Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

Citizen New Year's Resolutions

It’s a new year and so it seems to be a good time to make some resolutions with regard to education and a citizen’s responsibilities. In a free society parents with children in school are not the only stakeholders in education. Every citizen is a participant—and must be an active participant—in ensuring that our future citizens receive an education that empowers them to maintain our democratic way of life. Thomas Jefferson said as much in several ways, notably, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

To this end I would propose five citizen resolutions for education in 2016. As citizens we should resolve:

To uphold and advance our national commitment to effective, freely and fairly available public education. The public schools remain the best safeguard of democracy, and efforts to undermine public education, such as underfunding public schools and shunting public money into private education and corporate endeavors, must be viewed fundamentally as attacks on American democracy.

To ensure that all children, adolescents, and young adults are provided with educative experiences that enlarge their knowledge and understanding in ways that resonate both with the needs of our free society and with their individual interests, talents, and abilities. Narrowly defined, overly prescribed curricula inhibit personal development and should be anathema to free public education that is not solely in service to the state but, rather, is conceived to accommodate diversity in all dimensions as befits a fully developed nation.

To advocate for and work toward true safety for the nation’s young people, which means addressing safety issues across many dimensions, such as working for effective gun control to reverse the gun violence that has plagued the United States in recent years and working to establish and maintain learning spaces in which students are safe from prejudicial mistreatment and bullying related to racism, homophobia, or other detrimental conditions.

To strive through active engagement in democratic processes to ensure that elected officials at every level of government understand the importance of effective public education and work to craft laws and policies that commit resources, both real and philosophical, to the advancement of the public schools. Concomitant in this work must be real commitment by our elected officials to listen to the public they represent and to strive to act in a manner consistent with the public’s desires.

Finally, to work toward more appropriate use of standardized and other forms of testing, uses that truly contribute to the improvement of education. Mindless, mandated, mass testing, which has become rampant, is a misuse of instructional time and diminishes the educative experience. Moreover, the misuse of test results unfairly characterizes students, educators, families, neighborhoods, and communities and is a state-sponsored means to sort and select that often disadvantages the already disadvantaged, such as racial minorities and the poor.

None of these resolutions will be easy to keep or easy to accomplish. But the effort to enact these resolutions is worth making.