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.

Regressive Policy, Brutal Honesty

Virulently regressive, rightwing education policy is attempting to turn back the clock, handicapping all of our children, whose lives move forward not backward.

In American society writ large, recent events involving unarmed black citizens confronted, in some cases without cause, by white police officers that have ended in the gun deaths of the black citizens have turned a national spotlight on institutionalized racism. The election of a black president, far from signaling a post-racist era, has revealed deep and pervasive racism at all levels of society. At the very top, it has exposed the naked, deep-seated racism inherent in American conservatism, particularly among its extreme elements. For example, the association between the Ku Klux Klan and Tea Party radicals has become fixed in American culture, and the Republican Party has not distanced itself from its most regressive bedfellows. Indeed, the opposite often has been the case. In true trickle-down fashion, this regressive radicalism is reflected at state and local levels in increasing blatant ways.

Embedded racist, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic policies in schools are leaving the true public out of public education. Textbook dishonesty is approved policy in states such as Texas, where Moses has been morphed into a Founding Father and the Texas Board of Education has tried to pretend slavery never happened. While Texas frequently is the most egregious example of dishonest education, ideologically driven curricula that depart from fact are common is many states in which rightwing conservatives exert power over education policy. Democratic principles, civic education, science, and racial equality are among the radical taboos.

The brutality of the war being waged in American public education must be met with brutal honesty by educators, parents, and thinking citizens if there is to be any hope of reclaiming American democracy. Blatant, brutal racist actions in recent weeks have turned back the clock on race relations to the civil rights era of the 1960s, and people are responding now as they did then by taking to the streets. A similar activism is now needed to preserve public education, and the pro-education activists will need to be prepared to combat a brutal, no-holds-barred regressive response.

Thoreau reminds us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Nowhere is this more true than in public education, where we all must mount a vigorous campaign to reclaim our schools for the children they serve, rather than the ideologues who would pervert the course of education for their own selfish ends.