Super teacher Paul White blogs at Arianna Huffington’s site. In a post titled “Public Education: America’s Most Under-Reported War,” he argues for radical change in the school system.
Sample comment:
While the War in Iraq will progressively require less financial support, no amount of funding for public schools will ever be enough until its inept leadership changes. Local school districts should actually be given less money and not more, until they agree to hire competent financial professionals to handle their budgets, and stop funneling all their funding increases into unwarranted administrative bloat. The only school budget item which does justify an increase – teachers’ pay – is the one area where school leaders refuse to spend a dime. This counterproductive action both drives out good teachers and prevents strong candidates from entering the profession.
“War” is an over-used metaphor, certainly — White’s background, teaching in some of the most difficult situations, gives him license to use it. The comparison between our nation’s efforts to secure legitimate peace in Iraq and our efforts to improve schools is a stretch.
But consider my view: Schools make the nation.
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But consider my view: Schools make the nation. Certainly this was the view of American patriots like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Certainly this is part of our history when we consider the life stories of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, to name a few key figures whose development as leaders depended on their education — and usually public education. Consider the opening words of the Report of the President’s Commission on Excellence in Education* in 1983:
The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
Our education system is such a great idea that when we look at the history of the growth of the American model of public schooling we find large stretches of time when people do not question the need or purpose of schools, such things being so obvious in the spread of literacy, end of child labor, promotion of a learned population to provide educated workers for factories, and need to produce world-class businesses and products to preserve, defend, and advance freedom. That consensus on the value and purpose of education stands rather tattered these days.
So I offer a few hypotheticals. How would history be different had there been different results from the boards of education in Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1950s, to end segregated schools? What if the board of education had worked to desegregate the schools of Little Rock in 1954, keeping them open through the late 1950s, and avoiding the conflict at Central High? What if America’s schools had moved to keep up with science in the 1930s and 1940s, and as a consequence the U.S. had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957, rather than the Soviet Union (or better — in 1956, or in 1954)?
What would have happened if, after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the U.S. had provided aid to the nation to establish a system of public schools for both genders, throughout the nation? How would things be different in Pakistan today, had U.S. aid for schools not been replaced with money for madrassas? What would the future of China be had it continued to downplay the value of education after the Cultural Revolution, and were it not the leading producer of engineers today? What about India — what would its current status be were educational opportunity not as available as it is, to produce engineers and MBAs? How would history be different had the U.S. had many workers at our embassy in Tehran who spoke and read the local dialects? How would our current situation be different had the FBI, NSA and CIA had a large cadre of people who read and spoke Arabic, from 1995 to 2001?
We too often take our education system for granted. Education is the key to the future, whether it is our future or not. One must occasionally remind people these days that in the past, despotic governments have acted to withhold education from people in order to suppress them; there were laws that forbade teaching slaves to read in antebellum America, for example. Depriving people of education is oppression, it is a form of slavery even in a nation where slavery is outlawed.
So, while it may be a stretch to compare educational improvement to the warring in Iraq, the metaphors and analogies do not fail because education is unimportant.
Go read Mr. White’s views. What do you think?
* Potential conflict of interest report: The idea for the commission came from Sec. of Education Ted Bell, a Utahn, whose appointment to the post was engineered by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, for whom I worked at the time, on the staff of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. Bell selected former University of Utah President David Pierpont Gardner to chair the commission — he was president while I attended the U, and I had interviewed him as a reporter for the Daily Utah Chronicle, and worked with him in other capacities. Later, when I served at the Department of Education, I worked with Milton Goldberg, a wonderful scholar and delightful man who had been the executive director of the commission, and whose voice is present in the report. My biases may show, but of course, they are all correct, fitting and proper biases.
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