We can transform education we just need to work together and stand up and reclaim our voice in education!

Actually, I think you’re channeling Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation, which is a good thing.

This will require more than I think we can bear systemically. In a sense we operate on autopilot.

I propose we “occupy” a small town and make it happen.

There will be no understanding of “what to do” without school if you choose not to go.

Will we recreate an apprentice system for skilled craft labor?

Provide a free public k-12 education to families who want it and stop harrassing families who don’t.

Separate academics from babysitting. As a professional, I’m sure you’d appreciate that. I know I would have when I was in the trenches. You would be expected to deliver content and pedegogy and have the power to remove the disinterested from your class. Whatever their age.

Remove the age restrictions and let citizens of any age take courses as they are offered. Not ready for trig at 17? You might be interested at age 34. And we can afford to pay a qualified professional what she deserves to teach the same course in the morning and again in the evening because we aren’t asking her to do any babysitting.

Remove age restrictions from the bottom too. Need a place for the infant to go while you re-enter the workplace 3 days a week? Here’s a stimulating, safe nursery provided free of charge. Of course, we don’t need a certified teacher to cover this. It is daycare for crying out loud.

Now, what about all these disinterested students who’ve been relieved of their academic tasks by professionals no longer forced to babysit? Again, we are talking about daycare, and we needn’t pay qualified experts to oversee their safe activities while the parents are working (or taking a trig class).

Special needs students (my personal specialty) are still provided least restrictive environment. Provided their behaviors in no way hinder the educational pursuits of the rest.

In this way, parents are forced back into the role of active participant in their children’s education. They will eagerly side with the teachers in their children’s best interest…the teachers are the respected professionals after all. Can you imagine a parent calling out their pediatrician because their kid didn’t like getting a needle? Now imagine a world in which you received the same level of respect.

Teaching positions are sweet fruits over which the best and brightest would compete. Students who are ready for Shakespeare get to consume Shakespeare no matter what their age, and citizens who decide to opt out of the system altogether are free to do so…provided they pay their taxes in support of free education for all.

If it sounds Utopian, it is. It would require the government to trust the governed, including teachers. It would also require the dismantling of teachers’ unions so we could start behaving like the professionals we are instead of like teamsters needing protection — when is the last time you heard of lawyers or engineers striking for wages or benefits?

So, in a nutshell that’s my plan. Not ready for wide publication, though.

You make the illogical leap from ‘not going to school’ to ‘not participating in cultural, social, and commercial activities’. Why is that? Surely people can be trusted to participate in their culture, be curious, and engage in dissent and commerce without compulsory state-run institutions of learning. If I’m not mistaken, our country’s early history is proof of that. A continent full of unschooled colonists were able to not just read, but internalize the writings of Paine, Jefferson and the like. I’m afraid you’d have to find an Exeter alum to do that today.

I suppose not going to school and not participating in cultural, social, and commercial activities would be the way to start. Is this possible?

I understand you to believe that government schools are society’s last holdout against capitalist greed and corporate corruption, while I believe that they exist for the sole purpose of churning out workers for the machine – always have. As the Queen doesn’t need to battle the hive so that bees make more workers, modern corporations don’t need to coerce government schools to mold a workforce trained and tailored to do their bidding.

Contrary to what you write, the education obtained by children in the best private schools is very much needed for them to gain employment…just not the same employment reserved for the rest of us. Choate and Exeter prepare the next generation of corporate and political leaders by offering a rigorous, classical education proven to create clear thinkers who will naturally excel at the best universities and corporate institutions. You will not find this level of academic rigor at any government school, and not because the public is intellectually incapable of working at such lofty levels, but because provision of such an education would be antithetical to the true purpose of government schooling.

To continue the metaphor: The hive can’t stop making workers and start churning out a bunch of Queens, but that’s exactly what we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking over the past 30 years or so. Work hard, pay your money, go to college and you’ll be as prepared for success as every other titan of industry. Then when we’re faced with the reality that leadership roles in any society are limited and that they are often occupied by people far better groomed for the job than we are, we claim that the system is flawed when actually, it’s working perfectly.

So finally, to the function of public schools: Certainly not education, at least not in any classical sense beyond basic literacy and middle-management skill sets. As the workplace and its needs have changed over the century and a half of compulsory schooling (compulsory being an important issue because it means that if you lack the means to provide a private education for your children, you are compelled to surrender them to the state) so have the schools and their curricula. But their function has changed little. They exist to homogenize a heterogeneous population, weaken the influence of family culture, dissuade curiosity and dissent, and provide skills needed to enter the workforce.

The program has been more successful on some points than on others, but I believe its most stunning achievement has been keeping its obvious and clearly documented objectives from the rabble, thus ensuring that we don’t grab our pitchforks and torches.

I’m happy to agree that public education has a history and that history is filled with the ideology of the “governing” class. But we are not ignorant of our world because of a “flawed” system. We’re ignorant because we are all under the rule of that ideology in and out of school. There is no cure for that blindness. Finding ways to live and think and care that are human and that honor and dignify learning as a thing we do to deepen our humanity rather than serve as a labor farm system should be our clearest goal.

But even this flawed system of social management is preferable to a market-based ideology wherein children are only serving and being served within a market dynamic. Schools become like any product then and Tide becomes TidePlus becomes Tide with Fresh Scent and so on.

School is currently a battleground where corporations haven’t yet absorbed it as a market. Of course, we already “lose” to the content industry–textbooks, databases for research aimed at schools, etc., but we have a public place where ANY public can come together and agree on the goals in education, in learning, for their schools.

What’s happening now is that our primarily Republican governors and legislatures are MAKING programs in our states that create a measure of failure and then proclaim they are trying to do what’s best for children by defunding the public systems as a “consequence” of that failure. Then they play the competition card–competing makes you stronger!–but public schools can’t “raise” more money after its removed from their budgets and so our governments weaken our schools to a purpose. This is called “liberty” and “choice” but it’s only in the end “profit”.

First you and I would need to decide on the role of school. Religious institutions have a goal of educating children to become followers of a faith first and anything that follows is somewhat arbitrary.
The best private schools have children that in reality don’t need the education to gain employment after their education, the social strata will already provide for them.

Public education is for what then? We need to redefine work; redefine economic living; redefine progress; redefine human values if we’re going to create a school that has learning as it’s primary goal–learning to deepen or most human attributes. Those attributes are not confined to being corporate fodder for bottom-line consumption.