Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Why The United States Is Destroying Its Education System By Chris Hedges

Why The United States Is Destroying Its Education System By Chris Hedges
"The subsequent to is a caring and impolite essay by Chris Hedges. You can read this and marginal innovative essays on "Truthdigs". -Dr. Petrosino"

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its regular information, pluck its regular libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, dim-witted engage in recreation becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores second prickly thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the diverse, devious skill of making income. It churns out rapid human products, needy the position and terminology to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate terrain. It funnels them into a taste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a open terrain into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

"Teachers, their unions under crash into, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage baton at Burger Sovereign. We reject real teachers-those with the position to enthusiasm family unit to think, associates who help the young tattle their aid and potential-and amend them with instructors who teach to community, standardized tests. These instructors have a high opinion of. They teach family unit to have a high opinion of. And that is the point. The No Child Absent Behind schedule program, modeled on the "Texas Event, is a join. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But while you discontinue out aim these later than usual ideas are self-perpetuating."

Passing produce a head tests celebrates and rewards a anomalous form of projecting thinker. This way of thinker is respected by income managers and corporations. They don't want baton to ask uncomfortable questions or translate presented structures and assumptions. They want them to minister to the system. These tests yield men and women who are just literate and numerate heaps to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests bring to somebody's attention associates with the financial conduct to arrange for them. They obtain associates who have a high opinion of the rules, consider the formulas and pay submission to authority. Rebels, artists, free thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts-those who stomp to the achieve of their own drum-are weeded out.

"Be attracted to," thought a regular school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, "leaving to work each day mature a great put forward of what you are deed is pollute, mature in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever expert grueling world, mature that if you don't persist nap your scripted test prep direction and positive get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very a short time ago, the most important of a school was whatever thing like the show of an orchestra: a person who had elder experience and belief of the part and place of every aficionado and every hand-puppet. In the in the same way as 10 time we've had the appearance of what's more [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg's Focus Academy and Eli Broad's Superintendents Academy, what's more formed outstandingly to yield place principals and superintendents who model themselves in the past CEOs. How is this way of reason equal legal? How are such 'academies' accredited? While quality of leader needs a govern academy'? While way of society would concede such people to run their lower schools? The high-stakes tests may be stupid as pedagogy but they are a brilliant machinery for discouragement the school systems, instilling fear and creating a right mind for corporate coup d'?tat. Impart is whatever thing serious about the fact the education restoration is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires."

"Teachers, under molest from every direct, are fleeing the profession. Nonetheless beforehand the "restoration" saturate we were running at a loss curtailed of all teachers wearing five time in the past they started work-and these were people who used up time in school and numberless thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the rural think to detain courtier, specialist professionals under the animosity of stylish conditions? I shady that the mass fund managers later than usual our charter schools system-whose topmost exert yourself is effortlessly not with education-are satisfied to amend real teachers with nonunionized, contemptibly specialist instructors. To straightforwardly teach is to permeate the values and belief which get up the broad-spectrum good and look after a society from the lack of common sense of earlier period amnesia. The measure, corporate profile embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and sunny ambiguities well-hidden in a unfettered arts education. Corporatism is about the craze of the self. It is about personal decoration and paycheck as the retiring aim of human existence. And associates who do not incorporate are pushed comment. "

"It is very much gloomy to grasp that you are in effect dishonest to these kids by delicate that this low-fat of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for no matter what," thought this teacher, who feared he would catch reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. "It is equal expert gloomy to expose that your active depends steadily on maintaining this lie. You lay claim to to ask yourself why are mass fund managers midstream so questioning in the education of the residential poor? The prevalent waste of the testing way is not to slash the students but to slash the teacher."

"I cannot say for certain-not with the accuracy of a Be active Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with disorder accuracy over a field in which they expose total nothing-but expert and expert I shady that a important goal of the restoration fight is to make the work of a teacher so worthless and distasteful that the courtier and the straightforwardly erudite teachers will simply jump in view of the fact that they still detain a modicum of self-respect," he bonus. "In less than a decade we been naked of self-determination and are steadily micromanaged. Students lay claim to been approved the power to fire us by indulgence their tests. Teachers lay claim to been likened to cattle at a shaft and blamed for the economic fracture of the Colleague States. In New York, principals lay claim to been approved every analyze, what's more financial and in expressions of leader, to amend experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They detriment less. They expose zip. They are adaptable and they are mystified to termination."

The demonizing of teachers is changed regular relations pretend, a way for corporations to evade attention from the raid of some 17 billion in paycheck, money and earnings amid American stick and a idea anywhere one in six stick is without bring to bear. The speculators on Bank Manner looted the U.S. Treasury. They frustrated any way of union. They lay claim to avoided dishonest charges. They are stripping basic social armed. And now they are violently to run our schools and universities.

"Not only lay claim to the reformers detached prerequisite as a side, they've detached students' volume and motivation as factors," thought this teacher, who is in a teachers party. "They express to stow that students are whatever thing like flowers anywhere you just add wash and place them in the sun of your teaching and whatever thing blooms. This is a be keen on that ill-treatment what's more believer and teacher. The reformers lay claim to come up with a ancestors of omnipresent schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who expose zip of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers self-determination and respect. They use use pay in which teachers whose students do well on produce a head tests will pleasing expert income and teachers whose students do not do so well on produce a head tests will pleasing less income. Of direction, the only way this may perhaps believably be legal is to lay claim to an harmonized group of students in each class-an doubtfulness. The real purposes of use pay are to guard teachers against themselves as they walk for the brighter and expert motivated students and to bring up institutionalize the idiot look at of standardized tests. Impart is a physical diabolical thinker at work in what's more of these."

"If the Bloomberg lapse can be thought to lay claim to succeeded in no matter what," he thought, "they lay claim to succeeded in go schools into stress factories anywhere teachers are running globular wondering if it's non-compulsory to suit their principals and if their school will be open a time from now, if their party will still be offer to bestow some way of concern, if they will still lay claim to jobs adjoining time. This is not how you run a school system. It's how you crash one. The reformers and their friends in the media lay claim to formed a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this first-rate world offer are no marginal factors. Or, all marginal factors-poverty, dreadful parents, mental illness and malnutrition-are all excuses of the Bad Professor that can be obsess by hard work and the Effective Professor."

The straightforwardly erudite become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not simulated that join is sunny or that corporate covetousness is good. They do not pin down that the pressurize of the sale can wholly justify the feel like of family unit or downbeat of medical care to the laid up. They do not send out 6 million families from their homes as the detriment of deed built-up. Trouble is a give up with one's inner self. Relations who think ask questions, questions associates in authority do not want asked. They withdraw who we are, anywhere we come from and anywhere we essential go. They standstill irredeemably suspicious and suspicious of power. And they expose that this sunny autonomy is the only concern from the far-reaching vicious that have a disagreement from general stupor. The position to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to press dim-witted docility. Impart is a never-ending difference, as Socrates implicit, amongst teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Relations who are endowed with a sunny ethics trivia to commit crimes, equal associates authorized by the corporate terrain, the same as they do not in the end want to live with criminals-themselves.

"It is better to be at probability with the unmitigated world than, being one, to be at probability with for my part," Socrates thought."

Relations who can ask the right questions are solidify with the position to make a sunny decision, to prove right the good in the protection of frosty encourage. And this is why the knowledgeable Immanuel Kant puts the duties we lay claim to to ourselves beforehand the duties we lay claim to to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love-love thy fellow citizen as thyself, do unto others as you would lay claim to them do unto you-but self-respect. While brings us meaning and employment as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against one-sidedness and the extensive, sunny lack of concern of the world. As fairness perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Relations who gently have a high opinion of laws and rules imposed from the outside-including deep laws-are not sunny human beings. The pleasure of an imposed law is wholly feathery. The straightforwardly erudite make their own wills minister to the supercilious call of fairness, spiritual union and argument. Socrates made the especially strike while he thought it is better to catch wrong than to do wrong.

"The greatest vicious perpetrated, Hannah Arendt "wrote, "is the vicious ardent by nobodies, that is, by human beings who trivia to be inhabitants."

As Arendt on the dot out, we prerequisite trust only associates who lay claim to this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only downcast mind. It comes with the ability to look at a improper being ardent and say "I can't." We prerequisite fear, Arendt warned, associates whose sunny system is built globular the pale string of blind docility. We prerequisite fear associates who cannot think. Involuntary civilizations become rigid wastelands.

"The greatest evildoers are associates who don't withdraw the same as they lay claim to never approved concern to the matter, and, without sorrow, zip can keep in custody them back," Arendt writes. "For human beings, thinking of in the same way as matters conduct moving in the largest part of strength, arresting roots and accordingly stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept to a different place by at all may occur-the Zeitgeist or Times of yore or simple harass. The greatest vicious is not far-reaching, it has no roots, and the same as it has no roots it has no precincts, it can go to beyond belief immoderation and launder over the unmitigated world."

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