reform, 1/18/2013 note

"reform"  

You know, I wish we could rein in this word's use. Charter schools, methods of assessing student, teacher, and school performance---or maintaining a fair distribution of accountability between the "partners" (parents, community, etc...)---these are subsets of the major issue, the concern by many that public education appears to be ailing in its efforts to educate--- ie., in the general sense of the word and in keeping with the depoliticized meaning of the word, reform. There are good and bad ideas. Certainly we are in need of a little experimentation, but not a full commitment to charter schools! And certainly while some partners may be failing to meet expectations we mustn't overcompensate by handing over full control to any one other partner (eg., the business sector). Nor can we simply put full responsibility on parents' or teachers' shoulders. The economy is such that many parents just aren't fully available for their children at home or school, and teachers at the moment are obliged to follow a very compromised system if they want to get paid. So what reforms are we talking about when we say "reformers"? That word seems to have taken on limited connotations that obscure the overall problem. Our educational system has already been hijacked by a vested interest, a partner which has long vied to profit from educating rather than truly aspiring to enlighten the citizens and their children. 

So, how would you define education then... as a race against other nations for dominance in a world economy? --as a training program for employment? --as empowerment of individual and potentially creative or prolific minds?  Where is your allegiance? --with the inheritors of the same established elitism that condemned Socrates to death?  How many centuries do we even have left to get it right?   What ever happened to the western idea of school as the agency of the individual mind? Are we in America headed towards a disdain for the individual aspirations of natural persons while promoting only the supposed rights of corporate personhood?  Which logic are we using to define reform?  --that which provides a stabile and moderate benefit for all, or a strategy that both aggrandizes and enslaves? And where will your children be in fifty years from now? --struggling with tyranny or fecklessly resolved conformity? 

Sustained diversity is my proposition for humanity---whatever reforms we're talking about---just as it would be if we were talking about agriculture (another perverted human endeavor!).

So, for example, as long as teachers are barred from broaching controversial subjects and thereby teaching children how to resolve conflict through compromise, we will have learned nothing as a supposedly evolving-for-the-better species. We need not simply become as the marching millions of insect colonies and lock step our way to a happy leisure for a minuscule few queens? Such absolutisms are not what I call reform but rather are regressive means to preserve a toxic facade of progress!