Thursday, December 14, 2006

Another Voice in the Chorus

Some of you may have noticed that the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued its report today. I've been trying to find a link to the actual report, but you can find a summary of the findings here and a link to an executive summary of the report in PDF format here. Before I go any farther, let me be clear: I agree that our education system needs reform. Until I got to college, I was largely self-educated, and it is my strong belief that the public education system in this country failed me in every way possible. Where I get off the reform bus is where all the politicians seem to want to get on.

Among the various findings of the commission are booya ideas like raising teacher pay (well played), ending formal education in tenth grade to allow students to continue on in their own way (I'm still on the fence about that one; I need to know more), and this outrageous, foolish, and absurd finding:
Another major shift would be to have independent contractors operate schools,
though the schools would remain public.
Are you kidding me? Why does everybody want to believe that the answer to making education in America better is to make it more like business? And independent contractors... well, I suppose that's a fair change to make. The independent contractors we have working for us in Iraq are certainly paragons of trust and good, non-corrupt work. Yikes.

Here's my point of view on this issue: the schools need reform, there is no doubt about it. But re-orienting them so that they create better workers is not the answer. The problem with public education in this country has always been that it favored industry too heavily. If you question that truth, check out the essays of my favorite educational theorist (and New York teacher of the year) John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto's conclusion is essentially that in order to educate our children, we need to get them out of the schools. He favors homeschooling, which is something I most definitely oppose for no other reason than that most homeschooling is done by parents who can barely dress themselves, much less instruct their children in the particulars of chemistry. But I agree with Gatto inasmuch as he thinks that American education is essentially worthless. The problem with our system -- and the system that educates the teachers, which is a problem for another post -- is that it creates workers instead of thinkers.

Education should not be about creating anything other than complete adults. Complete adults necessarily are good workers and good citizens; workers are not necessarily those things. Education should be about disciplining the mind, about learning how to learn, about developing critical thinking skills and the ability to question the world around you. We pay lip service to this idea in American education by requiring, among other things, foreign language study. I say lip service, because the justification for the study of foreign languages -- especially Spanish and especially here in the Pacific Time Zone -- is primarily to enable students to communicate in a business context.

The report makes a number of other interesting recommendations, and I will most likely be providing commentary on them presently as I delve further into the findings of the commission over the next few days. But as far as initial reactions go, this panel's contribution to the conversation seems pretty standard: they have identified some key problems but have made recommendations that are either exceptionally unlikely to be implemented or are not nearly forward-thinking enough.

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