that it is readily possible
to get a degree in English in the United States without ever
having read Shakespeare.
Despite the international reputation
of America's best universities, evidence indicates that the
quality of many of its colleges and universities is actually
quite poor. Graduates of many American post- secondary institutions
do not compare in academic achievement to high- school graduates
in a number of countries. Hundreds of colleges in America teach
freshmen how to write sentences or do basic mathematics.
Part of the problem is the popular American
expectation that everyone should get a degree in something.
Every American parent wants to be able to say his or her kid
is "in college." There is in this much wishful thinking
concerning America's being a classless society. One result is
the existence of "degrees" in subjects such as recreational
supervision or popular culture or even circus. Athletes who
show no particular interest or aptitude in academics are expected
to compete for college scholarships instead of money. We end
up with degrees granted essentially for sports performance and
with degrees awarded in subjects that would be taught in non-degree-granting
polytechnic schools or community colleges in most other places.
All of this creates immense downward pressure on the meaning
of academic education in America.
Institutionally, American education is
afraid now of doing anything that might in any way be viewed
as categorizing people. This extends even to grades and graduation,
quite apart from more fundamental notions that some might do
splendidly in polytechnical education rather than poorly in
academic. So the entire system bends and shifts and swells
and is debased to accommodate this decision-avoidance. This
has less to do with a democratic or liberal spirit than it has
to do with a culture of cringing political correctness and the
fear of complications from the exercise of authority and the
making of tough decisions. Yet a ruthless categorizing is, of
course, exactly what the same students will be subjected to
the moment they enter the American workforce. They will on the
whole be judged unsentimentally for what they can do, and the
companies doing the judging will ask why the schools cannot
send them people equipped with needed skills.
The difficulties to genuine and meaningful
change must not be underestimated. For the future, in an America
which insists that it is classless, the children of above-average-income
families will continue to receive mainly good education, as
they do now, although that precious component that creates a
citizen with strong critical faculties may continue, as so often
is the case now, to be missing.
For the others, the residents of the
vast American educational gulag, only serious changes in how
public education is organized, financed, and staffed can succeed
in redirecting lives from the margins of society. Without change,
their situation will only deteriorate as the forces of globalization
divide society inexorably into a class competing with knowledge
in the world and a class competing with unskilled labor for
declining real wages, a process already well underway. And the
promise of full participation in making America a more vital
democracy will continue to ring hollow.
John Chuckman,
a columnist for YellowTimes,
lives in Ontario. He can be e-mailed at: jchuckman@YellowTimes.com.
|