As a public school teacher, I beg to differ - at least as far as teachers go; my goal is to teach my students to think; unfortunately, especially under Bush, the goal of the DOE appears to be to create cookie-cutter children who perform well on badly-written standardized assessments.
I am not a fan of our President George W. Bush. He ****ed up a lot of stuff. A lot. Schools and the economy are two things in which he didn't solely **** up. Those are two very important things in which the government merely took something bad and made it worse.
We need to have a frank discussion about the origin of modern schooling. This isn't a partisan discussion. There is no democrat or republican pulling the strings and creating this entire edifice. There IS a particular ideology, though. This ideology is what the people who really run the country beleive.
So, here are some tidbits from a time when the system of public education as we know it, was formulated.
President Woodrow Wilson, "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Benjamin Kidd, a member of the "Education Trust, " a group of foundation representatives from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association, in 1918, said, "school was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination."
Arthur Calhoun’s 1919
Social History of the Family notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts."
Here is John D. Rockefeller himself stating the mission of his Foundation, "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
Not according to the men who dreamed up this system. She doesn't have plans that matter, these men beleived and the people who run our system believe that there is a place in society for this child. They have created it because they know better. You will learn to crush your own dreams and accept one that has been crafted for you.
Here are some quotes from the educational gods teacher's worship. What we (I am a teacher) have failed to understand is that these men are nothing but the mouthpeices for the foundations that back them. See Rockefellar's quote above and proceed.
Dewey’s
Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897 gives you a clue to the zeitgeist: "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven."
Here is the emminent Jaques Ellul on the place of government propaganda in schools, "Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be
collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.
The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion."
All of this should make the hair rise on the back of your neck. Things suddenly start to make sense. The boredom, the constant shifting of subjects, the lack of application, the rote memorization, the humiliation...
School was designed by these men and many others who shared this ideology and that ideology is alive and well today. Everything that is wrong with NCLB legislation is summed up in John D. Rockefellar's mission statement for his foundation in 1911.
The problem isn't funding. Schools are working just EXACTLY as they were designed. The "problem" is that people desperately yearn for more and are looking for scapegoats because they are not getting it in regards to learning. That is what we were taught to do.