most everyone has finally got to the oops, sorry phase on no child's behind left/total-immersion standardized testing as a national strategy for achieving control over children's neurology. it really did have its successes, though: i'd say every year for the past decade the mind of the average college freshman is more mechanical than the last. so, anyway, maybe we made a mis-step. right. it was a mis-step that coincides roughly with my 15-year-old daughter's entire life. now, if i were personally picking out a moral crisis of our moment, it wouldn't be climate etc; it'd be government education. you can't envision any alternative. but it's just (a) literally kidnapping (look up the statutes), (b) a direct attempt at consciousness-formation applied largely for economic reasons to entire populations, and (c) a matter of surrendering your children to real idiots, mediocrities and cant-yappers like say arne duncan or margaret spellings who have done nothing in decades-long careers but utter cliches and administer repulsive bureaucracies, to say nothing of fuckwads such as george w. bush, bill clinton, bill gates, or barack obama. those people are themselves now 're-thinking' what they before pseudo-passionately advocated with their meaningless catch-phrases and tried to force on your baby. i don't know how people look at folks like that on tv and think they know what they're doing or that they have ever had an idea. maybe they wear good clothes or something.
i swear to god what drove the whole thing was a sheer combination of nationalism and capitalism. seriously, read the tom friedman education columns from the 90s and even unto today: our kindergartners are in competition in a globalized economy with the kindergartners of finland and sigapore, a competition we always lose. so what we need is the world's richest man to write a common core curriculum. then leftists are all: i'm an advocate of public education! yes, and neo-liberalism or whatever else you call that.
but, at any rate, making the choice to snatch children from their families is making the decision to turn them over to people and institutions who are no smarter and no morally better on average than these families themselves, to put it gently. but in contrast to these families, there is no moral justification for these people's involvement. (perhaps you think you can give a rational justification for public compulsory education. the only reason you think that is because you've never faced any skepticism, because i'm telling your argument is a tissue of fictions.) really i think we ought to implode all these internment facilities.
the good part is that education isn't what most people, or most politicians, think or say it is. even with many hours every day for whole childhoods, actual persons prove profoundly recalcitrant in a thousand dimensions to your alleged knowledge and your discipline. education has effects, but you can't make people over into whatever you please. the idea that we can, however, has been the fundamental thought behind educational theory since plato. that's more or less why education is always, always in a 'crisis.' it is always failing, never satisfactory. thank god.
