Scott SoCal said:
Teachers are probably underpaid and undervalued by society as a whole.
But, if I were producing the product that's being produced by public education the LAST thing I would do is demand more money. Public Education has become an abject failure and I sincerely doubt the teachers are at fault... the good ones anyways.
Why do the teachers unions dislike charter schools? Private schools? Voucher systems? Any form of competition? Why do they fight to the death for tenure? Why is is impossible to be rid of poor teachers? Why is not the student the priority?
There are three groups getting screwed the way things are with public education. Teachers, Students and Taxpayers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFN0nf6Hqk0
The education system is just a sham and has gone way past its expiration point thanks to a superficial and materialist neoliberal society that holds anything of intelligence, culture and class with the greatest contempt, because in secret feels inferior and inadequate or else has lost all sense and comprehension of these things. Instead of forcing students to remember facts and events, upon which to construct a critical argument, they are being told that such is superfluous and the result is that they come up with equally superfluous arguments.
Then we have a situation in which the private business sector has muscled its way into the mentality of the school administrations, which is of course nothing surprising, and this has adversely conditioned the relationship between teacher and students. Students are no longer to be treated with rigor, we can't place too high expectations upon them, we can't express a value system that might be construed as "provocative", as this may be earth shattering to them and goes against everything the oligarchy has told them, we can't challenge accepted viewpoints. All because they are paying clients and no longer students who have more right to "assess" their instructors then the teachers have a right to give them an appropriate grade, hence grade inflation is rampant in the system and they, the students, mistake mediocrity for excellence. They don't study, they don't even know what it means to study seriously, they don't take notes because the feel they don't have to or believe it just all goes into their heads after hearing it once. They are always looking for the easy way out. They claim they can't remember names, dates, events, that anything which goes beyond the merely superficial in what they are presented is overwhelming to them. They don't know how to think critically about the world around them and especially about the past, because everything exists in the eternal now, though they are first class consumers. They thus can't make connections between what they have been presented before, with something new. They don't read. They have no sense of culture beyond materialism and the market. They don't have even a basic understanding of the historical forces that have conditioned civilization to the present. They spend more time on face book (at times
in the classroom) than they do on their homework, let alone at serious research. They can be insolent, presumptuous and have a sense of entitlement, because they have been raised with it, that is not in any way justified by what they actually produce and how they think. The liberal arts education is dead, has been murdered by the a-critical, materialist, consumeristic and highly superficial society that conservative America has produced.
I could go on and on, but I will only add that I once taught at a Philadelphia charter high school and it was a complete joke. There was a pompous and incompetent board of directives made up of so called professionals and financiers who more then anyhting liked to pat themselves on the back in an appalling self-congratulatory display of nauseating vanity, types without any pedogogical background who thought that just throwing money into the situation would act as a magical solution to the grave problems of education. Folks who think that money can replace culture and that treating education like any business enterprise would produce sensational results, though education without culture, without a working pedagogical methodology is a complete farce and so this is precisely what they produced. Then there are all these standardized tests and quotas and percentages to aim for, which will then result in more state funding like a salary bonus for reaching selling goals in the corporate world. Students don't have to present, neither orally nor in written form, serious critical analysis of events anymore, their world is governed by statistics, by a mad and senseless statistical analysis of everything, litereally everything.
What a ghastly world of ignorance and stupidity the school board directors have produced! Students can't write anymore, they don't like taking any type of exam for which they have not already been presented the topics and questions to answer, that isn't multiple-choice like some game show quiz.
Private sector education is receiving ever increasing funds from the private business world to indoctrinate the young citizenry, whereas public education is being systematically defrauded and reduced to a feeble system of incompetence, poorly remunerated teachers that are often under qualified and the brainless products of an equally brainless preparation. It is a pedagogical world that has been neutered, in which no one is allowed to have a position about anything but only wish-woshy impartial and worthless analysis that only breeds confusion, ignorance and contempt.
The schools today are the world's largest factories of ignorance and contempt, I've thought.
We need public schools that are taken seriously again, that honor the youth by actually holding students responsible for their learning curve, that actually challenges them to think critically, that presents them with strong positions on both sides of the ideological fence with which they can formulate their own cultural, social, political world views and make them informed citizens. We need to liberate the schools from the mindless stupidity of the business world that has taken them over and which has caused a vast and ghastly superficiality among today's Americans. We need to rattle this society down to its bones to wake it form the induced coma in which the corporations have placed it. We need a strong public school system that's democratically accessible to all social classes irrespective of wealth and earnings and at liberty to educate towards being good citizens first, before being CEOs. Other than the type of inane competition, as if the logic of the market, could replace humanistic culture in the schools. The competition is crap, just as the public system is crap. Everything is crap and can only beget more crap until we gain some sense of what really needs to be
corrected.
The business mentality has taken over every facet of American society, and hence the schools as well, and it has reduced them to this debased state of imbecility which I have so far managed to escape. The school boards are being occupied by business managers and not educators and thus these imbeciles in this imbecility has resulted in the continuous decline of the intellectual conditions. No other country has allowed the private business sector to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by business. And what has it given us? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Larry Page? Yet I can't applaud the fact that we have Steve Jobs but have lost our minds, that we have Larry Page but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Bill Gates but have become more or less brainless and there is no change in site. That we have endless miles of shopping malls, which are only matched by the endless miles of ghettos and slums of our urban decay. This has been underway ever since we have stopped trying to create nice cities, stopped trying to offer good public education, but rather only trying build successful businesses, which is the only success that matters to us. We have built a successful business world but as a society we have become more ignorant, live in brutalized cities and isolating, unstimulating modern suburban housing developments, which are invariably seen as "good" places to raise children! It will be hard, if not impossible, to break free from the business stranglehold, I've thought, as our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the business world and it will take centuries, not decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of business. If they
can be repaired.
Superficial and amateurish revolutions won't do any good, as we have seen from the experiences tried so far.