PHOTO/HARVEY FINKLE
A crisis is taking place in our educational system. Public schools are being closed or underfunded while for-profit private and charter schools get public funds and are on the rise. For many of us of the older generation who grew up during the golden age of public education, it was in social studies or history class where we learned how the invention of the steam engine gave rise to the Industrial Revolution which put an end to the rule of monarchs, feudal lords and kings as well as their mistreatment of “we the people.” One of the leaders of the French Revolution (1789 to 1799) described the role of education at that time when he said, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
That history repeated itself in August in a Detroit, MI courtroom where seven students are suing Governor Rick Snyder and state education officials for denying them and their peers an education. The lawsuit cites over-crowded classrooms with no teachers (one class was taught for a month by an eighth grader), no books, no homework, lack of desks and school supplies, freezing cold in winter, sweltering hot in summer, overrun with vermin, saturated with the smell of dead rats and mold, along with bathrooms that don’t work or are in disrepair. Lawyers representing the state argued that, “students have no right to literacy” because the Bill of Rights makes no mention of it. The state also argues that the state had nothing to do with Detroit public schools, yet the school district has been run by state-appointed emergency financial managers since 2009, which has lead to these deplorable conditions.
Denials don’t end in Detroit. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has denied that he ever told Chicago Teacher’s Union President Karen Lewis, “Twenty-five percent of these kids are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and I’m not going to throw money at it.” He later closed 54 public schools in the poorest communities citing budgetary reasons.
However, a recent investigative report by Crain’s Chicago Business and the Better Government Association shows that at the time when those schools were closed, the mayor diverted $55 million in TIF (Tax Increment Financing) money away from those schools to the building of a luxury hotel at McCormick Place and then to the tourist industry at Navy Pier. By law TIF money is supposed to be spent on schools, libraries and blighted communities. Meanwhile teachers are laid off 1000 at a time and there are 20,000 homeless students attending Chicago public schools.
Similar stories are told all over the country. They are indications that just as the steam engine and the industrial revolution put an end to the previous social order, in like manner the new digital, electronic revolution with its computers, robots, microprocessors and 3-D printing is putting an end to industrial manufacturing. Industrial manufacturing required a large, disciplined, well educated workforce. Since no single privately owned capitalist enterprise could accomplish that, nationalized government-run public education was built.
As the electronic revolution replaces the old industrial worker with a new class of permanently homeless and hungry workers, to that same extent, public education is being transformed into privatized education. The children of this new class face a future where the private owners of education decide whether they get an unequal education or no education at all.
Any system that forces children into such a fate has no moral claim to power and must be replaced.
I work as an classroom assistant in the public schools in Lane County, Oregon. Today I went into the library of a middle school where I was working that day, and was appalled when I found out there is only one librarian working there who has been there for ten years. When she first started working as a librarian, the library had two full-time librarians. Now she feels lucky just to have a job, and the others are gone. She blames the insensitivity of school boards who have put appropriations of money elsewhere at the expense of having more well-trained staff. This librarian also described how, in her experience, professional librarians are being replaced with part-time people who are usually teachers or other people in the schools who are asked to be librarians for part of their time. (And who may not want that
responsibility, but have no choice in the matter).
I don’t understand this. Libraries are supposed to be centers of hope and learning for kids. What if, instead of a library who have well-trained staff helping kids with questions, there are a bunch of untrained people who are there only part of the time, or simply not there at all? Is this a pattern that is happening all across our country?