It is Teachers Day in the United States, which many in the profession must find to be rather bitterly ironic. That's a day when it is pretended that the country respects teachers even as they are undercut, under paid, education undermined and the task of educating is made next to impossible. The idiotic Jeffersonian localism that governs schools in the United States results in an ineffective network of local systems, weak and dependent on the income level of the area or neighborhood schools serve, the local culture of support for schools and the extent to which they and their budgets can be turned into a political football by politicians and media in order to put those who would crush the public schools into nonexistence into office. And I could talk about the huge role that football and other school sports play in the diminution of education.
And then there is the political motive in attacking the teachers' unions which sprang up due to the disrespect, lack of support, low pay and bad working conditions. That is in the states where teachers' unions are not banned by law.
But that's not the worst of it. In the United States the stupid, late 18th century model of local school districts has lost out to the national system of entertainment media, movies, television and the internet. The measly few minutes several days in the week that a teacher has to try to teach their subject to students already trained in how to watch TV by the time they start is swamped by all of that other entertainment media, geared to attract eyes and, so, geared to appeal to the most facilely won, least challenging, lowest and basest of the weaknesses in our collective character. And that was something also allowed under the Jeffersonian slogan of "freedom of the press". I have got to say, the more I think hard about why we are in the mess we are, the more I think Madison, Jefferson and the other founders were remarkably short sighted in the system they produced, not to mention we in the quite different 20th century who still like to play late 18th century dress up and doll houses with the Constitution when it couldn't be clearer than that the beliefs and expectations of that generation just don't work today. Sorry, but it's unavoidable that that system is why sit-coms and teen pleasing media wins over public education. There is a reason that the enemies of public education are the biggest fans of our frequently fat-headed founders. If they weren't fat-headed when they lived, their ideas imposed on us like an enlightenment era corset are today.
One of the worst things that has been done is to fall for the confusion that the separation of church and state mandates that the schools have no role in educating children in the moral standards that are the actual bedrock of a democratic or, in fact, any decent society. The idea that that can be safely "left to the parents" means that a dangerously large number of children will grow up to be functional sociopaths if not psychopaths, the roles they are instructed in by the media. Since we make no demands in that area in the media - "freedom of the press" don't ya know - our country devolves ever more into the kind of place where Donald Trump,not by any accident as seen on TV, could quickly be elected as the fascist strong-man of the United States. He will certainly be no friend of public education, he never set foot in one as a student for even one day. Something he has in common with way too many of our politicians. It did nothing to make him respect education or civic responsibility.
So the teachers in our public schools have my respect, they have my sympathy for trying to do a next to impossible job, producing a cohort of children who end up being educated to live in a democratic society in which they will cast informed votes that will produce a better society than that imagined by the worst of Hollywood. And they do it while under attack and while under paid and unsupported and disrespected.
Hillary Clinton, this would be a great day to announce that your Secretary of Education will be someone who is a product of public schools, public universities and who has a stake in the future of public education through their children or grand children. There are certainly many people of that description who could do the job. Though I doubt you'll find them in the higher eschelons of the DC-academic education establishment. I think the history of that department proves that no one less than a stake holder in public education could ever work there. No Democrat should ever appoint a Secretary of Education who is a product of the prep-Ivy equivalent system, ever again. They don't get it.
Though even that would still leave public education to die at the hands of the media that has become the de facto school and church of the majority of people in the United States.
I think I'll go read a Jonathan Kozol book to celebrate. It won't be a pleasant celebration but it will be an appropriate one.
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