“What do you plan to do with your life?”
THE ONLY WAY TO SCREW UP THIS OPPORTUNITY IS LET THE POLITICIANS “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX”.
“What do you plan to do with your life?”
The purpose of education is to address this question – or should be! The mess that is currently impersonating public education can be eloquently summarized in the truth that, for too many of its students, what they are doing in school has little to do with their life plans.
My parents, who grew up during the depression in rural South Georgia, asked all their children this question and it was not rhetorical, but one that required a planned answer. College was a given, since my Dad was the first ever in his family to go and we would be the first ever from my Mom’s. Thanks to WWII there were millions more like them and they are called the greatest generation for a reason. Schools grew and advanced incredibly as teachers became passionate about their career and the Supreme Court finally decided equality applied to public schools too. The teachers understood the challenges of the job, and rules were just what you dealt with because changing them was more effort than working around them. It has always been the expectation that school would prepare students for life, but since WWII turned the economy global, that expectation has grown increasingly college-preparatory and STEM oriented, even though many students plan neither. While the necessity of more training in non-STEM jobs in our technological society has grown, the number of people with the ability to access that training has decreased; and the preparation they are receiving to make use of the training – should they be able to access it – has become dramatically worse.
The rebellion fighting this dysfunction is afire, making strange bedfellows who disagree vehemently regarding how life – for which your education supposedly prepares you – might look. Some see education as purely career preparation, the problem being the current system does not prepare sufficiently for the career of THEIR business; others – including many teachers – believe education should prepare students to enjoy their life, regardless of what career they should choose. Meanwhile, increasingly students complain that the education they’re receiving is dramatically irrelevant to either of these purposes – from their perspective.
Globalization, started by Christopher Columbus, has made a trained workforce necessary, without enlightening us as to the best method to achieve such. Meanwhile we have turned all decision-making about education over to the least knowledgeable and most biased group possible – lawmakers! The basis of the laws passed regarding education over the last half-century has been designed, written and implemented by corporate interests whose purposes have everything to do with profits and mere lip service to actual education. Proof of this is the current stranglehold standardized testing holds; a multibillion-dollar business that has whetted the appetite of the oligarchs who now envision AI taught schools funded by local tax dollars – the goose that lays golden eggs! The truth that such a system would be even worse – if such a thing is possible – than standardized testing at teaching anything bothers them not a whit as they drool over a possible trillion-dollar payday.
It is well past time to redefine the purpose of education. Eight billion people and automation of production guarantees there are not enough STEM careers to support that many jobs, yet our educational system is still focused on that single goal. As the oligarchs realize they don’t really need workers, their interest in educating the populace is reduced to profit-creating options. Meanwhile the needs of that populace grow; particularly the needs for meaningful jobs that address needed improvements in mental health, arts, socialization and healthcare.
To see where education is headed, we need only look at healthcare in the U.S.: Completely run by corporations through ‘health insurance’, it has become the most profitable industry on the planet. Does the ‘health insurance’ industry want to ensure you have good health? Quite the opposite; they want to ensure that your health is the most profitable to the corporation. Do we want education to help achieve the most desirable life for our children, or do we want education to produce the largest profits for the corporate AI moguls?
“What do you plan to do with your life?”
IF our educational system is not addressing this question in a meaningful way then it is NOT an educational system.
The MAGA fiesta will not destroy public education – despite their best efforts which have been considerable: The chaos that has been created will force change – which is a huge opportunity! Unwittingly (I refuse to attribute logical thought to this crowd) MAGA has freed us to think outside the box!
THE ONLY WAY TO SCREW UP THIS OPPORTUNITY IS LET THE POLITICIANS “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX”.
Buckminster Fuller taught us there is no reformation of a broken system; the only viable option is an innovative replacement – think outside the box. The purpose of a system is proven in what the system values. In our educational system competition is valued above learning: A student grasps the concept – has learned it – and the system assigns a grade of C–average; where the goal of all students should be above average – per the system.
If the purpose of education were to place learning above competition would that be far enough outside the box?
In the U.S. we are in love with competition. Having spent most of my life coaching I am very familiar with competition, and the last four decades as a classroom teacher have shown me learning is NOT a competitive activity! The very best learning environments in my experience have all involved cooperation as opposed to competition. While competition certainly drives motivation, the motivation is far more concerned with the scale which measures the winner rather than learning itself – different values.
Time for a thought experiment that supposes the purpose of education is LEARNING as opposed to winning a competition. Our entire educational system is based on grades, both as a measurement of ‘success’ and a standard of how well you are competing with your peers (are your reading and math skills ‘at grade level’?). Yet learning is the most personal and non-competitive activity in which you can engage; and the effort needed varies widely due to many, often unrelated, factors. An educational system based on learning would allow students freedom to pursue the knowledge they desire – to pursue ‘the joy of learning’! At the start of my teaching career a major reason I decided to teach was enjoying the enthusiasm and excitement of kindergarteners; and a major disappointment during my career has been watching the educational system beat that out of students well before they reached my high school class. How much joy can you feel about gaining an understanding of a difficult concept if your effort is awarded a D-below average? Not to mention ‘average’ is of millions of your peers none of whom possess your unique combination of abilities and experiences!
Such a seismic change is impossible given the regressive nature of our current educational system and our love of competition, but the MAGA crowd has done an extraordinarily successful job of destroying public education – their stated goal – through defunding. This gives us the opportunity to use their success as the springboard to true innovation. Interestingly, the methodology involves a return to the basis of education from its start in our country – control by local government, the reason there was no Department of Education for the first 200 years of our existence and why it is never mentioned in the Constitution. That control was usurped by the federal government when Ronald Reagan proclaimed public education a ‘failure’ and then made it a self-fulfilling prophecy as he tightened federal control under the guise of ‘accountability’, an accountability under total control of Congress with the loudly touted aim of ‘fixing’ public education. You are welcome to expound on how ‘fixed’ public education is currently.
This control is based on money. Though most school funding comes from property taxes, the requirements imposed by federal legislation have claimed a growing share of the budget. and the threat of withdrawing all federal funding leaves local school boards with a task that increasingly resembles rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. To return control to the local school boards would require Congress to continue to fund the requirements the Constitution – or Congress – mandates, but to sever all strings (accountability) attached to those funds, such accountability would instead be the responsibility of the residents paying the taxes! Obviously, Congress will be as averse to ceding control as ever, but in times of chaos we the people gain power – if we are willing to grab it! A good starting point has been graciously provided by MAGA as they have claimed unwarranted control of local property taxes to fund vouchers, which are by design the antithesis of public education. We MUST insist that tax monies collected for public education is spent on schools that adhere to the Constitution, which vouchers do NOT do! Eliminating both the costs and employee time of standardized testing would come close to offsetting loss of federal funds, and would also demonstrate that local school boards – NOT the federal government – control public schools.
What would the resulting public education system look like?
The most dramatic change would be individual school systems empowered to decide the purpose of education for their community. Likewise, the methodology of attaining that purpose would be in the hands of the local school board as opposed to some highly paid group of ‘educational experts’ provided by the federal government, and whom I can say from decades of experience are distressingly deficient in any practical knowledge of how their expertise could be applied. This would bring the very best of American ingenuity and competitive spirit to bear as local school boards worked to find the best way for their schools. A guarantee is at least some of these school boards would ask the true experts – the classroom teachers – what would be the best way to improve learning. Personally, it is clear to me the success of those systems will inspire more to emulate them.
Ronald Reagan made incredible political capital from the ‘failure’ of public education, and gave control to the federal government under the myth that the government would ‘fix’ it. No one currently claims public education is ‘fixed’ – all agree it’s broken. The inability of this brokenness to be addressed by the federal government is due to the obvious truth to which even the ‘educational experts’ agree – learning is NOT a one size fits all proposition. We have tried the federal solution and the outcome is clear: Abject failure! It’s past time to give the true experts, the classroom teachers, a chance – or at least a voice!