LIVING FOR CHANGE
Hyenas and Our Failing Schools
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, May 11-17, 2008
Several readers wrote to say how much they enjoyed last week’s column in which I told the story of how Professor Kay E. Holekamp arrived at her hypothesis that the relatively large size of the brains of spotted hyenas may be due to their living in community, and also suggested that the dumbing down of Americans in the last few decades may be due not only to the media but to our loss of community and solidarity.
A New York friend recommended an article by John Taylor Gatto entitled “How public education cripples our kids, and why” (http://johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm)
In 1989, 1990 and 1991 Gatto had been named New York City Teacher of the Year. In 1991 he also received the New York State Teacher of the Year award. At that point he decided to retire because, as he explained in a letter to the OpEd pages of the Wall Street Journal, he was no longer willing to “hurt kids to make a living.“
In this article Gatto not only names a number of very important Americans who never graduated from high school: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Margaret Mead.
He also explains how our factory-like school system was created a hundred years ago to dumb down young people and stifle critical thinking. It does this by dividing students by age, classes by subjects, confining education to the classroom, and constantly testing and grading to determine which students are fit only for manual work and which should be groomed for managerial leadership of the economic system.
As long as there were plenty of factory jobs, young people accepted this caste/class structure, usually dropping out after the 9th grade to work in the plant and make enough money to get married and raise a family. But as the jobs declined and they were expected to spend more years in school (in order to keep them off the job market and maintain the educational-industrial complex), they began to regard school as a prison and to drop out by the thousands.
Today about a million teenagers drop out of U..S. high schools every year. But instead of recognizing that our school system was created for the fast-fading industrial epoch, instead of incorporating what neuroscience tells us about the importance for learning of Community and Context, most educators, concerned about their jobs, are still trying to solve the crisis by more rigorous operation of an obsolete system.
Fortunately there are some teachers who are beginning to think and act outside the box.
For example, on Thursday May 1, two dozen elementary, high school and adult education teachers in Oakland, California, set aside their normal lesson plans in favor of topics like the war in Iraq, racial inequality and a recent 10 percent cut in the state schools budget. Their story is told on Common Dreams, May 2.
Teachers handed out worksheets bringing home the reality that 1,000,000 Iraqis and 4,000 American soldiers are dead and that the war will cost the U.S. about $2.8 trillion, forcing cutbacks in education and health care.
As a result, students, instead of fiddling with their hair or otherwise expressing their boredom, carried on a lively discussion, wondering whether the United States was committing acts of violence against innocent people and whether American businesses were getting rich on the backs of the poor.
Craig Gordon, a social studies teacher at Robeson High School and the author of the day’s curriculum, said the goal was to raise awareness among students who may not have a firm grasp of the relationship between what happens at home and what happens “out there.”
“I wanted them to actively think about the priorities of society, because they are the ones who are going to be most affected,” Mr. Gordon said. “They are the ones that need to be informed so they can make a decision on whether they want to do something about it.”
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