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.
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