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.

Greed Capitalism, Civil Democracy, and Public Education

Extreme polarization in American politics has become the norm, and it’s wreaking havoc on public education.

The old labels of conservative and liberal must be set aside. “Conservatives” are intent on conserving nothing. These so-called conservatives—at least the most ardent of the tribe—are actively working toward resegregation of U.S. society not only along racial and ethnic lines but also along economic lines. The destruction of public education is one way they are trying to achieve it. This objective can best be characterized as an iteration of greed capitalism. The philosophy is not “I’ve got mine, you get yours” but rather, “I’ve got mine and now I want yours.”

Greed capitalism is rooted in fear, and there’s been plenty of that to go around. Although the 1990s brought nearly a decade of growth and prosperity, that happy time was disturbed as the world moved with mythic anxiety toward the turn of the century. Y2K was a boogeyman. Much of his boogeyness was steeped in a deep distrust of technology. The Digital Age didn’t arrive like the rosy-fingered dawn. It raced in with bells, sirens, and flashing lights. If you were content to live in some prior misremembered Golden Age, say, the Fifties, such a clamor represented a threat that, for all its subsequent banality, seemed all too real to many people at the time. New technology then and still today raises the fear of change.

And then, of course, there was the all-too-real assault on U.S. sovereignty of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Given a political hysteria already stoked by other forms of fear, it was no surprise that overreaction was the order of the day. Two ill-considered, illegal, and largely unnecessary wars torpedoed prosperity and plunged the country into massive debt, while policies favoring greed capitalism set America up for the economic knockdown of 2008, just when the country ought to have been recovering from its excess of imperialism.

So-called liberals experienced a fleeting resurgence in Barack Obama’s politics of hope, which were a reaction to the then-dominant politics of fear. But the 21st century’s not-so-great depression put some holes in hope, and the election—and reelection—of a black-identified President, of course, fueled the poorly concealed racism inherent in greed capitalism.

Today’s liberals would have been middle-of-the-road conservatives in those golden Fifties. A virulently radical rightwing cadre under the big tent of putative conservatism has dragged the entire body politic to the right. If there are any ardent leftists remaining, they are plowing their organic fields well away from the fray. If true, honest-to-Eisenhower conservatism has been subverted by the radicalism of greed, then true FDR liberalism has been subverted by apathy and, ironically, a reemergent sense of hopelessness.

The American Founders, by and large, well understood the dangers of absolute democracy, such as strict adherence to majority rule. A tyranny of the majority has always been a real threat. Democracy in the New World could succeed only on the basis of a social contract: government for the common good. Of the people, by the people, for the people—accent on for. This is the essence of our civil democracy—not socialism, as rightwing critics accuse.

A cornerstone of the common good has been, since near the beginning of our nationhood, public education. Truly public education is premised on notions of equity and equality. The common school is a reification of the common good, providing everyone the opportunity to achieve success and prosperity to the extent of his or her abilities and efforts. In attending to the common good, the Founders were focused on the notion often expressed in the cliché about a rising tide lifting all boats. When all prosper, the nation prospers. When prosperity is privileged, the nation falters.

Rightists give a wink and a nod to “democracy,” “Christianity,” and other wholesome notions and, in so doing, have hoodwinked a substantial segment of the population into believing that what’s good for the rich is good for everyone. Gold-enthroned televangelists have nothing on these purveyors of the greed-is-good philosophy, for whom there is no common good. Common is for commoners. Greed capitalists are creating an aristocracy of wealth. In 21st century American politics money rules wherever good people have been fooled into voting against their own best interests, something you'll never catch a greed capitalist doing.

So where does that put public schools? Smack in the middle. They are the red flag at the center of the rope in the socioeconomic and political tug of war, pulled this way and that. Adherents of the Founders’ vision of democracy tempered by social conscience are fighting to retain public education as the means by which the American dream can be realistically offered to everyone—no exceptions.

Greed capitalists and their dupes are pulling hard in the opposite direction, using vouchers, charters, and “choice” sound-good rhetoric (and accompanying legislation) to ensure a permanent, and growing, economic underclass—serfs for the aristocracy. The gulf between the wealthy and the impoverished in the United States is astonishingly large in comparison to other nations in the developed world. America has now become a shining example not of democracy realized, but of democracy imperiled.

Those who believe in the American Founders’ vision of a social contract, of the common good, of a land of opportunity must grasp their end of the rope and tug with increased fervor. Make no mistake, the opportunists of greed are doing just that from the opposite direction. The battle to keep universal public education public is a battle to save American democracy.