Danielsaurus

‘Our Broken Escalator’

Some thoughts on the slow decline of our American education system, from one of my favorite columnists, Nick Kristof:

My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.

This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.

For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.

Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.

Coming from Kristof, who’s spent much of his career reporting on developing countries around the world, it’s truly poignant and disappointing to see how far we’ve strayed from the values that once made us strong as a country. Certainly, the nature of ‘education’ has changed – the needs of our society have moved on from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial demands which once pushed the American education system forward. We no longer need (if we ever did) schools to function as factories, to educate and deploy a stable and homogenous workforce. The nature of schools and the function of education is – and should be – undergoing a more fundamental, if conflicted, paradigmal shift. But this is different. What Kristof speaks of here is about how we simply, plainly no longer value education in general, regardless of form.

We treat teachers abysmally, pay them poorly, disparage their unions and blame them for the problems of a system which, at its root, is currently fundamentally flawed and problematic. We bind the hands of school principals and district administrators to bring about larger change, burying them with reports and regulations – done out of the call for “accountability”, a word for which we have neither a clear definition nor proper understanding – and we force schools into operating within whatever is the cheapest and most barebones model of education that will still deliver adequate results on fanciful, made-up tests which have little to do with real education. And the children themselves, those we uphold as “our future”, we’ve disregarded with a whiff of disdain – if we render them any attention at all. Schools have been shaped into concrete prisons, far removed from the centers of our community life; where once schools were integral places in our communities and neighborhoods, as Kristof for instance recalls about how his old school newspaper doubled as the town’s biweekly newspaper, their societal role now has been marginalized and relegated to simply “educating” (or more often just “protecting”, or worse, “containing”) “the children.” We’ve devalued children’s roles in society, no longer recognizing or welcoming what good they can bring as members to community life – and by extension, we’ve done the same to schools and education; we’ve turned the one last place left where children can interact with and contribute to the surrounding community into a static prison, lifeless and bound by burdensome worries and demands, a place where children’s own voices and contributions don’t matter.

Think about it: when was the last time you actually entered and spent a meaningful amount of time in a local school (one your own children didn’t attend)? How often today do you see a local school’s sport team treated like royalty, with the entire population showing to support them at games and players being known and congratulated outside of school? How often are you encouraged in your local community to actually know the children who live in your neighborhood, who aren’t yours or friends of yours? What level of expectations, if any, do you see your local community setting and holding of its schools – and of the children in those schools? What does your community ask of them, and in what ways are children really actually encouraged to contribute and participate? Have you ever read, or had a chance to read, an essay or opinion of a student in the community whom you didn’t know personally? When was the last time you saw a school or group of children really valued by the community, upheld as a prized part of its local community life, and supported with the necessary resources and attention?

We can ask if our schools and education system are in decline, but I think these are some of the more relevant and insightful questions for the moment. I think what matters now isn’t so much the quality of schools themselves, but their decreasing place and importance in our communities. What matters now is something far larger and more central to the whole of society.

I’ve strayed from Kristof’s column and his central point, but I will end with this: I think he’s right. We don’t value education and we don’t support our schools; if we did, our financial budgets and legislative priorities would look different. But I will go further and say that our schools crumble not only because they lack our financial support, and not only because we no longer value education – but because we no longer value children themselves.

We’ve become a society which has no place for children. We’ve slowly but steadily distanced them from our public life and discourse. We’ve removed them, psychologically and physically, from much of our society. And we stand by and let the schools we keep them in rot and fall away, with them inside.

That’s the larger tragedy.