lichen: yes to free schools, and a breakdown of the hierarchy of patriarchal and authoritive ways. And cheers to abandoning monopolies granted to the publishers that push the awful curriculum and dumbed-down, corporate-capitalist indoctrinating textbooks.

Education is not something that can just be delivered to people (of any age). We must want it and work for it. That means we need to be interested and co-creators with our curriculum, not just receivers. Education and democracy are not like pizza and chinese food that are delivered upon request.

Ensuring equal opportunity is a lot easier and more abundant than many complainers realize. Ensuring equal outcomes is impossible and is a subjective and foolish game. Every child has access to schools and libraries. What they do with them is their business. Most of the kids in my neighborhood have never been to a library, but that’s OK because they don’t take care of their own things much less shared things, and don’t like to read. Their “poor”, but they have cable, video games, name brand sweatshop clothes and shoes, soda and chips and candy, but don’t want books. Sad, huh?

In the end, if parents and kids don’t value education, no amount of additional funding and sociology is going to change the outcomes. It is interesting to me that families in countries without such accessible resources of public schools and libraries jump with alacrity at the opportunities when they get them, and in my country they demand that someone give them an education, when it’s already available.

The problem is economic disparity. Schools have only entrenched the problem. Why bother with “they schools” anymore? They clearly don’t deserve more money, the failing kids’ families should get additional money since that’s what tests show is the “outcome” factor. But the schools always say, if you’d just give us more money . . .

Peace,
Melissa

The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.
H.L. Mencken

And the most lovable of all? Why – the professors of education, of course.

It is not without reason that this group has so much scorn heaped upon it. Since the early seventies, they have fiddled with this educational theory and faddled with that bunch of smoke-and-mirrors data, all in service to their careers. They have cranked out a seemingly endless supply of subject-ignorant drones in service to the latest bucket of educationese shit.

And the losers? The students as always. And by extension, the entire nation.

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.
~ Mark Twain