No Child Allowed Ahead
When I see the awkward contortions President Bush has gone through in order to attempt to merge Conservative principles with his wife's indoctrination by the Education Industry, it evokes images of the fictional Duke Leto Atreides of Frank Herbert's Dune. The Duke's love was a woman named Jessica who had bore him a son, Paul, but was forbidden to marry him by the strict, cult-like group she belonged to, the Bene Gesserit. The Duke's action and ultimate death were manipulated by the Bene Gesserit mainly through Jessica, but mostly against her will. But she could never fully escape their control.
Bush's infamous No Child Left Behind attempts to crossbreed the Conservative principles of local control, basic education and fair accommodation with Liberal/Socialist concepts of so-called "outcome-based education", standardized testing (for students, not teachers) and substituting glossy sounding words for actual substance. It initially had support on both sides of the isle, but everyone except the Whitehouse soon realized it failed to provide much of anything other than red-tape and lots and lots of cheating.
President Bush's strong suit is supposed to be compromise. It's been said he can get differing parties to come together better than anyone else. But in this case there really was never any common ground. While Conservatives see education as a tool to empower the individual, Liberals see it as a method of maintaining control of the individual by the state—the opposite of empowerment. It's been said that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. But Liberals have discovered that if you convince him that all fish are poisonous that don't come from you, then you make him a slave forever. That, in a nutshell, is how Liberals use education.
At one point in our history it was recognized by communities that educated citizens made for more productive and honest citizens. It was decided that land-owners benefited the most from an educated community, because they would be the first to suffer from theft by those unable to earn a living otherwise. Thus was born the property tax to fund education. Eventually the states started taking control of the schools until by the middle of the 20th century all of the states controlled school districts, consolidating many smaller districts into larger ones. It was inevitable that the Federal government got involved and wrestled as much control as they could. After all whoever controls the education of today's children controls the attitude of tomorrow's political leaders.
The problem is that we forgot one of the most important lessons we had learned when we'd won our independence from Britain—the strength of decentralization. While the British troops were organized polished and "professional". American soldiers in the 18th century utilized what the French called "Little War" or Guerilla warfare. Keeping troops in small groups, attacking quickly, giving the enemy few targets to hit and minimizing damage by never having too many troops in one spot. It worked as a handful of "peasants" whooped the snot out of what was thought of as the most formidable army on the planet.
By centralizing our education system, we make the same mistake the British did in the late 1700s. If one department controls education, then that one department can be manipulated and controlled. The Department of Education itself is the single biggest liability to our education system. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, himself argued for the dissolution of the Department in order to minimize the deleterious affect the nation's teachers' unions had on education. While most unions have a clear distinction between labor and management, the NEA and the AFT both allow teachers and administrators to join, thus declaring rather than helping labor fight management, they are helping labor and management fight parents, and the children those parents want educated. And their efforts are only made possible by the existence of the US Department of Education and the centralized control of America's schools.
That's why schools fight the ideas of vouchers, merit pay, homeshooling, teacher testing or any other measure that would actually improve education. Our schools are controlled by members of power-mad unions that fights for what benefits the teachers (and their own Liberal/socialist agenda) at the expense of the education of the children.
Posted by Danny Carlton at May 8, 2008 7:21 AM