Notes from My Reading

I found this post saved as a draft back in 2005.  These notes are from a few years back, but still, I think, pertinent for parents and educators today:

Acting Dean of the University of Texas at Austin was interviewed by the author ofEd-School Follies. The dean averred that teaching is a form of social work and admitted when asked that:

"...the necessity of affecting social change sometimes impedes learning."

"But," she continued, "it has to happen then; you can't not use the schools as the agencies of social change. It's too convenient." (emphasis mine)

In the book Public Controls for Non-Public Schools, Donald Erickson, Associate Professor of Education, writes of the struggle between parents and humanist educators:

"The chief enigma.., concerns the fact that the child does not choose for himself, particularly at the elementary level, the life orientation to which he will be molded. Given the power of culture, there is no method I know of to permit the young unbiased choice...THE PROBLEM IS ONE OF DECIDING WHO SHALL CHOOSE...". (emphasis mine)

Erickson actually understood that this problem was addressed and dealt with as much as it needs to be in the Constitution and the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. There should be no question at all. The "life orientation" to which the child shall be molded is, or ought to be, up to the parents and child- not any government or creature of the government (and 'creatures of the government,' or state, is not an insult. If your job is created by the government and your funding comes from any government, state, fed, or local, then what you do in the capacity of that job you do as a creature of the state).

About that deciding who shall choose- it's a constant tension.  Teachers lament the lack of parental involvement and everybody decries those parents who aren't 'involved' in their children's education.  When schools are failing, it's always the parents' fault because they just aren't involved enough (never mind that public schools are also justified on the basis that they have to be there to help kids whose parents won't do their job).  But I think perhaps we don't mean the same thing when we use that word.  Although they may not actually recognize it, educators seldom mean a partnership of equals, let alone a partnership which recognizes the ultimate authority of the parents.

You may remember this story, where the parents wanted a Spanish immersion program and actually funded it themselves, and the school turned down their donation and rejected their involvement on this appalling basis:

Bowing to parents' wishes would have sent a bad message to voters, said Gerald Murphy, a School Committee member.

In the future, voters might have been willing to vote against any tax increase because they thought parents or others would step forward and pay for programs slated to be cut, Murphy said.

  My own observation (born out by legislative attempts like this) is that for the most part what those who criticize the lack of parental involvement mean is that parents shall be involved as helpers- they will do what they are told, cheerfully and without question. I suspect that most educationists and politicians who tout the need for parental involvement do not mean that they want parents involved as equals. They don't want parents as partners.  They want them as minions.  And also scapegoats- so when schools fail, the parents can always safely be blamed- and then used as justification to get more funding for those failed schools.

However, like John Taylor Gatto, Richard Mitchell, Samuel Blumenfield, and others like them, I have come to believe that the public schools are not truly failing. They are failing children, but they themselves are not failing to do what they are designed to do. What are they designed to do?

The goal of those in the upper echelons of institutions is ultimately perpetuation of the institution itself. Our institution of public education is extremely successful:

Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact, be successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that education in America is "failing," it is because we don't understand the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim--to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers.

~Richard Mitchell, Graves of Academe, Propositions Three and Seven

The institution of public school is highly successful. 

Where we as a nation are not successful is in actually educating our children.