Discuss: The Schools We Need

Oh…where to begin in response to this fantastic article—with a compliment: it is my anecdotal experience, after sending three daughters through the public school system, that a student is lucky if he or she encounters one shining light of a teacher, and I suspect that there are many students for whom Eric will be that light. Since each of mine had one, I know that its power is unfathomable—one such light can keep a kid sane through high school, help find the student’s true life’s interest, can pass on the wonder and change the world. What if every teacher shone like this?

Thank you for pointing out that education is the foundation of democracy. It seems to me that democracy is built upon a three-legged stool: the right government structure, a robust public education for all potential voters, and the satisfaction of basic human needs (food, shelter, health and security) so that the voters have time to think about things outside of survival. We seem to be losing, rapidly, two of the legs. How long can a stool balance on one leg?

About 9 years ago, I home-schooled my 8th grade daughter. At the same time, I happened to be a local elected official. While I taught my daughter Earth Science at home, I was trying to get some zoning language adopted, which would provide protection of riparian buffers along waterways in our Township—a rather crucial need, then and now. It became apparent to me that many of my constituents did not have the basic knowledge that I was teaching my daughter. These were my friends (mostly, except for the ones who put the dead woodchuck in my driveway and the milkshake in my mailbox), intelligent, likeable people. I remember thinking “I need to start way back at the beginning.” Not to influence them so they’d make the decision I wanted them to make (I do believe in democracy)—but to offer the background needed to make any kind of decision that would come from an informed analysis. Fast-forward to now: just a few months ago, I promoted a voluntary riparian buffer protection program in a neighboring township. After my presentation, one of the officials said “you probably believe in global warming, too, don’t you?”

This is why we need teachers in the trenches. Thank you for this article, which I wish could be written across the sky. I’m not sure that if every University of Kentucky student saw the mountaintop removal, it would end. There are still the woodchuck people. But it might.

This article was so perfectly timed for me in my current thinking about everything.  The ideas you put forth here are the exact reasons that I founded a Science Cafe in my town several years ago, and the reason that I push for well roundedness in my own children.  It’s the reason that we discuss everything from math and science to literature and politics at our dinner table every night.  Thanks for putting this down with such elegant concepts and language!

Great essay!  It’s an important point that many overlook.  Not only does a faulty education system threaten our economy, and our abilities to sustain ourselves, but the very structure of self-governance.  We aren’t being properly equipped to engage in the debate, but worse, we aren’t even aware of our deficiencies, or that there is a debate.

We will be discussing this essay in the next episode of our podcast The Midwest Peace Process.  Thanks for providing some grist for the mill!

The author makes a great connection between the disconnect public ed. corporate “Reformers"have between their reforms and a true educated public. Basically they have no use for a truly educated populace trained in critical thinking with the ability to question authority. These corporate educational reformers simply want what Gatto discusses…a compliant workforce with some profit motive mixed in for good measure.

Unfortunately, the author falls into the corporate reformer trap of ridiculing the teaching profession without thoroughly teasing out the important causes for any perceived problems in the teaching profession.  Corporate reformers want to use all teachers as scapegoats for a system that may be failing thanks in large part because of the public policy their politicians have supported.  After all, these same reformers want to take over higher ed as well as public ed.

Just a correction: Lee Smith isn’t a Kentucky novelist; she was born in Grundy, Va., and now lives in North Carolina.

Very nice essay ! All of it is so very true. We need to take some positive action but the system is so vast where can we even begain ?

Extraordinary essay touching on so many crucially pertinent issues that one reels from the task of addressing the here-in clarified social, political, corporate/capitalist, moral, psychological forces that shape contemporary American education. My father, born in 1898, had only an 8th grade education and was never in his life taken for less than a well-educated man. Times are very different, as we read.
  And there, it seems to me, is the one element not clarified. How can one write well if one does not read? If one’s textual input is Tweets and video games, well then, shallow, unfocused, consumerist/conformist slave mind develops. I have friends who are teachers who will tell you that after years observing the system being “fixed” and dismantled they now believe that is precisely the plan.
  Thank you, sir, for your patient, caring, high-minded and deeply felt analysis. I will share it widely.

This is a great essay, among many over time, that point to the threat and the opportunity.  I appreciate the depth and personality of your analysis. 

We’d love to make use of this article at IDEA - and would love to invite anyone not familiar with our emerging effort to put action to the ideas raised here, to check us out.