PUBLIC EDUCATION

My alarm-radio turns on at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday just like every other day. Of course there are no announcers in the studio at that time, just an engineer and a library full of prerecorded programing. The Sunday schedule begins with a lady poet who interviews other poets and authors who have passed through the city, promoting their books or other writing activities. Sometimes it’s really good stuff, writers who truly have something to say and talk as well as they compose. Then at 6:30 there is a high-minded do-good interview with someone who has a spiritual or humanitarian connection. That program can be interesting as well but in either case, if it is less than stimulating it’s easy to doze off for a while. Either way, I’ll be getting up a little before 7:00. 

This morning the Do-Good humanitarian was a congressman from Ohio who had written a book. I missed the title but their conversation touched on education and the ways we manipulate the process. As a career educator with 30-plus years in the business, I have my own ideas about why and how we school our children. A conversation on public education runs the risks of many irrelevant distractions and I don’t go there often. My nature is to reduce things, to find a common denominator before I plug an idea into an outlet to see if it will buzz. Then a conversation has to unfold from that fundamental truth. That bothers some of my peers as they would like to simply vent their views and move on. 

Concerning education I begin with the ‘Why’. It may seem a waste of time after all, we all know why kids need an education; or do we? When our economy began to shift from agriculture to industry, employers needed literate employees. Public education came about as a matter of national security, to underpin a strong, growing economy. The powers that be certainly did not see it as an egalitarian means of raising the lower class. The importance of the individual, in public education, was not a priority. That is why we have public education. It has a business model, just like any other business. Its product is people who have been trained to meet the needs of a nation, a place that needs minimum wage workers as much as it needs CEO's. 

The idea that public education should stimulate upward, social/economic mobility is relatively new. As much as we like to believe that each child is important as an individual, able to learn and that nothing less is acceptable, children are the raw materials for an academic industry. Every parent whose child goes to a pubic school does so under the illusion that students come first. The power structure and funding methods are still entrenched in the ‘Factory’ model school. You can not meet the particular needs of every child, cost efficiently. People mean well but when it comes down to ‘put up or shut up,’ education is like any other business endeavor: maximize profit and minimize expense. Creating a vehicle for social/economic mobility is not only too expensive but a threat to status quo as well, so we don’t do it. We do a lot of ‘Double Speak’, lip service, run new programs out like model changes at Chevy and Ford but the common denominator is still, money/power. Private schools are expensive but available to people who are willing and able to make that investment in their children. From the bottom up education is about children and possibility. From the top down it is about national security and status quo. Unfortunately for kids, funding and policy come from the top-down. So, as the congressman was babbling about standardized testing and teacher certification I was turning over, closing my eyes.