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.

Palliative Security

The Bush Administration’s overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, continues to ripple across our increasingly violent and fearful society. The United States leads the world in gun ownership and gun violence. Powerful, largely rightwing forces within our society are determined to keep it that way. It should surprise no one that the election of a black, liberal President saw a corresponding rise in gun purchases.

Those who see gun ownership as a God-given—or at least Constitution-given—right dismiss the alarming statistics: more than 30,000 gun deaths a year (about three every hour), some 70,000-plus non-fatal gunshot wounds a year. They fail to see a problem in the fact that during the 20-year Vietnam War period, between 1955 and 1975, more than 58,000 U.S. service members were killed, slightly less than the number of U.S. civilian gun deaths in any two-year period.

In recent weeks I have visited a number of public schools in Indiana. Most, especially in the wake of the elementary school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, are instituting new security measures, such as locked entrance doors with cameras. One school I visited had begun locking all interior doors: offices, classrooms, library, and so on. Observers, whether school staff or visitors, were issued a master key to allow them to enter classrooms without interrupting the lesson by knocking for admittance.

Children and educators increasingly work in prison-like conditions in many schools. Ironically, the security measures are largely palliative, designed to provide the illusion of safety rather than true security.

In that school with all the locked doors, every door featured a large glass window. The locked library was behind a wall of glass. The camera-equipped entrance doors to the school: all glass. Any would-be armed assailant determined to enter the school or any room within it could do so with relative ease. Such security measures affect only the law-abiding, not those with criminal intent.

I’m reminded of the wag who commented, “One guy in a plane tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of passengers every day have to take off their shoes to get through airport security.”

This is not to minimize the devastation that one deranged gunman brought to a small community in Connecticut. But exceptionality should not be used as an excuse for universality. Teachers are routinely taught not to punish the entire class for the transgression of one or two students. Yielding to unreasonable fears and spending money that could be used for teaching and learning on unnecessary and ineffective security apparatus for schools is sad and worrying. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is piquant. Fear is seldom a motivator for good. Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression, of course, not gun-toting killers. But the sentiment is transferable.

In the same inaugural address Roosevelt also, in the same context, said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I would suggest that the dark realities of the present moment are not would-be assailants lurking near schools, ready to invade classrooms and gun down children and teachers. Such incidents are exceptions, dreadful, tragic exceptions. The dark realities are our unreasoning fears, which pierce the hearts and minds of parents, educators, and most damagingly, children.

Locked glass doors won’t keep out a determined killer but do send a dangerous and damaging message to children, namely that they live in an uncertain world, a world in which they need to be constantly afraid. What kind of educational message is that?