Educating on Education, Part 3: The Education System in America Is Broken - But No One Has Any Interest In Fixing The Parts That Need It

 

The talking points for everybody on either side of the political spectrum is that we either learned the wrong lessons from Covid, that we handled it wrong and that it revealed all the flaws in the American system. I’m not qualified to talk about the first two, but I do know that when it came to education, both sides are entirely correct – but neither is acknowledging the real reason.

By the far the biggest controversy when it came to the lockdown was over when and how schools should be reopened.  From what I recall of the argument, the right’s major case was that the best thing for kids was the restoration of normality while the left argued just as strongly for the safety of their children.  I should point out that, as far as I know, the parents and teachers were the only ones polled on the subject: no one asked the children what they thought. This should not come as a shock; as I have pointed out in many of articles involving controversies in our schools, the people who are most effected by never get interviewed on the subject.  I have a feeling that, in both cases, the parents themselves never asked the children what they might think about it because as I’ve made clear the children are basically proxies in these fights rather than the actual cause.

I should now mention that while either argument were false flags, at least the right’s came from something resembling honesty. The right did want a restoration of normality – for themselves. And the only way they could have that was deal with something I made very clear in my previous article: all school has been is essentially day care for children five to seventeen. And don’t kid yourselves that those upright parents on the left didn’t want this normalcy too: I have no doubt they were just as exhausted by having their five and six year olds underfoot twenty-four hours a day with no relief.  I remember Seth Meyers and Tina Fey making jokes about in on late night over the summer of 2020. And that fact, more than anything, gets to the heart of lie about education in America: it is for the parents, not the children.

I have already made arguments in my previous articles that the educational system in America is flawed at every level; from the fact that most of the knowledge is useless and boring to the fact that the students don’t really want to be there in the first place. I imagine that the children who missed school did so almost entirely for the social aspect: like all of us, they were tired of only seeing their friends over Zoom,  and they were bored watching cartoons all the time. But I guarantee you none of them missed the routine of school, which gets to my biggest problem with it as a student.

Schools are often referred to as ‘institutions of learning’. I want you to reflect on what the average high school day is like. It may have altered some in the quarter century since I attended, but this is what I recall:

You are told that you must follow a routine. Your schedule in school is divided into eight forty-five minute periods, starting at 9 AM. You must go to a class and ‘learn’ literature for forty five minutes. This usually consists of a teacher lecturing, a certain amount of discussion, and you’re trying to take notes on what you think is relevant. Maybe the advance of technology has made this process easier for the next generation: I recall trying to scribble a lot of references from here or there that were almost inevitably ineligible when I tried to ‘study them’ that night, much less days later.

Forty-five minutes a bell rings. You go to a class teaching Math. In the two minutes it takes to get there, you have to essentially cleanse your mind of everything you learned in the previous class and try to remember what you learned in yesterday’s class. In the minute before the teacher gets into the room, you have to look through your notes or the book and see if it makes sense. The bell rings, the teachers come in, the process repeats.

You do this eight times, with an interval for lunch and perhaps physical education. You have to get used to eating lunch, say, at 11:00 am or 10:30 whether you want to or not. At the end of the day, you do assignments for whichever class you’ve been given. Comprehension of the subject is considered the equivalent of education.

None of this really seems conducive to a traditional education. What it seems in a very real sense is conditioning. The educational process is, in a way, forcing a child to abandon the freedoms they had growing up, and divide their lives into intervals. You must ask permission to use the bathroom, you can not wander in the halls to long, disruption of authority – which can take the form of misbehaving or (in my case) asking questions the teacher did not want to answer – gets you labeled as a trouble maker.  You are being taught that an adult is an authority figure who must be respected no matter how he behaves. You are told that the lessons you learn are important for life, when as I said, most of it is irrelevant to it.  Schools might not be prisons, but I guarantee you that every single student who goes to one must at least consider the question three or four times in the average week.

And the irony is that so much of our society doesn’t really measure the importance of a high school or a college by how well their students do on tests. The parents of the individual students do (I’m going to get to that in a bit) but let’s not kid ourselves: so much of our society views any educational institution through its sports teams. Male sports team, to be clear, most football. We all know that school will starve their chemistry labs and student newspapers but that the high school football team will no doubt be able to afford cars for some of his athletes.

Why do we do this?  Anyone who reads YA fiction will get a clear picture of this but the clearest version I got came in Tom Perotta’s most recent novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win.  In this book  Tracy, who was the famous overachiever in Perotta’s iconic Election never achieved her life goals and has essentially focused on becoming principal at her alma mater.  She has learned the hard way that you can be the greatest academic student, have all the extracurriculars in the world, be class  president – and it still won’t mean your long term goals come true.  

This is made very clear when she interviews for the job and the superintendent takes her very real concerns  - the fact that the technology department is underfunded, that the teachers are not educated in modern learning, that not enough focus is made on the gifted – and tells her that they mean nothing. He tells her that the valedictorians will be fine; it’s the below average students that need help. Tracy knows better, of course, but holds it in. The nail in her coffin, however, comes when it becomes clear she hates football. 

Throughout the novel, it is forever clear that all the people in her town and high school care about is returning to the glory days of the 1990s – the only year that their team won the state championship. Tracy is denied the job because the school board has decided to hire Larry Hallorann, the football coach who led the team to that winning season. Everyone knows that he was a terrible teacher and a lousy administrator, but no one cares. It is the nostalgia of the past that lures them to the idea that if they hire a winning football coach as their principal, things will be better. Even Tracy’s greatest ally on the board is won over because it reminds him of his time in the marching band.

One of the bigger ironies of Tracy Flick is that this ideology doesn’t have anything to do with the people at core of it. A central character in the novel is Vito Falcone “the most famous alumni of the school.’ He was a quarterback who helped lead them to that championship and became a pro football player – which is four games in three years.  Vito, as we learn, was a horrible person in high school. He was a bully and a womanizer who got at least two women pregnant. His ex-girlfriend got together with one of his teammates – who was African-American. That’s woman’s brother hated him, they got involved in a fight, he went to jail – and Vito did nothing on his behalf. Vito is now an alcoholic, twice divorced, someone who has beaten his wife, is suffering from brain damage. He is on the verge of killing himself when the school invites him for an alumni function.

When he returns, the town swoons and celebrates him but they don’t really notice him. Even a cursory observer would now that Vito is not right in the head, but no one cares about Vito the human being. It’s what he makes them feel that matters, not who he was then, not who he is now.

That’s the real reason I think so many parents care more about high school and the educational experience then their kids do. It is purely about feeling young again. Adults have grown up and have seen that their dreams have curdled. So they focus on their children as a way to live through them and feel younger.  The average child does not want to be in any form of school and be dealing with these issues. These battles are essentially for control. To shape our children into version of ourselves.

And make no mistake, this is a fault of the so-called ‘enlightened parents’ as well. If anything, they are far worse version of this then the ones who just drop their kids off at school at view as day care.  One of the most recent examples of this appeared in The Epic Story of Every Living Thing by Deb Caletti. The novel is the story of Harper, a teenager who has lived through the era of Covid and is dealing with the very reals traumas of being a teenage in the 21^st century – dealing with shooting drills in school, the possibility of climate change, a prisoner to social media. One of her biggest problems is her mother, who has raised her on her own from a sperm donor who she had never answered questioned a single question about.

Harper’s mother smothers every aspect of her life and has done so through her childhood. The most obvious example comes when Harper gets an A- on her calculus exam and her mother assures her: “You’ll do better next time.” Her mother is clearly a helicopter parent and as the book progress, it is obvious that so many of her friends have lived their lives under the endless pressure of this idea of ‘safety’. Which in the eyes of these parents is an unwillingness to allow for injury, failure or any privacy in their own lives. Harper has been a prisoner under the guise of love.

Harper eventually manages to liberate herself from the shackles of everything her parents and her society have put on her. I won’t go into detail here because it isn’t pertinent to the piece, but one of her choices she makes is to break away from the educational path her mother has set out for her practically since grade school. Harper tries to see her mother as not an enemy, which to be clear is more than I was able to do as the reader. Because in my opinion, her mother is just a model for so many parents who believe that restricting a child’s liberty is the best way to prepare them for life.

And that includes every aspect of their free time.  Every child gets sent off to ‘camp’ in the summer. It’s said to educate them, so that they can learn skills or make new friends. In actuality, it’s the summer equivalent of school. Parents do not want their children underfoot. To them, the idea of being lazy and free is somehow offensive to them. I must admit that I occasionally, more than a quarter of a century after finishing my educational process, still wake up screaming from nightmares where adults have managed to find a way to shorten, if not eliminate, summer vacation entirely. I’m actually reluctant to write it down out of fear some adult will put in on a ballot somewhere.

So to be clear all of these battles over curriculum are fights that the students do not care about, is not useful for their long term life skills, is taught in a method that is unsuitable for anyone’s educational process and in the standard of the community of the school, pales in comparison to the athletics involved.  Like almost every battle being fought among the ideologies today, it is has nothing to do with the people are most affected by about it – who, I repeat, would most likely rather be anywhere else.  In a sense everything about education today is about indoctrination, but it is indoctrination to the patterns of the structure of American life. Those on the left who question everything that is wrong with America are the largest proponents of public schools; they seem to have conveniently forgotten that these self-same schools are designed in such a way that no real person could get an education in the sense of the word.

At this point, it would seem a redundancy to argue that every aspect of the fight over education is about the adults involved and has nothing to do with the children. And it is that very clear problem that now makes me consider a subject that is such a land mine that I’m not even going to mention in this particular article. In the next article (and probably the last in the series for a while) I’m going to deal with why education should be the last part of societal change and not the first.