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Public Education is Under Attack
Printed in New London Day, 10 March '02
The education system in this country, and in the state of Connecticut, is in danger, and the rights of children and their parents, are being subverted. The measures being promoted as cures for the ills of our school systems - mandatory testing, school vouchers, invasive legislation - will only lead to weaker educational systems overall. Our children's minds, as well as our nation's social and economic stability, are the ultimate victims.
Most teachers will assure you that standardized tests are a multimillion dollar product with the purpose of fattening the testing industry's bank account. Such tests, however, lead teachers to teach to the test. Rather than encouraging creative thinking, they teach rote thinking and fill their students with the facts they need for the test, not for the challenges of life. And life in America needs creative thinking and an intellectual approach to many problems. We need to devise clean energy sources. We need to end pollution and resource-depleting industries. We need to restructure our economy to provide opportunities for
meaningful, sustainable, adequately remunerative work for everyone.
Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain all floundered in school. They would, most likely, have performed abysmally on standardized tests. Do we want to stigmatize our future Einsteins, or do we want to nurture their individual ways of learning? Let us take the money away from testing and put it into mentoring and more resources for schools (better libraries, for example), so that we don't spend millions just to dumb our children down.
School vouchers, too, will have a negative impact on our education system. Apart from the simple fact that the poorest children are those most in need of publicly funded education, there is the problem of lowering the benchmark. Many people have an illusion that vouchers are a way to get out of an inadequate public school system. But if all who could bail from public schools did (and most middle class families still could not afford to do so, or provide the transportation to do so) the public system would falter, the standard with which private schools would have to compare themselves would be lowered, and (private schools existing for profit, not for the public weal) the private schools would perform more and more poorly to save themselves money.
This, of course, begs the question. Public education is offered in the interest of the country as a whole, and if we further
under fund it we will be stuck with the higher cost of unemployable, angry young adults, cheated out of a chance to be productive members of society. Although I
home school my own children, I hope someday soon to see a higher percentage of my tax dollars going to the public school systems.
Not only do we have to worry about making enough money to send our children to Pine Point if we want them to avoid a future of flipping burgers, but the CT legislature is currently considering bills to post "In God We Trust" on every single public classroom wall in the state (withholding funding for noncompliance), and wants to make the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory. Propaganda, whether it suits one's own tastes or not, has no place in the classroom. Allowing it to enter because it seems innocuous at the time just opens the door to more, and eventually offensive, propaganda.
The state is even considering legislation to dictate how homeschoolers go about their lives, including mandatory standardized testing of homeschooled children, despite the amply demonstrated successfulness of homeschooling. The bill currently under consideration would also prevent most formerly homeschooled adults from homeschooling their own children! All this is invasive of people's privacy, of their right to think for themselves. The government has no business intruding into people's religious or philosophical or personal realms.
The public has an obligation to provide every child with the opportunities afforded by a decent education, and it is in the public's best interest to do so. But vouchers, mandatory testing, and micromanagement will not help - will, in fact, hinder the education process. These things do not benefit children, and they erode our civil liberties. Our children's education should be in the hands of the parents who care about them.
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