As an educator with some 15 years experience in public, private, and overseas education, I intend to devote the next several blog entries to the topic with which I am most familiar, with occasional diversions, of course, as the passion of the moment dictates.  This first is meant to be nothing more than a broad reflection.  Future posts will delve into specifics.  You, the reader, are welcome to comment and question and such commentary/inquiry may well dictate the nature of my future postings.

Let me say that with all due respect to my fellow educational professionals, it has been my impression over the years that our educational system is in dire need of a complete overhaul.  Sacred cows must be slaughtered, cherished notions reviewed and often discarded, and major restructuring undertaken.   We must take a clear look at what is wrong, what is right, and engage in open minded discourse without grandstanding and politicizing of this monumentally important to our very democracy issue.  This inability to engage in meanigful discourse, of course, is part and parcel of the problem itself...

Where to begin?

 First of all, let us examine our expectations.  Our country, some regions more than others, has from the very beginning, recognized the importance of educating our populace, not just in order to train folks for employment, but to train citizens to participate in an informed and positive way in our polity.  American education has been a vibrant expression of our ideals and commitment to bettering ourselves and our civlization.  Emerson, in his essay, "The American Scholar", distinguished the role of the learned in our brash young republic from that of our predecesors in the old world, imploring Americans to put their learning to use in the broader world, and to make the world itself their classroom.  This practical, action based philosophy of education is in fact extolled in modern educational theory, though I fear it has been eroded by many beliefs, attitudes, and practices.

OK...time to fling bomb number one...

Democracy...as Churchill quipped, a terribly flawed system of government, but the best we shaved apes have yet to come up with.  But what works well for government does not necessarily apply to all other endeavors.  Take the military... In revolutionary Russia, Bolshevik military units experimented with electing their own officers for a while.  After some embarassing defeats in which popular officers followed the will of their men and did not exactly fight, the process was abandoned.  I once attended a church where the congregation had considerable leverage over who their pastor would be.  It became apparant to me that sometimes an honest man of God must say to his congregation that which they do not want to hear.  As a result, I have come to the belief that democracy does not work too well with religion, either.   I have further come to the conclusion that although a healthy democracy requires a well educated populace, too much democracy is not very good for ensuring a good education...

Lets begin with a little supply and demand, and some nice sounding, sacred ideas.  If the supply of people with certain degrees increases, what happens to the value of those degrees?  The GI bill resulted, in post WWII America, in an ever larger number of Americans with college degrees, which was a very good thing.  We needed more educated folks.  The natural desire to see one's children live better than one, combined with the simple logic that more of a good thing is always desirable, led to increasing numbers of Americans attending college as the post war period continued.  When Vietnam resulted in even more Americans spending longer years in universities, often in humanities fields in order to avoid service, when the idea that education is a right began to take hold, when parents began to expect their children had a birthright to a higher education, something undesirable occured...

 First, as alluded to above, simple supply and demand kicked in.  When huge numbers of people possessed bachelor's degrees, the value of a bachelor's degree decreased.  When, in order to be competitive, many went on to recieve master's degrees, the very fact that this occured...decreased the value of a master's degree.  Now even a doctor's degree is by no means a guarantee of financial well being...supply and demand with all other factors held equal, nothing mysterious.  But not only have more people become more and more educated, but an expectation of having the right to an education, along with an ever growing and self serving education establishment which (self servingly) encouraged the overdemocratizing of education, has led to an abominable dumbing down and therefore further cheapening of all levels of earned degrees, from a basic high school diploma to a doctorate, especially higher level degrees in non mathmatical/scientific fields.

Beyond this consideration, and related to a host of degenerative societal and cultural issues, is the very idea that one has a right to an education at all.  Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe that a functional democracy requires as educated a population as possible and as an educator would dearly love to see our society dedicate itself to providing as high a quality of education as possible to as many of our people as we can, but unfortunately, human nature and reality being what they are, the view that an education is a right to be provided by "someone else" is destructive to the very education desired. 

Broadly speaking, I can identify four factors that impact upon the education of a child.  There is, of course the educational institution itself, the family of the child, society in general, and the person recieving the education.  When education is seen as a right, when a child is viewed as a passive input/output product, when destructive cultural phenomena are ignored, and when parental responsibility is compromised, no educational institution can miraculously churn out highly educated people at the rate we expect and need to stay competitive in this world, much less to even maintain a functional democracy.

For some four decades at least we have been drowning in a sea of sophistic educababble in an attempt to ignore certain obvious, sometimes unpleasant realities related to education.  As much as we love our children, can we truly "leave no child behind"?  Is this realistic?  Can we put the burden of a child's education 100% on the educational institution and realistically expect our educational institutions to perform ALL the educational responsibilities of parents and society as a whole?  Have we sacrificed quality for quantity?  Have we ignored the fact that all are not created equal in terms of ability and aptitude, thereby setting unrealistic expectations and lowering standards to fit our delusions?  Have we refused to take upon ourselves the responsibility to undertake the gigantic task of truly reforming education in favor of slick, sophistic, silver bullet quick fixes conjured up by ivory towered, self justifying educational brahmins, eschewing common sense?

Well, speaking of education, I have some unfinished business to take care of tonight myself.  I look forward to digging deeper and hearing your responses and questions.