51/50 Means We Have No Clue [View all]

[ymetca]

The DeVos vote of 51/50 with VP Pence as tie-breaker seems to represent our ambivalence toward public education. We're all afraid to change something that so affects our children, and our future. And we search for blame, not realizing WE are the problem.

Business leaders have been denigrating public education for many years, because it hasn't provided them the well-greased gears for their enterprises. But they are unwilling to pay for post K-12 education, especially via taxation.

Because markets are competitive, there is diminishing monetary value for pursuing education beyond a certain threshold, particularly in certain fields that are not in high demand. And, even though that viability threshold is now post-secondary, the return on investment for a new employee is about the same amount of time it takes to complete a post-secondary education, and dropping fast. As a student, you will be hard-pressed to pay off your post-secondary debt when most jobs will turf you out after 5 years.

This ROI problem, I suggest, is a result of a lack of democracy in education from the very start. We say we need x many y's in order to maintain industry z. But Democracy isn't an investment. People aren't "human resources", and teachers are not widgets in an economic engine. The whole term itself "economy" implies there is not enough to go around, and therefore we must "economize". Who decides who's children must be "economized"? The teachers? The parents? Congress? Bill Gates?

Public education was created for the purposes of industry, but industry generally has almost no use for most of what education teaches. Hence the so-called "back to basics" approach that is foisted like clockwork, over and over again. Einstein's insanity principle in action!

We all say we need to "reform", "innovate", even "re-imagine" our public education system. But none of us ever questions that the system itself is flawed because it is un-democratic. We've subjected education to the whims of industry, rather than industry to the triumphs of education. Education has taught us we are destroying our environment, and that we treat each other like robots. But instead, all anybody seems to want is more robots. Madness.

The ones being taught have almost no input into the system at all. If we really believed in the principles of Democracy, shouldn't our public education system be reflective of what our children desire to learn? Instead, we kill that desire via rote memorization, rigid indoctrination, and limitations on what can, or even should be explored. Self-discipline above all is prized.

Such system is now more counterproductive than ever. We won't transform public education unless and until we allow it to truly transform us. No one should ever really "graduate" from it. Public education is, quite simply, what we all should be doing in life. For our sake. For our childrens' sakes. For Democracy's sake. Instead, we close the doors on our best and brightest at just the moment when we should be inviting them in. All for the purpose of "economizing" our "investment".

The reason we can't "fix" our public education system is precisely because it is undemocratic. Even though we teach Democracy in schools, the first thing a child learns is that jobs are NOT democratic. THAT is the problem our public education system is telling us we MUST fix, or we all will perish. Perish to the whims of a plutocratic few, as they eat our ecosystem whole.

And now we have placed an "end-times" religious bag-o-nuts in charge of it. Just barely.

Well, there is that little glimmer of hope anyway...