ParisTampaBlog

Some beliefs die hard. The belief that education is a common and public good, and free, is one of them. Also that education is a right, that we have a right to education, much as a right to health care, is another one.

These two ideas, as seductive as they still are, are now dying, first because they’re just too expensive and governments can no longer afford to pay the bill. But also regardless of their cost they still ought to be dying, and in fact shouldn’t have been held in the first place.

Why? Because they’re based on the false assumption that education and health can be given to people regardless of their readiness, imposed on both children and adults from without, from on high, whether the recipients want them or not. And of course they can’t.

I’d be willing to grant that some goods can be imposed upon us from without,  —clean air, clean water, roads and sidewalks, sewage systems, security and what not come to mind.

Furthermore, in regard to these goods it’s not even important whether or not they are wanted by the recipients, although in most cases they probably are. For given to us, most often by government actions, we accept them, with their functioning properly requiring only that acceptance, nothing else on our part.

But education, and health are different. It is not within the power of any government to give them to the people. They depend much more on individuals doing for themselves whatever it takes in order to possess them.

Up until now we have been terribly mistaken about the delivery systems for both. In fact, in regard to the one, education, many of us still believe that the schools have it within their power to educate our children. And for 200 years, in spite of an endless series of reforms in response to failure, the schools have failed to do just that.

Now all that doesn’t mean that education is a consumer good, like shoes and iPods, although that’s how the progressive educational wing of school defenders would have it, —in their view education being either a common, that is public good, or a private consumer good. And when it’s put that way, education vs. shoes, say, who would come down on the side of shoes?

Not the liberal reformer and still believer in the common school of Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann and John Dewey.

But the real tie between education and consumer goods is something else. Consumer goods, at least in a free, liberal democracy, come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, corresponding to and satisfying the no less huge and diverse population of consumers of those goods.

And that is the tie or link between them. The schools also, if in our brave new world we continue to have such, ought to come in at least as many shapes and sizes as shoes.

Of course the things we buy and consume are valued differently. And consumer goods cannot always be compared in regard to their value to us. Some such as education and healthcare may even be priceless although in order to make them available, and thereby help the individual acquire them, we do put a price on them. such as the cost of a college degree, or a hospital stay.

Education and health care, properly removed from the responsibility of government, and from being rights owed to individuals, and instead being positioned in our society as the responsibility of individuals who would have them, not their right, goods to be obtained principally by their own efforts, do become then, but only in that sense, like other goods sold on the free market.

Finally, education, even when properly placed as we would have it among consumer goods, will always be more than shoes, and the schools themselves in whatever form they may come in, but now meeting in their endless variety of shapes and sizes, the no less endless variety of students coming to their doors in search of an education, will always be more than shoe stores.

Clearly those who love America love the freedom they have now or the freedom they find  when they come here. No one travels elsewhere to experience what it’s like to live in freedom. For that they come here.

In 1990, before the break-up, I traveled to the Soviet Union just to experience what it was like not to have our freedoms. And I found out. And of course I would never have gone there if I had ever thought I could not come back.

That was much the same situation throughout the world during the Cold War when there were many countries without our freedoms of movement and expression. And if we did travel to these countries, it was only with the confidence we would be free to leave whenever we wanted.

There are those, if only a few, who even today when the Cold War is mostly a distant memory travel to North Korea, although no one would do so if they knew the way out would be closed and locked down after their arrival there.

Things have changed, of course, and for the better. Today there are other liberal democracies with many of our freedoms of movement and expression. And in no small part these peoples have their freedom because of our being there first in “freeland” and setting the example. But there are others yet to go to freeland, their leaders being unwilling to free their people, that alone accounting for many if not most of today’s conflicts.

I believe we were the very first people of modern times, to have realized that nothing was more important than being free, although the work of determining just what that means is still going on.

But when we travel to other liberal democracies we still don’t fully experience freedoms similar to our own. This is probably because of the heavy presence of government in the form of excessive rules, regulations, and of course taxes, all weighing down heavily on the people. It is as if the people were not to be trusted with their freedoms, as if the government, not the people in their independent and individual lives, had somehow to remain in control.

The simple acts of buying and selling, those activities that occupy us on a daily basis, such as trips to a department store or super market, should be enjoyable, if not delightful experiences. But in France, for example, a country I know well, the sales people I encounter are most often in a bad mood, as if they were being oppressed by working conditions over which they had no control.

In France the heavy handed government seems to turn the simplest activities into disagreeable chores, making going on a shopping trip more like going to the dentist than engaging in the delight of open and free commercial exchanges with others.

One feels an all too heavy government presence most everywhere, in a pharmacy, in a gas station, in a train station, and of course in the post office. And I hear often that those who would start a business of their own, say in France, or elsewhere within the (now on life support) Euro zone, learn very quickly that they would do better to head to London, Sydney, or New York where they would be freer to create their own positions, niches, eventually making places of their own in the global markets.

The looming presidential election in America is, and rightly so, turning on different ideas of freedom, freedom that we need both to protect and to grow,  if we would have it for long. Furthermore this election will be decided, as are most elections in liberal democracies, by those who are at the center, and most concerned about protecting their freedoms, and holding on to what they have.

Neither the Democrats of the progressive left, nor the Republicans of the conservative right represent what the country is all about, let alone are they at all what the country needs. In fact the two extremes would reduce our freedoms, the one by growing the power of government, the other by imposing its religious and radical ideas on us all.

But happily Left and Right, because of their extreme and opposing viewpoints, pretty much undo one another, as in the recent French presidential election, cancel each other out. And so much the better.

The real campaign for president hinges on the political center, on what the people at the center are thinking. In this regard, and for this reason the two candidates have just recently taken steps that would move them to the center, moves that would probably in their view and the view of their people, attract the support of the independents. And in fact, those at the center, mostly independents, have been waiting and closely watching them, waiting to see how they would move as the election nears.

These particular “moves to the center” were made in two highly charged and controversial areas of our nation’s life, immigration and education. Third rails, both of them. Health care, a third third rail has for the moment been left out of the discussion.

The two moves were alike in that both would grow our country’s image as being the land of the free. Did they see their actions this way themselves? Probably not.

Rather in both instances they were both looking to attract large Latino and school choice voting constituencies. For both intentions if carried out would do away with one or more previously imposed government restrictions, in the one on the children of illegal immigrants and in the other on the parents of mostly minority and disadvantaged children living and attending mostly segregated schools in our inner cities.

The one, Governor Romney’s, would give poor students and those with disabilities the right to attend any public or charter school in their state. His proposal would permit disadvantaged city kids to attend suburban schools of their choice, this being an enormous increase in freedom of movement for kids and their parents, although for all the obvious reasons it probably won’t happen. (Does Romney know this, that it won’t happen? Of course.)

The other, the President’s plan, would allow the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children to remain in the country without fear of deportation and be able to work. This is the President’s own version of the administration’s earlier Dream Act that was blocked by Senate Republicans in 2010. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants to our country would thereby, at long last, be given some of the freedom for which they came here in the first place.

As one at the center I am pleased with both moves. Although at this moment, of the two I would say it’s the President’s proposal that gets my vote. By executive order he is giving life to the Dream Act that was stupidly, mindlessly rejected by the Senate. That this failure to do the right thing could have happened tells us that our freedoms are still threatened, in this instance by our own elected representatives.

In a 1813 letter to John Adams Thomas Jefferson proposed ”instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions….”

What we have now, while still very much an aristocracy of wealth, is no less an aristocracy of Jefferson’s “talent,” or rather the talented, especially those with exceptional mathematical, verbal, artistic, and athletic skills. This is all to the good. But we are still quite without that other aristocracy of virtue, perhaps even more so than in Jefferson’s time.

Also we are still without that which Jefferson himself most wanted from the schools, and as he wrote elsewhere, an informed citizenry.

So we might say that to the aristocracy of wealth, which pretty well described the country of the founding fathers, we have over the next two centuries and a bit more added an aristocracy of talent, but are still without an aristocracy of virtue.

And as things are now for most of us, not either extraordinarily wealthy or extraordinarily gifted or talented, life is still a struggle, and, in spite of the ceaseless, and occasionally heroic efforts of reformers to change that things, for most of us have not changed.

The revolutions of the modern era, begun by those who would change things for what they thought was the better, failed utterly of course to change the way things were, their actions even when well meaning being accompanying with huge costs including millions of innocent lives lost.

If there is a worthy goal for our sacrifices it has to be not to change our natures, that we cannot do (for the time being anyway), but to make us a bit better, that which we could do.

Thomas Jefferson was right about the desirability of an aristocracy of virtue. But up until his time, and up until our own time, other than false progress on previous but mistaken paths traced by religion, we haven’t yet figured out what path now will get us there.

Well for the hunter gatherers their day also was 24 hours long. Did they sleep most of the day? If not, they probably had as many “sensorial” experiences as we do, their lives having been in that sense no less full than ours.

And yet they, because they were without even the tiniest bit of our technology (if you except the cave painters of Southern France and Northern Spain, who in the darkness on the walls of their caves have given us almost the only real glimpse we have of them) have left us with little, almost no account or their days, or nights.

Therefore, faute de mieux, we impose upon them, those tribes of 10, 20, 30 thousand or more years ago, what we see going on in the few intact hunter gatherer groups we have uncovered mostly in the tropics during the past 100 years of so.

Are there others of these, much like our earliest ancestors, still covered, still undiscovered? I don’t know. From my easy chair in Tampa, Florida it doesn’t seem so, but then I have never spent any time in the jungle regions and have no idea if there are well hidden still undiscovered places out there where these people might still be hunting and gathering.

In any case, because of our technology, that which constantly holds and compounds the mountains of available information available to us, much as the bank compounds interest, we are leaving behind us (for how long, who knows) a vast, although woefully incomplete in respect to the entire 7 billion or so of us alive today, record of (some of) our activities.

Can anyone other than Google or an even more powerful Google robot, put it all together, and then somehow hold it all together, all the vast record of the lives of the billions of representatives of homo sapiens alive today, let alone those of earlier epochs?

In my own case I now I have thousands of pieces of my own writing, tens of thousands of pieces of the writing of others in articles and books, all of it propping me up as it were in my large upstairs room-study where I work at my computer, along with my wife who is there also working at hers.

Propping me up in the sense that with all those written words about me and within easy reach, and especially the little of them that I have grabbed hold of, swallowed as it were, and digested and made a part of me, I now am somebody. They have in a way lent me a little of their substance.

Take them away, move me away from the thoughts of others, that which will of course in time, and not too long a time, happen, then what will remain of me? I wonder sometimes if my soul, the imperishable part of me, is made up only of them.

An important question because they will in time, I know, perish. I might ask if there is anything to me other than the ideas, nearly all the ideas of others, that I have accumulated during almost 80 years and have now in books alined in rows on shelves where I am now living in Tampa.

And without them, much as without the technology that also surrounds me, would I find myself back entirely in the grip of the sensorial impressions of my long day, the same 24 hour day as that of the hunter gatherers? There are those who say that would be a good thing if it were to happen.

In a forward to Mitt Romney’s education “White Paper” Jeb Bush writes:

There is no more critical issue facing the United States than the need for education reform. Despite spending more on public education than virtually every other nation, our students’ math and science achievement lags well behind that of their peers abroad. One in four American students fails to graduate from high school within four years of entering, and far too many of those who do graduate are ill-prepared for the demands of college and careers. Once the world’s leader in the postsecondary degree completion, we now rank in the middle of the pack among industrialized countries. Many American students suffer due to inadequate schooling, but the shortcomings of the American education system are most devastating for minorities and the poor. Our ability to meet these challenges will determine not only the success of our economy, but our very future as a democracy.

In respect to what he designates as the “critical issue” facing the United States there have been those saying much the same thing since the country’s beginnings. More recently we have been inundated by the cries of “Wolf at the door,” but unlike in the children’s story we go on believing that the wolf is there no matter how many times we see it’s not true.

There was A Nation at Risk in 1983 during Reagan’s presidency. Then there was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and then just this month the Council on Foreign Relations report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security. Why is it that we seem to always be living with presumed school failure putting our country at risk and creating an urgent need to reform our schools?

It is a fact not often and not enough recognized that our educational desires for our children do not correspond to how we as adults live. We go on telling our children, while holding them in school, that certain things are all important, such as reading, writing, the knowledge of history and science etc., and that these things require their full attention or else, but in the way we live we show that for us such things have little or no importance.

How many of us read the great books? take part in one of our species’ great conversations, write? do math and problem solving for enjoyment? share our thoughts and feelings with others? We would have the children do these things in school while we do…what? If there is a critical issue in need of our attention it’s rather that we begin to reform ourselves, and you know how little chance there is of that happening.

In regard to Jeb Bush’s statement that “our students’ math and science achievement lags well behind that of their peers abroad,” I’d ask him, who are these “our students?” He has to be speaking of an average student, an average achievement, the average of the test scores, say, of all our 14 year olds taken together. And just how important is that number? Countries with higher average test scores just don’t have our heterogeneous population, that in itself being, in fact, and in so many ways, hardly a weakness, one of our great strengths.

In any case our country’s growth rate and per capita living standard do not depend on the average test scores of its students in the schools. Rather, if our country still leads the world in regard to so many economic and other wealth indicators, and in fact it does, it’s because “our students,” at least a significant number of them, are extraordinary achievers, and in so many respects, not just test scores, lead their peers from elsewhere.

Moving on I would attribute what Bush calls the shameful high school dropout and low college graduation rates much more to the mistaken efforts by our politicians including Jeb himself, his father and brother, and countless others of our so-called educational leaders, — I would attribute it to their continued insistence that college be within everyone’s reach. Whereas in fact, if it’s a quality education, a real liberal arts education, it’s simply not within everyone’s reach, at least while of school age. (That’s probably why so many of our wisest men speak of life-long learning.)

Furthermore only a relatively small percentage of the available jobs in the country even need anything higher than an 8th. grade education level, certainly not four years of college. Training may very well be needed and appropriate, but not a four year college. Too bad that Bush, Obama, Romney  et al. don’t speak of vocational education, that of which we may be in desperate need.

If there is a critical issue in the paragraph I quote from Jeb Bush it’s that the American school system is devastating for large numbers of our poor and disadvantaged school children, many if not most of these being racial and ethnic minorities living in our inner cities.

He’s right about that. And yes we do need to address this issue, but probably not in the ways that Bush, and earlier brother Bush along with Ted Kennedy, and now Mitt Romney, as well as President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan are suggesting.

We need to address the lives of kids outside of school, where their “real” education is going on. We need to establish and maintain contact with the kids, their families and neighborhoods, with where they are living and actually learning without us. What goes on in school is much less important.

In fact, whatever we might do to them in the schools, in the mistaken idea that the country is at risk because of them, be it to establish common standards, hold their teachers responsible, subject the kids themselves to more and more testing, none of this will change things significantly, undo their up until now failure to learn. The kids themselves will have to realize, sooner or later, that their learning, their positive growth in school and out will depend first and most of all on themselves. Perhaps we can help them with that. Perhaps we can’t. We haven’t really tried.

There are those who, come what may in the way of school drop-out, and school graduate and school failure numbers, would protect the public schools, and especially the image, or idea of the schools as being that which most binds us together, no matter our different ethnic and racial origins, into one truly exceptional people. Altogether something we should hold on to and cherish.

And the defenders of the schools continue to believe in spite of the total lack of evidence that the schools have ever done that, have ever bound us together as one people representing the well informed and responsible citizenry so desired by Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

You may reasonably ask, what’s wrong with that, with people defending the schools against those who would bring them down? Furthermore, you might ask what could possibly take their place? Other than other schools?

And there’s the rub. We do seem to be stuck with our schools the way they are. And we do have the record of a seemingly endless series of reforms that have done little to change them, let alone do away with them entirely.

What’s that expression, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? That activity has to be the story of school reform.

On the Titanic, of course, what should have been done was to abandon the ship entirely before it sank. But in regard to our abandoning the schools we’re no closer to doing that than were the residents on board ship before being struck by an iceberg.

My analogy, of course, breaks down because the Titanic was up until the very end a great ship. Absolutely nothing wrong with it and we can excuse the confidence of those on board. But the schools? They have never run smoothly.

Given their obvious failure to educate, to create that informed citizenry that Jefferson would have, why is it that that they are still doing now what they were doing at the start and have been doing for some 160 years? And why is it that during all that time so little has been done to improve the schools?

Christopher Lasch, in a chapter of his 1995 book, the Revolt of the Elites, tells us that the fault lies still in our belief that “schooling is a cure-all for everything that ails us.”

“Still” because this was the belief of Horace Mann, the founder of our public schools, who established the first “common” or public schools in Massachusetts in the 1840s.

Mann laid it all out, all that the schools should accomplish, and ever since the schools have been laboring under the burden he imposed upon them. Now it wasn’t that his vision was anything other than what we would want for our children.

It was just not possible. The reality was something else and as long as the vision, Mann’s vision or the visions of most of our professional educators since, didn’t square with reality the idealistically conceived common school was going to continually struggle if not collapse when up against that reality.

It is not as if the schools’ defenders do not know this. Just recently, one of the defenders, Diane Ravitch, speaks of three steps that would have to be taken to assure “that every child in the United States has reasonable and realistic access to a truly world class educational opportunity.” In other words, what needed to be done to realize Mann’s vision for the schools.

The first step, she says, would be to find a magic wand and make sure that every child is born into a two-parent family with income sufficient to provide a good, middle-class life.

The second step would be to have a popular culture that supports and reinforces the value of learning and the character traits necessary for success in school.

The third step would be to have a national education policy, one that included national academic standards, a national curriculum, and national testing, etc.

Now Ravitch understands perfectly that the first two steps would never be taken, their needing unobtainable magic wands in both instances. The third step is still one more in that series of reforms, actually one that has been often talked about if never fully enacted.

It doesn’t occur to defenders such as Ravitch that the ship of school is sinking, or rather that it was never fully afloat, that it was wrongly conceived at the start or launch.

Christopher Lasch points out that there is a good deal to be learned from the debates that took place in the formative period of the school system, the 1830s and 1840s:

“…[one cannot] miss the moral fervor and democratic idealism that informed Mann’s program. …  important arguments for education, in Mann’s view, were the “diffusion of useful knowledge,” the promotion of tolerance, the equalization of opportunity, the “augmentation of national resources,” the eradication of poverty, the overcoming of “mental imbecility and torpor,” the encouragement of light and learning in place of “superstition and ignorance,” and the substitution of peaceful methods of governance for coercion and warfare…”

This is what Lasch means by, “schooling is a cure-all for everything that ails us.” And we still hold onto that vision for our schools. We still expect the schools to save us. We still don’t let go in spite of the evidence that the schools have never during the 160 years or more of their existence been anything like a “cure-all for everything that ails us.”

Here is Christopher Lasch’s own conclusion:

“Mann and his contemporaries held that good schools could eradicate crime and juvenile delinquency, do away with poverty, make useful citizens out of “abandoned and outcast children,” and serve as the “great equalizer” between rich and poor.”

“They would have done better to start out with a more modest set of expectations. If there is one lesson we might have been expected to learn in the 150 years since Horace Mann took charge of the schools of Massachusetts, it is that the schools can’t save society. Crime and poverty are still with us, and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen.”

“Meanwhile, our children, even as young adults, don’t know how to read and write. Maybe the time has come if it hasn’t already passed to start all over again.”  

But we don’t know, of course, what it would mean “to start all over again.” And we go on arranging the deck chairs. And the schools are now no less than before assailed by their critics and reformers, and protected by their no less numerous defenders.

The reality of how, and what, and if the kids are learning, doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind.

Does anyone remember the Educate America Act, aka Goals 2000, signed into law on March 31, 1994 by President Bill Clinton? Probably not. Do you remember your New Years Resolutions of that same year? You may be like me and you stopped making such lists when you became an adult and knew yourself well enough to know that whatever you resolved to do on January 1 would be light years away from your actually doing it just one calendar year later.

I summarize the Goals below because they’re still on too many of our wish lists of things we would like to happen. In fact these or something much like them were very much on the minds of two (child-) adults, George Bush and Ted Kennedy, when they, surprisingly together, fashioned the NCLB Law of 2001. And similar goals are still very much a part of the thinking of another two (child-) adults Barack Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan.

“Dear Santa,’ they now might write, “here’s what we’d like for Christmas, and we’ll be very good while waiting for Christmas Day to arrive.”

That (Wikipedia.org):

• All children in America will start school ready to learn.

• The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.

• All students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, the arts, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our nation’s modern economy.

• United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.

• Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

• Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.

• The nation’s teaching force will have access to programs for the continued improvement of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.

• School will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.

Now what’s wrong with doing this sort of thing, making resolutions, wishes, etc.?  Are we hurting anything or anyone by doing so? Well it may be true that we’d like to have goals like these for our own children, for “unless a man’s reach should exceed his grasp…” But, for the country’s schools?

I can’t help but thinking that we might be better off, meaning a bit closer to solving real problems —the fact, for example, and as everyone probably agrees, that our public schools fail large numbers of children and don’t prepare them for skilled jobs and fulfilling lives— if we were to put away childish ways, no longer thinking like children in respect to what schools can and cannot accomplish, if we were to put “Goals 2000″ thinking light years behind us and as adults move on.