Found this on HomeSchool and etc blogsite, an excellent synopsis of the present condition of public schooling. Public schools have never been about excellence and despite years of smoke and mirrors and incredible increases in spending they are still not. They are and always will be about producing docile, conforming adults ready to assume the tasks of production and service in society. There is nothing inherently wrong with this notion unless you present conformity and submission as excellence. The more intellegent, crazy and restless among us have always aspired to and achieved beyond the standards necessary in the public school model.
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance . Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
1 comments:
Maybe if American education weren't government-sponsored education, and instead more of a free enterprise thing, we'd have something. But uhhh....yeah. Good luck with that one.
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