American "Education?"

In 1992, the National Council on Education Standards and Testing submitted a report to Congress, the Secretary of Education, and the American People, entitled "Raising Standards For American Education."Among the proposals the committee recommend.Ālist of six National Educational Goals to be reached by the year 2000. These goals are:

-all children will start school ready to learn
-the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%
-students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 demonstrating competency in English mathematics, science history and geography. Schools must also ensure "that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy."
-every adult will be literate and possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy while exercising the responsibilities of citizenship.
-U.S students will be first in the world in science and math.
-Schools will be free of drugs and violence.
"Raising Standards for American Education:A Report to Congress, The Secretary of Education, The National Education Goal's Panel and The American People." Submitted by The National Council on Education Standards, on January 24, 1992 Washington, D.C.

As 1996 draws to a close, the midway point in reaching these objectives has come and passed. If anything, America is further from achieving these goals now, than it was four years ago when it proposed the goals to begin with. And as a student who has just completed an teaching internship at a local Hartford academy of art, I don't know whether I should be laughing, or crying when I consider not just the plausibility of these goals, but rather their (in)conceivability

I wonder what troubles me so much when I consider our "national objectives." After all, I say to myself, they were designed with the best intentions and considerations; those that seek to instill and augment the qualities and attributes that make America the "great nation it is today." So what if they are idealistic and hopelessly detached from the existing realities of America's youth. Should the NCEST be blamed for, "tying too hard," or "striving too high"?

If the problem were merely confined to "the objectives" of these goals, then perhaps their solutions would not be so evasive. The NCEST seems to be operating under so many illusions and misconceptions about the way life in America is run, they somehow expect the education boards of America to be exempt from the societies that constitute them. What do I mean by this? Let us take for example, the question of capitalism. It is disturbing at best to find two of the six goals mentioned above, refer to "productive employment in our modern society." The situation becomes scarier, (not to mention more frustrating) when we read deeper to find the penetration of business into the educational system. In the discussion concerning the teaching of geography, the report shamelessly emphasizes the role of business when it says:

The priority of business is not whether geography is taught as a separate entity, but that students understand practical concepts of geography that are useful knowledge to business.

I was even more shocked to discover the committee's reporting that:

Business should be involved in the process of developing the curriculum from the beginning. Business prefers not to have a blueprint given to it to proof read after it has been developed. Business has been on the "steering committees" in the past; now it wants to be on the "working committees" with the content people and the teachers. Business wants the opportunity to react to (not set) standards at the time standards are being considered.

Like any good business, the objective here is to make money, with the use of "industrially produced" students. It boggles my mind why business is even given a seat at the table when matters of education are considered. But this is precisely one of the problems. Education is conceived of as a business, such that students are engineered to be "productive" and "responsible", without consideration for their education, but rather how marketable they can be made. There is a need to directly question the who or what we are asking our students to be productive for? It certainly isn't for the students themselves. If that were the case, there would seemingly be no limit to the plethora of creative things produced by our public educational system. Instead, we have to set standards to try and keep everybody in school, or we have to try and make sure that all graduating seniors can identify America on a map, and do simple algebra. What is going wrong here?

The educational system has dropped its standards so unbearably low, because it is difficult enough to get students to care about education in the first place. But we cannot go blaming the students, for they are the product of their societies, reflections of our greatest accomplishments, images of our worst defeat. They have become the unfortunate sponges that soak up the parts of our society that we would not like to admit exist. As Paul Goodman relates:

Our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worth-while goals that make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man's work. It is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity....It has no Honor. It has no Community. (Paul Goodman)

What can we expect from a system so destitute in values of fundamental human dignity and worth? I quote the well known linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky at length because he puts into words so well, much of the malaises we suffer from:

"Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which has been accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it's long been understood- very well- that a society which is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world in an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can."

Should we then be surprised to see our youth engage in the self destructive behavior of violence and drugs? Should we be surprised to find the apathy and equanimity so ubiquitous throughout all stratas of education; a symbol of anesthetization, a sign of unwillingness to participate in a community that does not care for them, but only for their productivity. Should we be surprised that students act this way when we find a curriculum void of issues that pertain to their lives, and when we find a teaching faculty selected for their "appropriate" approaches to "authority" and its gallery of insipid and jingoistic icons? Should we be surprised that the quality of students in America gets markedly lower every year, and then in moments of crisis, ridiculous standards are set that "American students will be first internationally in science and math by the year 2000", all in a ludicrous effort to "Stop the backsliding" of our youth?

This is where we are today:

"When you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem. It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what, in more honest days used to be called "propaganda." Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions. Various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion." (Noam Chomsky)

Education has become a vehicle for propagating and propitiating a defunct system that is against the best interests of the majority of those that participate in it. But yet the charade still continues: partly out of the apathy that is generated, partly from the resigning of power into the elitist power structures that contain it, never questioning their propriety, authority, or practices that maintain the ineffectiveness of the system. And here lies the tragedy: We have lost our genius for inventing changes to satisfy crying needs. Our spirit, that curious and extraordinary source of passion and creativity, has been crushed and replaced with plastic devices to contain, desensitize and detach us from the very cores that distinguish us as human.

This understanding has a profound impact upon what the role and future of education should be. The spirit, once popularly conceived to be the playground of the privileged few poets and philosophers who celebrated it, may in fact be the essential domain that preserves our humanity. Cultivation of the spirit is not a luxury of dilettantes but an obligation for self-preservation. This should be the focus of the educational system: to teach children the importance, value and creative potential of the human spirit, and how such a spirit must be balanced and interwoven throughout the fabric of our lives. In fact this is nothing new to the original concept of education. From its lexicographical roots: to educate comes from the latin word educatus, meaning to lead out, or draw forth. The implication here of course is that the teacher is merely drawing out, that which is already inside the student. Unfortunately this subtle meaning of the word has been lost over centuries, and the term "to educate" has rather come to mean, to put in, inculcate, and program. It is precisely this process of putting in rather than drawing out which literally, extinguishes spiritual sparks and passion. The student has no option but to feel alienated and lost, not just because he is surrounded by a society that does not care for his well being, but also because he is separated from himself. Life can only lose meaning for him because all meaning falls in between the valley created between his logical mind and his unrealized spiritual soul. There is no harmony between the two as ideally there should be, and as a result, there is no experience of a harmony of being.