Remedial Education
Over the past week, there’s been some discussion here in the comments about education policy, and a few people have asked me, publicly and privately, where I stand on the issue. To be honest, and you won’t hear me say this much, I don’t really have a strong opinion. Education is an important issue, but I don’t have kids, I’m not a teacher or a student, and have no contact with the educational establishment in any aspect of my life, beyond a few members of my family and a couple of my friends who are teachers. Moreover, I attended private schools for my entire education and was one of those mutant freaks who not only got pretty good grades, but actually got into the whole “learning” thing to an unnatural and obnoxious extent (as those few EA readers unfortunate enough to have gone to high school with me can attest).
Consequently, my solution to the education problem is for parents to raise smarter kids. That way, whatever obstacles the system puts in their path, they will be able to succeed by taking an interest in the world around them, reading for pleasure, doing creative projects in their spare time, and developing their talents with whatever tools are available to them. Call this the “Lake Wobegone Plan” in honor of the mythic Minnesota community where all the children are above-average. It occurs to me that this is not practical advice, so I have been reluctant to offer it.
All of this is a circumspect and smart-ass way of saying that, on the merits, I really don’t know if vouchers and tests will make public schools any better, or if it’s a funding issue, or a problem with teachers, administration or curriculum. If all we are interested in doing is finding better solutions to teach our kids to read, then I’m all for trying various approaches and using whatever tools are available.
The problem is, like everything else in America these days, education is intimately tied in with the nexus of partisan politics. The NEA, the teachers’ union, is a key pillar of financial and institutional support for state, local and national Democrats. While the union is concerned exclusively with educational policy – and not always in a productive way – their support helps Democrats contest elections and win on other issues that I think are more important. So, to the extent that I want Democrats to win and don’t have a strong opinion on educational issues, I don’t personally feel the need to get confrontational with a key constituency. If the NEA has a problem with vouchers and charter schools, hey, it’s their issue, and I don’t know enough about it to know who’s really right and wrong. Perhaps I’d feel differently if my circumstances were different, but they’re not, so I don’t.
By the same token, I think there are plenty of opponents to the NEA whose real problem is with the Democrats. That is, Republicans are championing various educational “reforms” not because they think they will help fix the schools, but because they see them as a good tactical way to piss of the teachers and diminish the power of a key Democratic constituency. Also, many Republicans are proud to say that they don’t have much of a commitment to public education in the first place, and would rather see the whole system replaced with private, for-profit schools, religious academies and home schooling. That’s fine, but if they don’t actually believe in the system, then they’re not people I feel good about giving a free hand to fix it. The NEA has an obvious conflict of interest, but so too do folks whose stated goal is to get the government out of the education business altogether.
Finally, I think the whole debate over education is clouded by our expectations of outcomes. In a democracy, the role of public education is to socialize kids into becoming good citizens. In a capitalist economy, it’s to instill skills and habits of discipline into the next generation of workers. For religions, it’s to inculcate theology and maintain the community of believers. For parents, school gets kids out of the house and keeps them off the street during the day. For most kids, it’s primarily social, a means to meet the expectations of adults, and, to the occasional freakish mutant misfit, a source of intellectual interest and stimulation.
Meeting all those expectations is a huge burden to place on any system, and it’s just possible that the system we need may cost a little bit more than we think it does. During the Golden Age of American public education, from, say, the 1890s to the 1950s, labor costs were artificially low because there was a captive pool of educated women who had no other outlet for their professional skills. There was also an upwardly-mobile urban middle class with a vested interest in the system and the means to support it, plus a sustained influx of immigrants from countries with strong educational traditions, highly motivated to use the opportunities of public education in America to advance themselves socially and economically. For a number of very good reasons, none of these favorable conditions apply to the same extent today, and yet our expectations on the educational system have gone up, not down. Seems to me that something’s gotta give.
It appears that a number of readers of this site have strong opinions on this subject. I freely admit that my own views are coming from somewhere other than facts and I’d be grateful to anyone who can cite good articles and discussions about this. You never know – I just might learn something!
4:58:38 PM 
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