Why Public Education Sucks

For the record: I am a devotee of the idea of public, democratic education. My life is better because of inspired teachers. I owe them. As a working class kid, I never would have gotten what I needed in a decadent dictatorship, a puppet plutocracy, an arrogant autocracy, or an opulent oligarchy. Public education has made my livelihood possible. I've been a teacher for thirty five years and have taught elementary, middle, secondary, and college students. This little rant is not a commercial for elite, private schools. What it is is an indictment of the tyranny of testing and all it implies. No Child Left Behind picked up the bad idea that the outcome of a good education should be passing a test. (Of course, the lack of funding, bad working conditions, lack of respect for teachers, bad policies made by politicians (not teachers) also had a lot to do with it.) That outcome pushed, no, coerced, teachers into teaching to the test, and left the real work of education -- equipping students to become creative problem solving humans and engaged citizens of a democracy -- out in the cold, an after-thought. Students have learned not to think, but to wait for the answers. The ones who asked questions got thrown out; many ended up in prison. Public education has made a business out of producing mediocrity: standardized, bloodless, dry, mind-numbing, instruction-following mediocrity. One of the taboos of the new era is creative self-expression and being "human." The new way is exclusively "social." Well, I think that the best social achievement comes from a knowledge of what one loves to do, what one is good at, and what one feels "called" to do. That comes from self-awareness and self-examination. The "self" makes the best "social" possible. This dominant either/or view of knowledge as exclusively socially constructed drives good minds out of the classroom and into hiding. The few that make it do so in spite of public education rather than because of it.