Imagining the future

If you stand back and consider current public education trends, and carry them through to their eventual goals, this is what future schooling will look like:

Kids will attend school 45 hours per week, year round, from age 3 to age 18.

There will be no recess.

There will be no talking at lunch.

There will be a uniform (including hairstyles, jewelry, etc).

Daytime curfew laws will help enforce school attendance.

Truant students' parents will face jail time.

Police in the schools will enforce the discipline code.

Police use of nightsticks, pepper spray and tasers will not be uncommon.

Bullying and sexual harassment will continue to be tolerated.

Students distressed by school because they are strongly attached to their parents will be diagnosed with Separation Anxiety Disorder and given drugs.

Students who are scared to attend school will be diagnosed with Social Phobia and given drugs.

Students reluctant to attend school for any other reason will be diagnosed with School Refusal Disorder and given drugs.

Students who resist constant control will be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and given drugs.

Students who can't sit still or be silent will be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and given drugs.


And for all that, you can bet that literacy rates will remain lower than they were before compulsory schooling, that general knowledge will decline, that voting rates will decline, and that our workforce will continue to lose high-tech jobs to developing nations. What, then, is the point of 15 years of coerced schooling?

The people fighting for more public schooling, the teachers who think 3 more months of class time will solve their problems, the school board members who think preschool will boost academic success, the parents who think more money is the panacea-- these folks think that school is a wonderful thing and more is certainly better. Not only do I personally feel they are mistaken, but more to the point, they aren't the ones in charge.

What I mean is, how does this serve those in power? If public schools made the people more difficult to govern by causing them to demand more from politicians, to stand up for their rights, to exercise critical thinking, then politicians would find ways to reduce schooling. Instead, what they have done is find ways to keep current schooling or increase it, but simultaneously to make it less effective in terms of actual education. The schooling itself, those 180 days, that is still serving those in power. And everyone, on the right or the left, seems to want more days, more years, more hours.

I believe school acts like the chain around the infant elephant's leg in that old parable. As an infant, the chain is an effective control; the elephant cannot break it. As an adult, the elephant is so well trained that a mere rope around the ankle will keep it from straying.

An American spends well over a decade in an environment in which they must obey, have no autonomy, and certainly have fewer rights than the Constitution provides to citizens outside of schools. Questioning the authorities is both futile and likely to be penalized. What is the societal effect of this early training?

We have a Congress that routinely acts contrary to the will of the American people, and does so without fear. We have presidents who did not win the popular vote. We have no enforcement to speak of when it comes to food safety laws, environmental protection laws, or price fixing laws (think gas prices and plane fares). To give a more dramatic example, 9/11 was not just preventable in some vague "if only we had known" sense, but in the sense that the government knew everything about the plot except perhaps the exact date, yet provided less security for New York's airspace than was provided in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. This was on record as the most colossal government fuck-up in the history of the United States until Katrina came along. But the average American, trained by 13 years of doing what the teacher says without question or protest, feels it's not his or her place to get involved.

The Democrats ask for more money, more days, more hours for the schools-- and the Republicans say "Well sure, but don't think we're going to let you teach anything," and laugh themselves silly. What the new robber barons like about school is the same thing the original robber barons enjoyed: the way that rope weighs heavily around our ankles.