PHOTO/HARVEY FINKLEY
PHILADELPHIA — Recent headlines about schools in Philadelphia say it all:
“The Aftermath of 3,783 Layoffs: What Will Philadelphia Schools Look Like?’
“One counselor, 2,820 students”
“Dozens remember young girl, call for rehiring of Philadelphia school nurses . . .
Twelve-year-old Laportia Massey died from an asthma attack that began at a public school where the nurse visits only twice a week. Philadelphia has cut 100 nurses from the city’s schools in the last couple of years. Some schools see nurses only one day a week.
Philadelphia closed twenty-four schools this year. Sixty-four were slated to be closed, but public pressure saved many—for now. But 4000 staff were laid off, leaving schools across the district with few librarians, counselors, nurses, assistant principals, secretaries, and non-teaching assistants. Music, arts and sports programs and ESL services were cut. Schools opened with a decimated teaching staff. In the city boasting the nation’s first public library, neighborhood libraries have closed; now school libraries have been shuttered as well.
Children are enrolled in split-grade classes because of teacher layoffs. In schools still open, students and staff are coping with the addition of hundreds more students, some from formerly rival schools, to already crowded buildings. In most cases, the receiving schools experienced cutbacks like those across the district, in which assistant principals, counselors and secretaries have been all but completely eliminated.
To compensate, parents are volunteering as secretaries in schools. The mayor started a fund drive to raise money for school supplies and other needs for the schools. Schools must apply for support from the fund—which should be a right, not charity.
Philadelphia has emerged as ground zero for the wholesale destruction of public education across the U.S. It is both ironic and politically significant that Philadelphia play this role. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin—Philadelphia’s noted statesman—argued that public education should be controlled by the state, not the church, and that public schools should impart the practical skills needed for participation in public service and, significantly, in “commerce.” Ben Franklin’s secular, occupationally-oriented public education was to become an integral part of the welfare state—the form of state created in the next century to promote the interests of industrial capitalists. Throughout the industrial age, public education served an overarching purpose: to prepare a skilled and disciplined workforce for the industrial capitalist enterprise.
What happened? Simply put, with the transformation from industrial production to labor-replacing electronically-based production, the capitalist class no longer needs the kind of labor force it did. In fact, it doesn’t need huge sections of a labor force at all. So why spend money educating workers you don’t need? Moreover, an educated working class today is a dangerous class.
But the class displaced by the historical movement from the industrial to electronic age says that the abundance produced today should be available to meet people’s basic human needs, distributed through a truly democratic state. That requires a new public education system with a curriculum suited to the new period of history. Resistance to the destruction of Philadelphia’s schools is mounting—resistance that has the potential for building that new system.
We will report on that resistance in part two of this article.
He’s an old soul; no push-over; extremely courageous;
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