Employment and Education
Preface
This essay is divided into eight sections, A-H (plus an appendix). These are listed in the Contents, directly below, and can be read sequentially over time. Section H still needs some work, as the summary expected in a "conclusion" has not yet been provided there. The section on educational reforms (that originally followed the untitled introduction) has been moved to an appendix, "Educational Reforms and the War Against Teachers", which has been divided into three sections.
Contents
A) Introduction
B) Employment
C) How Schools Reflect Society
D) School Teachers as Employees--and an Alternative
E) Formal and Informal Education
F) Some Basic Requirements
G) Lifelong Learning--and Learning on the Job
H) Looking Forward--and Conclusion
Appendix I: Educational Reforms and the War Against Teachers
- IA) A Religious Analogy
- IB) Educational Reforms
- IC) The War Against Teachers and Public Schools
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A) Introduction
Despite the title, I will not discuss here the purposes of education, including its role in finding employment. Nor will I delve into the methodologies of formal teaching or the more general aspects of learning. Those are topics I have discussed in other writings and will try to take up again, later. I also will not discuss higher education in the colleges and universities, despite having spent many years in that environment.
I will focus here, instead, mainly on two areas in which I had, later, prolonged direct experience--the public schools in the U.S., and the situations of employees there. However, I will at times venture beyond these narrow domains. In any case, this essay is not a scholarly one, based on a thorough study of the history of the fields of employment and education. Scholars will surely find the discussion here to be inadequate in that regard. It is based mainly on my own experiences in these areas, during my close to three decades of working as a schoolteacher in New York City.
The opinions expressed here are my own and are tentative. They are of course biased--because of my particular life experiences. No doubt, others will have different points of view. In human matters, there are few absolute truths. The full reality has many aspects. We each are limited by our perspectives on this. By sharing our views, we may be able to comprehend that full reality a bit better.
At this stage of my life, I do not expect I will live to see any major changes for the better in the public schools here or in the wider world. Nonetheless, it seems that I should make some effort to spread around, at least to a few people, whatever insights I gained from my labors in the schools, hoping that I might at least plant a few seeds that will influence things in the future, however marginally.
B ) Employment
In the past, I had expressed my views and listed my positive suggestions about educational reform. The discussion here on that topic has now been moved to an appendix.
Moving away from that seemingly perennial circus, I would like to draw attention now to two larger questions that are probably very pertinent to the educational reform business.
1) When will we move towards doing away with the roles of employers and employees?
2) Should our formal education still be mainly geared towards making us efficient members of these two groups--the first a very small fraction of the second in numbers, but containing an even tinier fraction whose wealth and power greatly exceeds that of the rest of humanity ?
These are two separate, though related, questions.
Regarding the first, those whom fortune or effort have spared from being either employers or employees may perhaps feel that their lives prove that this question has already been answered: This movement has already occurred.
And those who have been relatively untroubled or satisfied or even highly content in these roles may think that such a question is absurd. To these I ask: how many of the billions of humans currently on this planet are in your fortunate positions?
Regarding the second question, many may again rightfully object to such a question being even asked. If formal education fails to equip students with the skills needed to survive in our current environment, is it not doing them a great disservice?
I understand the reason for this question and empathize with those who ask it. In our current situation, such training, oriented towards securing employment or otherwise surviving economically and so also physically, surely needs to be part of formal schooling.
Two further questions arise, however.
a) Those who look towards an ever more rapidly changing job situation in the future, as job skills quickly become outdated, may ask how such a preparation is even possible any more. Surely, the employment-oriented training can no longer be purely job-specific, at the school or even after-school stages, but needs to be far more flexible and general, giving students the skills to adapt to this situation of constant flux in the job market.
b) But for me, there is an even more important question, which I will return to in the section on lifelong learning and learning on the job.
And it is this: why should we accept what is purely man-made as inevitable, even when it is clearly not something that promotes human happiness, but rather guarantees ever increasing misery, in multiple ways?
What humans have wrought, collectively, can we not also change, collectively? Should we be content to be as the fabled lemmings are, unable to halt our stampede towards annihilation? Are there no alternatives to this insanity?
This employer-employee situation is a relatively new one in our evolutionary history. It did not exist for most of our very long prehistory as humans. It only commenced, after the advent of intensive, settled, grain and tuber agriculture, with the brigandry and extortion that led to the creation of the landlord hierarchies and the empires.
However, the employment trap did not directly snare most of us until about two and a half centuries ago, with the spreading of this device or instrument of servitude beginning in earnest with the commencement of the industrial revolution.
Even if we count peasants as employees of landlords, this employer-employee system dates back at most to a few thousand years--and for many of us to just a few centuries.
But this would still be a stretch, as the whole landowning hierarchy, all the way to the emperors, operated more like a huge protection racket, with the actual producers of wealth--the peasants working in the fields--being largely left alone--except at the tax collection times, usually following harvests.
The current, much more closely supervised and dependent relation most of us are now in, as employees, only became widespread over the last two centuries. It has captured most of us (such as those living in China and India) only over the course of far less than a century.
This occurred as wealth, followed by what had become labor, drained from the rural villages to the cities--and from these to the global hubs of finance (which were earlier also the centers of colonial empire).
Of course, earlier, the thugs, tax collectors, soldiers, sailors, servants, construction workers, artisans and others, who had depended on pay from the rural landlords and their masters, or from the big traders, had become employees, to various degrees. But these were still only a small fraction of the population.
I am of course skipping over the sordid, murderous and very economically significant history of physical slavery of various kinds--a history that has still not ended.
Let me end this section with this question, a difficult one that will have to be answered. If indeed we want to do away with the employer-employee paradigm that has arisen fairly recently in our cultural history, what should we replace it with?
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C) How Schools Reflect Society
The assignments of numerical scores and rankings to students can be traced in part to the needs of industry and commerce and in part to the needs of government--perhaps most clearly seen, in the past, in the civil service examinations of the Chinese empire.
The emphasis on speed (and, more generally, "efficiency") can be traced directly to the needs of the factories. The mass production systems of the factories were reflected in the formal schools.
These schools had roots in religious schooling for priests and monks, on the one hand, and in the training needed to get the skills and time-discipline needed to be efficient workers in the factories and in business and government offices, on the other.
The schools for military training also contributed to what emerged later as the model for most of our schools today, the world over.
So we see that the schools have reflected the societies in which they were instituted. It seems to me that those who wish to better the situations of students and teachers in the schools need to bear this fact in mind, while not allowing that to detract from paying attention also to the practical details of the many mundane tasks the schools have been charged with.
There is a tendency, even within the schools, to use the state of society and the weight of our troubled economic and social history as excuses for not addressing these practical details that affect, firstly, the learning and so also the lives of students, and, secondly, the work and morale of those who are trying to teach in the schools.
The reason that the situation in many of our schools is an impossible one is in part because the pathologies prevalent in society enter into the schools and in part because little heed has been paid by those with grand visions to the basic, practical needs of the schools.
I am not talking here merely about the physical resources or the student to teacher ratios, important as these are. I would like to emphasize more the basic, commonsense environment and attitude needed for teaching and learning to proceed.
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D) School Teachers as Employees--and an Alternative
Part of this analysis involves examining the hierarchical structure and the lack of feedback and correction mechanisms that tend to prevail in large institutions, with factory-type production plants. These are based, of course, mainly on the employer-employee relationship, operating in a top-down manner, with managerial or supervisory layers that typically function, among other things, as one-way valves.
Paycheck-and-benefits dependent employees, much like soldiers, are expected to follow directives and orders, no matter how stupid or even lethal, with little room for questioning, feedback and correction.
We might do well by restoring a little bit of respect for teachers, students and parents, rather than treating them as fools.
More generally, what could eventually replace the employer-employee duality that has increasingly plagued us for the last few centuries, with its inherent inequities?
I have no simple answer to this question.
Some may point to the cooperative model. In the case of the schools and colleges, one can envision cooperative enterprises run by educators.
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E) Formal and Informal Education
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A Clarification of Terms Used
Deviating from usual practice, we will often use the words "learning" and "education" interchangeably.
We will, however, try to distinguish between the following two sets of terms:
1) "formal learning/schooling/education";
2) "informal learning/education".
We will use the first set of terms to refer to learning in a structured environment, usually with designated teachers either present or else playing some active or background role.
Regarding our use of the latter set of terms and the relation between the two sets, let us reproduce here some text from Appendix IB (Educational Reforms).
"Until fairly recently, formal schooling was seen as no more than a topping on the far more important informal education that we all received, via family and community.
This included the acquisition of our first language and our first ethical and philosophical framework, as well as all the acquired physical, mental and social skills needed to survive as members of a social species."
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Those looking at the potential of modern information processing and communication technology, and the advents of AI and machine learning, may have their own answers to some of the questions raised here--or may dismiss most of this discussion as hopelessly outdated.
Some may see the emphasis shifting to students being more active, self-directed learners who utilize educational resources, both those available online and those available in the schools, including teachers.
This sounds good in principle. Does this not reflect how informal learning has always proceeded, including in the acquisition of the first or even second languages?
In practice, we run into difficulties. Humans have their specialized disciplines--those of the priests, scholars, scientists, artisans, artists, engineers, doctors, surgeons and more.
There were reasons why schools were set up to teach Sanskrit, Hebrew, Latin, Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Chinese ideographic writing and more. There were reasons for the military academies. There were reasons for the long apprenticeships in the crafts and arts--including in classical music, dance and the martial arts. These preceded the factory schools--which also had their purposes.
There is a level of understanding and basic proficiency that can be reached by the serial reading and working out of exercises in the chapters of a well written physics textbook--be it on paper or on-line--with help when needed from a caring human being proficient in the subject. This level cannot so easily be attained via bits and pieces read or watched via rapid, self-directed or casually assigned searches on the Internet--however useful these may be at a later stage.
So it is not so simple. Formal education has its place alongside informal education, and formal education has certain commonsense requirements that need to be met. I will discuss some of these in the next section.
Informal learning is in fact even more important, especially in the early years. Formal education is built on informal education and cannot proceed without this as its base. It is merely the icing on the cake.
Yet this essential, early, informal learning, long mainly the province of the family and community, has been disrupted by the increasing demands of employment and by the atomization of our communities.
The Internet, including social media, cannot be a replacement for this. By design, these new media are both far too distracting to allow for quiet, sustained focus, and far too addictive. Too often, they isolate us even further from our immediate environment--that of humans, other species and the land, water and air around us.
This is the local environment of laughter and tears, of hide-and-seek, hopscotch and kite-flying, of singing and dancing, of learning to cook and clean, of assisting a sibling or a grandparent, of listening to stories from aunts and other elders, of watching the ways of the wild things and tending to the domestic beasts, of climbing trees, scenting leaves and tasting plucked fruits, of seeing the dawn, the sunset and the myriad stars of night…
Many of these things, which children enjoyed and learned from over the ages, are now no longer available to them in the cities, in which more and more of us live very isolated lives.
F) Some Basic Requirements
As a teacher with many years in the classroom, I will try to list, but not elaborate on, some old fashioned, commonsense basics that would make teaching and learning in the schools much less stressful and much more likely to be successful.
These do not require huge expenditures, new technology (which is always welcome as a supplement) or any great retraining of teachers.
Learning and creativity take place most readily in a state of relaxed attention, free of distractions and stress. Sadly, for a number of reasons, this ideal situation is a rarity in too many of our schools and homes. We need to publicly acknowledge this and then work to address this.
In a good environment, the human interactions, including the spontaneous births of humor and affection, make the work of learning and teaching much more enjoyable.
For most of us, the learning of subjects such as Calculus, Chemistry or Carpentry (or C.A.D., if you object to the learning of the third craft--ancient but still practical) needs, ideally:
- motivation or purpose;
- physical resources;
- sequence
- time and pacing;
- focus;
- diligence;
- questioning and exploration/play;
- feedback and correction;
- comprehension in various ways;
- small successes and satisfactions;
- persistence and practice, leading to familiarization and habituation;
- application, connection and creative extension.
These things, combined, help make what has been learned part of our seeing, functioning and being.
In practice, we may have to be content with forgoing quite a few of these. However, for each thing that is lost, there is a great price to be paid.
In many of these things, the guidance of a subject-proficient, caring human--a teacher--is a great help.
The mutual attention and respect that is needed for sustained, satisfactory human interactions should also preferably be present between students and teachers, as also between students and between teachers and others.
What I have listed above should be taken merely as the suggestions, born from experience and reflection, of a sincere, humble practitioner, necessarily limited by his own education and experience. I would hope other teachers would also offer theirs.
Each of the topics listed above does need to be discussed in detail. However, I will not attempt any further elaboration on these topics here. I had done that repeatedly, while still teaching, long ago, without achieving much traction. Let me just note here that many of these elementary yet vital things have been badly neglected over the decades. They really need to be attended to.
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G) Lifelong Learning--and Learning on the Job
Humans, even more than most child-rearing social mammals and birds, are, by evolutionary nature, very good at learning and teaching. We may be a pioneer species in our rate of cultural innovation and diversification. This has, in our case, greatly outstripped the rate of biological evolution. This has worked to our advantage but has also placed us under increasing stress.
We are now constantly told that we must be lifelong learners. We always were so, but this was not by demand, but rather by inclination. We enjoy learning. However, learning under pressure can be very stressful. We are much more relaxed and effective doing things with which we are familiar than when doing things which are novel—especially if these are complex.
In the not so distant past, formal schooling, if it at all existed, was a relatively brief affair. Nowadays, here in the U.S., 13 years in the schools, K-12, may still not be enough. Further formal schooling must often be completed before one can get a suitable job—or otherwise sustain oneself and one’s family. So one can easily spend a good or even major fraction of one’s life in the schools and either the colleges or the training and certification programs—and still not be done.
This writer's spouse returned to college in her mid 60's, while still working at her full time job. She cannot quit the job to be a full-time student, owing to certain mundane but vital considerations--such as income, health benefits for herself and her family, and her future pension and social security incomes. So she still has several years of college left to complete, building upon the years she had spent, while also working full time, in her youth. Such things, if purely voluntary, would be a cause for celebration. Too often, however, they are not.
The amount of material one has to learn keeps increasing in quantity and complexity. One is also expected to learn much of this at an unnaturally rapid rate.
Again, in that not so distant past, after a certain period of apprenticeship, one could be a skilled worker or professional, utilizing—and hopefully perfecting and extending—what one had learned during that apprenticeship.
Alas! Those days are gone forever. Our jobs are increasingly outsourced, off-shored and automated, as employers seek to reduce costs and increase productivity, so as to increase or maintain profits—or just stay in business, as competitors do the same. Those of us who still have jobs often have to do far more work, for the same or even lower pay, under even more stressful conditions, with less job security. They also have to adapt to continually changing demands, and to keep pace, especially, with constantly changing technology. Those who cannot do this often lose their main or only source of income.
It is one thing to learn for the love of learning, to hone a practiced set of skills or to extend these, or to be creative with those skills. It is quite another thing to be reduced to a perpetual novice, struggling to comprehend and become proficient in things that have been conjured up by distant teams of engineers and marketers. Too often, these are seemingly magical black boxes, neither transparent in their workings nor locally reproducible from scratch.
If Arjuna, so skilled as an archer, were told that he must set aside his bows and arrows, which to him had become extensions of his limbs, and were forced to then take up musketry, only to be told, a year later, that he must abandon this and compete with the young laser men, we might well imagine his chagrin. How much more difficult then, it must be for an engineer, in middle age, to “retool” as a lawyer, or something equally remote from his field of expertise.
As wealth drained from the villages to the growing cities, many of our ancestors left their villages to seek sustenance in those cities—or even in faraway, foreign countries. In doing so, most of them fell into the trap of employment. Nonetheless, they must have been relieved that they had escaped from having to beg to survive.
It seems that we are now being finally released from that trap! But we are being released unwillingly, as our learned skills, acquired through our education and experience, become outdated. Just like the mill-workers and peasants of the past, we are being replaced, more and more, by machines that are not only able to produce, without rest, much faster than we can, but are also, in certain ways, much smarter than we can ever hope to be.
We have here to ask ourselves a basic question, which can be formulated in various ways. Are constant innovation and new technologies truly requirements for human happiness and survival—or are they threats to both of these? Are we born simply to race to serve the demands of Mammon, amplified by the wizardry of men and machines—or can we choose to opt out of that race and that service? Are we meant to be slaves to the power of wealth and technology, or can we still be free?
If one has answered that question differently from what appears to be implicit in our collective behavior, then we have next to ask ourselves how we can work, individually as well as collectively, to escape this enslavement and the catastrophes that it leads to, to find again our freedom and ensure the survival of our species, along with the myriad others still left on this planet.
H) Looking Forward--and Conclusion
The Marxists, anarchists, feminists, primalists and others may have their own takes on the issues I have discussed here, as may the U.S. libertarians, the enthusiasts of free markets and of globalizing capitalism, etc.
However, surely the opinions of students, teachers and parents--the ones affected most directly by educational policies--should be important inputs in the formulation of policies on education and also at all times during the implementation of these policies.
I would like to reiterate that, from the point of view of our human evolutionary history (not only biological but also cultural), both the employer-employee duality and the formal schools are very, very recent developments. To a lesser degree, so is the formalized teacher-student duality.
All of these things may dissolve in part and be retained in part. What occurs will not be by divine decree or by the inevitable workings of natural laws. Nor will the shape of things to come be determined solely by the seemingly almost unstoppable, combined force of industry, commerce and finance, limited only by the constraints of a collapsing biosphere, catastrophic wars and social chaos--unless we allow the first of these to be the main determinant of our future and accept the other three disasters as inevitable corollaries.
To prevent these disasters and to move collectively towards a saner society, we need to question some of the basics of the growth-oriented economic system, which has provided many of us with an increasingly wider range of cheaper goods and services, but at great costs to humans, other species and the physical environment.
In particular, we need to question the need for ever increasing rates of consumption and production, and we need also to try and regain a greater measure of local and economic self sufficiency. All of this means going against and reversing the tide.
This is fine as an academic exercise, but is perilous in practice, given the great momentum of the global economic juggernaut and the complex entanglements that governments, corporations, communities and individuals are caught in.
Arjun Janah
2018 October 18
Brooklyn, New York
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Appendix I) Educational Reforms and the War Against Teachers
As a former high school science teacher, I look with some skepticism at the directions in which basic formal education, which has always had its strengths and weaknesses, is headed.
Surely, many changes in the schools, instituted over the years, have been beneficial for the students in those schools. However, too many have either distracted from the work at hand or have actively harmed far more than they have helped.
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IA) An Analogy with Religion
Analogies have their uses and their limitations. I will resort to one here, apologizing in advance for any slighting I might seem to give to various religions or other creeds that readers may have allegiance to.
Let me say that (almost) all of the creeds mentioned below have had their clearly benevolent or beneficial aspects, as evident historically. Unfortunately, all of them have also had clearly malevolent aspects. I will not discuss the helpful aspects here, but I will touch upon the harmful ones.
It is almost as difficult and perilous for a teacher, even a retired one, to argue against the adverse effects, on students and teachers in the classrooms, of many of the educational reforms that have swept through the schools, as it once was for a formerly tribal person in India to argue against the caste system that had been imposed upon him or her by the advance of Hindu-Aryanism, or for a "pagan", "heathen" or "kafir", converted under duress to Christianity or Islam, to argue against the precepts of those Judaic religions.
The oppressions in both these cases were both physical and psychological.
Setting aside the physical violence and intimidation that usually accompanies subjugations and forced (rather than free) conversions, let us turn to the psychological conditioning.
The Hinduized tribals, absorbed as a menial caste of low social status, became convinced, over generations, of the superiority of the "higher" castes, being content if they could find yet "lower" castes to spit upon in turn.
They had been successfully infected with a "virus of verticality", as it were, and were now active agents of its propagation, ensuring its persistence--and so also the stability of the caste system, the dominance of those at the top, who benefited most from it, and the misery, yet acquiescence, of those at the bottom, who suffered the most.
So also, those converted to Christianity and Islam, freely or by force, became pious and dutiful sons and daughters of Abraham, assured that their ancestors had been under the spells of evil witches and wizards who were in league with an even more evil Satan. So these were seen to have deserved the grisly or fiery fates they had been assigned to by the piety of the enlightened conquerors and/or converters.
These converts too had acquired a virus--that of doctrinal intolerance, with their one superior and highly insecure patriarchal god (who brooked no others) and his purported doctrine (from which there could also be no deviation). Blasphemy and heresy were now the weapons by which the zealots among the converts bludgeoned and dispatched any resistance to this virus.
We see the same conditioning imposed in the name of patriarchy, European colonial rule, fascism, communism, free market and globalizing capitalism, scientific rationalism and materialism, etc.
Past beliefs and practices, along with the believers and practitioners, are demonized and systematically eradicated. There is no provision, usually, for diversity of opinion or practice. This is much more so in the monotheistic faiths and their later political and economic counterparts. Of course, the degree to which this occurs can be moderated or intensified by various factors.
This is also what occurs in the schools, in the name of both established educational practices and in the name of educational reforms.
Many teachers in the schools may privately voice concerns about the directives already long extant or being newly issued in the schools.
Some may be concerned about how things are. However, by adaptation, most teachers have ceased to question that, however irrational or unjust certain things may appear to a newcomer.
Many more may be perturbed about major changes--both because of the discomfiture caused by any change from accustomed routines and practices and because things novel in this way are often looked at more critically--making their flaws more evident.
But most teachers are leery of publicly voicing these concerns, in venues such as school-wide faculty meetings--and even in department meetings.
This can surely be traced in large part to their being employees, who do not want to irk their bosses, and in remaining parts either to apathy, to the herd mentality or wanting to be a "team player".
But there is more.
Practicing teachers are rarely equipped with the tools to argue against the dictates that are handed down to them through their supervisors, and even less with the theoretical grounds for these, which often originate in academia.
The teachers' muted protests are at times shot down by some of their own colleagues, who have expeditiously versed themselves in the latest academic or pseudo-academic verbiage that is flooding the schools and have also adopted the accompanying rationales, without truly questioning the assumptions on which they are based or their ranges of validity.
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I will not venture here to argue on the specifics of each reform. At the risk of seeming far too vague, I will not try to substantiate the charges I make in this section with anecdotes, examples or numerical data. Instead, I will only outline here the general situation regarding K-12 educational reforms in this country, as I see it.
At the end of the previous sub-section (An Analogy with Religion) I had pointed out that teachers face certain barriers to public discourse on education. I had explained how these obstructions are set not only by employment but also by psychological conditioning and intimidation. I hope that, by having done this, I have helped set the stage for other teachers who read this to breach those barriers and supply their own particulars. I believe that they can do this in legion.
This is not to say that all of the attempted reforms of K-12 education in this country (the U.S.) have been ill-intentioned or without merit. Some reforms have been based on valid, useful ideas. However, by turning certain good ideas, with some limited utility, into general doctrines or dogmas, the reformers often made these potentially good ideas into very bad ones.
The underlying problem has usually been that these attempts at educational reform lacked in perspective and tolerance what they had in claimed innovation (too often, recycled and repackaged pablum) and in hubris.
As a result, more often than not, the babies were thrown out with the bathwater.
In this regard, these waves of reforms have indeed been like the highly destructive advances of the great proselytizing religions, once these had become organized and had obtained the backings of the kings and emperors.
Until fairly recently, formal schooling was seen as no more than a topping on the far more important informal education that we all received, via family and community.
This included the acquisition of our first language and our first ethical and philosophical framework, as well as all the acquired physical, mental and social skills needed to survive as members of a social species.
We have seen many attempts to reform formal schooling, based on varying ideas of what it should or should not be. Almost invariably, these have been imposed on the schools, and so also on students and teachers, in a top-down fashion.
There has been little provision for input from students, classroom teachers and parents in the formulation of educational policies. Nor has there been much provision for feedback and modification/correction, from these most-affected parties, in the implementation and practice of these policies.
In this regard, this has been as if the occupants in a vehicle had no choice in setting its destination, and were also assigned drivers who were simply given orders and were then fitted with blindfolds and earplugs. It is little wonder, then, that there were repeated crashes, even lethal ones.
Sadly, but perhaps predictably, these disasters were usually addressed, if at all, by yet more "reforms" of the same type. Too often, the truly vital issues and hard problems were not publicly acknowledged, let alone effectively addressed. Precious time and energy were diverted, instead, into issues far less vital.
The old, underlying problems continued to fester, as newer layers of problems were created and overlaid on top of these. So the confusion, chaos and dysfunction were further compounded. This in turn was used to justify further accusations made by both the political right and left against the public schools and to call for yet more educational and structural reforms (including privatization) to further their agendas.
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IC) The War Against Teachers and Public Schools
There is a place for standardized examinations and for evaluations of teachers. It is far more important, however, to provide help and support, as needed and asked for, to both students and teachers. They also need to be left in peace to do their respective jobs, which are far from easy.
This misguided emphasis on testing of students and evaluations of teachers have helped kill much of what remained of the enjoyment of teaching and learning in the schools. Sincere students have been put under unnecessary, debilitating stress. Sincere teachers, often also under such stress, have been increasingly robbed of whatever independence they had, being deprived also of the chance to develop and practice their individual teaching styles.
This is a repeat of what happened to artisans, with the advent of the factories.
At that time and repeatedly after that, there had been financial considerations driving the changes. So also, the destruction of the teaching profession (already underway through things such as the misapplication of precepts lifted from educational psychology) has been greatly accelerated by financial forces.
In the U.S., "school reforms" are being used to drive out the teachers with seniority, with these being replaced by those who cost less. In the "right to work" states, unionized teachers have been replaced by others. This is, of course, part of a wider, anti-labor agenda.
This is playing out in different ways in the Republican and Democratic states. In some Republican states, the teachers' unions have basically been busted. In some areas, the public schools have effectively been privatized. Throughout the country, the drive for privatization, led by the Republicans, has taken over the charter school movement. This has also received active support from many Democratic politicians at the federal and state levels.
Meanwhile, the longstanding and still remnant strengths and successes of the public schools have been ignored or dismissed.
These continuing strengths and successes have been truly remarkable, given the continuing deterioration in the working conditions in the public schools. They have been based mainly on the focused labor, perseverance and humanity of sincere students and teachers, often working in very difficult conditions.
If one has served as a school teacher in a typical urban public school for a while, the chances are that one has learned, perforce, the virtues and perils of humility. Sadly, this quality has been too often lacking in those who criticize the public schools or push for doctrinaire reforms, without bothering to directly experience and so to better understand the realities that exist in these schools and in the surrounding society.
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