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unhinged
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'this business we call 'education' - when we mean 'schooling' - makes an interesting example of network values in conflict with traditional community values. for once hundred and fifty years, institutional education has seen fit to offer as its main purpose the preparation for economic success. good education = good job, good money, good things. this has become the universal national banner, hoisted by harvards as well as high schools. this prescription makes both parent and student easier to regulate and intimidate as long as the connection goes unchallenged either for its veracity or in its philosophical truth. interestingly enough, the american federation of teachers identifies one of its missions as persuading the business community to hire and promote on the basis of school grades so that the grades = money formula will obtain, just as it was made to obtain for medicine and law after years of political lobbying. so far, the common sense of businesspeople has kept them hiring and promoting the old_fashioned way, using performance and private judgement as the preferred measures, but they may not resist much longer.
the absurdity of defining education as an economic good becomes clear if we ask ourselves what is gained by perceiving education as a way to enhance even further the runaway consumption that threatens the earth, the air, and the water of our planet? should we continue to teach people that they can buy happiness in the face of a tidal wave of evidence that they cannot? shall we ignore the evidence that drug addiction, alcoholism, teenage suicide, divorce, and other despairs are pathologies of the prosperous much more than they are of the poor?...
why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? surely not so a few of them can get rich? even if it worked that way, and i doubt that it does, why wouldn't any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? it divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally degrading them, identifying them as 'low-class' material. and the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! i don't believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. i can't help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. i have enough faith in american imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we'd come up with a better way - in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.' - john taylor gatto
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180501
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