State of Education

Did anyone else watch  the flurry of You Tube segments about the failures of the American education system recently? If you haven’t had the chance, I recommend  you do it now. I beg you watch one lengthy segment as an act of good citizenship, if you’re not too busy. And if you are, or you happen to stumble across this article at a time when it is still in a shambles give this a read and consider my points, 

No greater social disease exists today than the demise of our public education system. As a nation we have not seen such a glaring detriment to the collective spiritual growth of our Republic since the days when Jim Crow defined the social landscape of America.  

So, who do we blame for the diminishing  returns of our suffer our youth these past 25 years? What institutional failures can we identify in this time frame as the culprits? Why is it that our public education system has eroded from one of the best in the world, to one of the worst in little more than a quarter of a century? Good questions all,  just not the most important 

Cover of Brave New World

but where I differ the most from the prevailing sentimentality had to do with normative discrepancy

Have the jaded personalities that are so commonplace in modern America cultivated a socio-cultural norm that predisposes our public schools to failure? If so, then our public schools stand little chance of surviving this historical epoch in which individual success has taken on a god-like reverence, and collectivist ideals have become passé.  

I realize that we are all predisposed to expect nothing less than hyperbolic sensationalism from the media, yet I can assure you this is not the case with any of the reports I have seen, or read, during my years as a fledgling educator in a credential program. On some levels, I actually think that a bleaker picture could be drawn than the one promulgated by the media. For instance, the countless fights and racially charged violence that I witnessed nearly every day at a Richmond area middle school last year and Berkeley High School the year before that, are the types of events that I do not normally see covered by the media. Perhaps it is just too raw for us to look at these stark situations and admit to ourselves that, despite all of our talk about the virtues of plurality and social justice, the message is not clear to our young people. Their actions certainly bear witness to this fact.