Educating On Education, Conclusion: We Can't Fix Our School System Unless We Agree On How Its Broken

 

The battle on education continues to rage and always will. Tonight on MSNBC there was a story on how a  Christian-owned cell phone company in North Texas is in the midst of a right-wing movement to control schoolboards by changing the curriculum, banning gender-neutral restrooms and arranges scores if not hundreds of teachers. A teacher interviewed claimed that this was part of a right-wing plan to arrange a segregated school system, either by race or religion. The term brain-washing was used more than once.

This battle has been going on for decades and I don’t think it will end any time soon. And the recent it won’t is because both sides have a complete and total misunderstanding of the people at the heart of it: the students.

Yes it is wrong for the far right to try and wage its proxy battles through our educational systems. But it is just as wrong for the teachers and the left-wing media to argue that public school is some kind of hallowed shrine that deserves preserving.  Because as I have written over and over, every aspect of our educational system is flawed by design and execution and will help everyone except the people it’s for.

What is the American school system supposed to provide our children? An educational system that provides the groundwork for a productive adult life. What does it actually provide? A system where eighty to ninety percent of the curriculum will become useless to the average participant within a few years of graduation, if it is not forgotten between summers or learned at all in a structure that is utterly unconducive to learning anything.

The American school is supposed to provide us with a sanctuary and structure and it does – for the parents and the teachers. For most parents it is a way to make sur your children are elsewhere when you are at work – we learned that lesson the hard way during the lockdown and pandemic. For most teachers, it is to provide employment where they are directed to teach a lesson plan that allows no room for freedom, gives them little ability to give full instruction to the majority of their students including the ones that might need it the most all in the center of a student where ninety-five percent of the population would rather be anywhere else.  And for the record, even if we gave adequate funding to public schools this would do nothing to change the mindset of the students. And as the last twenty years have tragically proved, they can not even ensure public safety of our youngest.

In a way, those who criticize school for indoctrination are absolutely correct.  From the moment we enter a school in kindergarten, a child’s freedom is completely gone. You are taught to never question an adults authority. To speak only when called upon. To have your lunch at a certain hour. And certainly never to question whether anything you read in a lesson plan is wrong. This happens in the best of schools or the worst, private or public. You are prepared for adulthood in a sense – you are prepared for a lifetime of routine when you’re structure is divided into hourly shifts, where you always waiting until your day is over until you come back and have to do the same thing again. And you are being taught to perform to the best of your ability at a task that you might find useless or meaningless but have no choice but to learn. Life in your average job or in a penitentiary, take your pick: the average elementary to high school experience prepares you perfectly for that, if little else.

And you also learn from an early age about the absolute worst parts of behavior. The tendency to divide by cliques, the tendency for bullying and looking down on who those are different in anyway,  the idea that you will be laughed at, berated, or out and out ignored starts pretty much the moment you enter your first classroom and never ends.  This was my experience going through school in the 1980s and ‘90s. In the age of where every child has an iPhone, I have no doubt it’s exponentially worse.

I have little doubt that when a network finds students who are worried about books being banned or about their educational curriculum they have spent a fair amount of time looking high and low for the right kind of photogenic and articulate kids. I am also fairly certain that they had to spend a very long time looking in almost any school they go too. Perhaps I am being cynical when I say that most kids they asked say they have never been to the library or that they didn’t notice any major changes or maybe that many did merely to lie about being on television and getting their fifteen minutes. I don’t think I am.

Because most children  - certainly not the ones I knew when I was going to school – can either articulate or are even aware of how useless their educational experience is.  I imagine far more of them would tell their parents or any adult who would listen that they don’t give a damn about school one way or the other, that they hate being there with every fiber of their being, and they really don’t understand why so many adults are angry about a place they never go to. And even if they were articulate enough to put this into words, no one will ever listen.

Because children are only relevant to the American system based on potential more than reality. We see them only as mirrors to whatever we want to see  - our concerns, our fears, our politics, our prejudices. We’ve been using them to wage proxy battles for our society since at least the era of civil rights and we’re just going to keep on doing it.  As adults we believe we know what’s best for them better than they do even if they are smarter than us and ask questions we don’t want to answer.

All of this battle about ‘parent’s rights; is a complete misnomer because it is based on the idea of control. And this why I fundamentally think the battle over schools is completely futile.  At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to restrict anyone’s access to information.  It may have been far easier to do in the rural schoolhouse and horseless carriages, but it’s impossible to do in the age when everybody has a computer in their hands.  Parents were never able to stop their children from finding pornography or alcohol; what makes you think they can stop from learning things they want to know?

And as for those who worry that educators are being hampered by parent’s group as to what they can teach, relax. No one ever gets an education on anything useful from elementary school to at least high school.  The ones who want to learn about this subject will find their way to find a way to finding it eventually. The ones who don’t, well, in the magical public schools you still celebrate, they had next to no chance of learning it anyway. I am a literate, erudite and well-read individual. And as I said at the start of this series, I got that way despite by experience in the American educational system, not because of it.

That said, I do have a request for all of the teenagers who are living through this struggle today. I know this is a battle and it’s not going to be easily won but I have confidence you will survive. However, if you choose to have children of your own, try to remember just how horrific the last several years of your educational experience were and how much you hated being in school to begin with. Remember just how inadequate every aspect of this system is to your education and your future well-being.  Make your decisions about where to send your children based on what you think is best for them, not what society tells you. And when other parents try to tell you that teachers are trying to ruin your children’s education, try to remind them what school was like for them. I don’t have any hope this generation of thinkers can do anything to save or fix the system. Maybe you guys can come up with a better idea.