HOW EDUCATION IS DEGRADING OUR CHILDREN

Millions of Americans have been persuaded rhetoric that the purpose of education is to prepare our children to score well on standardized tests so that we can have more well-trained workers. As the standardsmovement gets stronger, we convince ourselves that being a useful employee is the only key to a happy and successful life. Rather than nurturing a sense of wonder and a passion for learning, our schools are increasingly devoted to standardizing knowledge into lists of data, telling students what is appropriate for them to know and think, and then 'scientifically' measuring how well they regurgitate this data on assessment tests. What is truly important in human life consists precisely of those things which cannot be measured; love, decency, joy, all the great virtues and passions. This is what the education of a human being should be about. But America no longer seeks to educate thinking, feeling, human beings. We seek to educate servants. The new rallying cries are 'Raising Standards' and 'No Child Left Behind',which we all know are just euphemisms for job training.

All of this is just a prescription for an efficient human ant hill. And it is worth remembering that in the ant hill an individual life does not count for much. There are always plenty of replacements who can do the same job.

The corporate world gets involved in education, worried that their businesses will not be able to compete in the global economy if the workers being produced by our schools are inferior. They then insist that schools should be run like any other enterprise in a competitive marketplace, and the rules of quality control, managerial efficiency, and good marketing technique, should be applied in exactly the same way. Thus, we need (1) a common set of standardsfor the end-product, (2) a scientific test for measuring how well the students and schools are meeting these standards, and (3) an advertising campaign to convince the public that a meaningful education of their children means getting them to score well on these tests. This latter is easily achieved by appealing to parents' worries about the financial future, and then ceaselessly sending them the message that our schools are in a 'crisis'.

But the economic system is not floundering because of badly performing schools. The American economy rises and falls, as it does in every nation and in every era, in response to numerous and profound market and social forces that bear no relation at all to the day-to-day functioning of our educational system. Meanwhile, the insistence on greater 'accountability' of schools does not lead to greater achievement by our students. It leads to greater stress, fear, and alienation, it leads to a dumbing-down of curricula, it leads to pain and stigmatization for many children who do not do well on standardized tests regardless of their intelligence or their classroom efforts, and it helps to deepen the rifts between diverse and antagonistic elements of society.

This certainly does not mean that there is no room for improvement in the school system. But narrowing our vision and stultifying our minds is not a very admirable reform, and it is merely degrading and destructive to base our educational system on an orthodox corporate model, treating our children as nothing more than future workers and consumers who are to be counted, measured, and evaluated.