 In my recent post on rebuilding
the American civic state I argued that one of the five key requirements
to do so is re-educating the public -- about the issues facing the
world, about history, geography, civics, economics, and the workings of
government. It's not the first time I've suggested that education
reform, if not a panacea, is at least a necessary condition for
meaningful social change.
Recently however several bloggers have suggested that, far from being
part of the solution, our education system is part of the problem. Most
recently, Emma at Late Night Thoughts
wrote:
There is something monstruously
evil in children going hungry in the
world's wealthiest nation...We know that well-nourished children do
better in school, but the first thing to go during budget cuts are
school meal programs. We know that healthy children are more likely to
grow up to be productive adults, but we skimp on pre-natal and
children's care. We know
that children who have access to interesting activities are less likely
to become delinquents, yet art, music, and after-school clubs are now
rare as dodo's eggs in the American educational system...
We are told that in this global post-industrial economy, the most
important assets for a nation are its workers. We are told that an
educated, creative workforce is the key to maintaining national
economic growth. But actions indicate that we want exactly the
opposite, and that makes no sense. Unless, of course, we accept my
friend's theory. I don't want to. But it's beginning to make a sick
kind of sense: It doesn't matter if children can't learn, if most of
them
are not meant to do much with their lives. |
What set Emma off were two articles that suggest that's
exactly what the education system is designed to do: To separate and
elevate the elite, and sedate and restrain the majority. This article from Russ Kick citing the work of John Taylor Gatto
describes the history of the American education system and those that
had responsibility for its design and administration. Some excerpts:
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood
Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools
should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped
and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the
specifications for manufacturing will come from government and
industry."
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these
sentiments in a speech to businessmen: "We want one class to have a
liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of
necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit
themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
[This philosophy continues to direct the American educational system to this day]. In
other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly
wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching
us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves,
question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were
to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly
the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to
the level where they could continue running things. |
Although Gatto may be a little too quick to see conspiracy theories
everywhere, the sheer mediocrity of the education system, and its
effectiveness at dumbing down young people and making them mindless
consumers and conformists, despite the efforts of mostly well-meaning
educators, are sobering.
Emma also cites a new 60 Minutes report on the explosion of poverty in America, and how it especially affects children:
Almost half the people fed by these lines are kids. The Agriculture
Department figures that one in six children in America face hunger.
That’s more than 12 million kids. Nationwide, children have the highest
poverty rate.
Looking at the [long Ohio food bank lineups, that start every day at
dawn and often run out of food before the line is exhausted], Bob Garbo
says, "This is it, and you’ll see
this pretty well all over the country...We’ve gone backwards. This is
what I heard from my mom and dad. This is what it was [like] during the
Depression era. That people stood in line to get government
commodities. We haven’t come very far, have we?”
In Ohio, the lines continue to grow. In the first three months of this
year. The lines jumped by nearly 20 percent with over 200,000 more
families standing in line for food. |
It's an effective combination for sedating and subjugating a nation:
'Educate' people when they're young -- to be uninformed, to feel
inferior, and to value themselves by what they consume -- and then,
when they get into the workplace, fill them with fear of unemployment,
hunger, and deprivation, so they willingly work for next to nothing,
and expect and demand nothing of their employer. Then add the final
clincher: make them feel as if their failure, their poverty, their
unemployment and underemployment, is their own fault,
so they feel guilty and blame themselves for not thriving when "any
American can rise to become President or a captain of industry".
Perhaps it's not an accident that the people at the Dean MeetUps, at
the anti-globalization rallies and the anti-war protests, are generally
well-to-do, highly educated people. They're the only ones that have so
far escaped the noose of suppression and despair, the only ones who
have had the opportunity to learn what a great nation can be, and still
have the hope that one day theirs could be one again.
|
MADE IN CANADA
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