The biggest issue lacking regular coverage
With ending the war, affordable healthcare, assessing terrorism threats correctly and wrestling the truth back into the corporate media being the paramount issues du jour, I find the blogosphere is often remiss in providing sufficient coverage of an equally vital issue: providing a quality education to our young.
Our public schools are the longest lasting war fronts in my life experience, as cultural battles have raged in them at least since the mid-fifties Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Racial segregation, classism, gender equality, sexuality, historical revisionism, religious proscriptions, teachers’ compensation and taxcut zealotry have all played a hand in the decimation of a sensible framework upon which our human potential infrastructure is built.
And I missed a recent, important story that Mick Arran covered with great thought and eloquence, the effort to revamp NCLB. As it features one of the greatest advocates for disadvantaged schoolchildren - who’s apparently been on a largely ignored hunger strike since May - I consider Mick’s coverage to be essential reading for anyone who really wants to create progress in a backsliding world.
Take a few minutes to consider it.
For a followup, read what others are saying from schools around the nation.
We have been taking a dysfunctional system and breaking it. We have been creating a new system of educational segregation that will permanently leave many, many children behind.
The toll will be felt most acutely by those further marginalized, but it is also dragging down our society’s understanding and competence as a whole. And just a the priestly classes in ancient times maintained their hold on power by possessing knowledge they claimed the sinful could not comprehend, such a segregated system is designed to create a paternalistic hierarchy that fosters dependence on authority. That way leads to tyranny and authoritarian control instead of fostering the logic and self-determination that must serve as a foundation for a healthy democracy.
October 4th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[…] Kevin has a very thoughtful post on the current state of our children’s education. Now, I largely never like the NCLB act. It placed too much emphasis on testing and not enough emphasis on actual learning. While I’m talking about the children, Jon Swift understands bush’s message to them, you know, just “Grow up!” And if parents don’t happen to live together anymore, beware when religion is used to keep child and parent from communicating together. […]