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.
