***Warning: this page has been reserved for a stream of conciouseness in relation to the mind-boggling frustrations thrust upon me by news, media, politicians and average idiots. The opinions stated here 

 

are mine alone and are subject to change because intelligent people EVOLVE. ****

2/26/2012

Recently I have had- much to my surprise- more than one conversation about education as a human right. Somewhere along the line there has been a fundamental breakdown in the understanding of “the general welfare.” It literally blows my mind that some folks consider education to be a luxury and NOT a human right. First and foremost, if one supposes to have a functioning representative democracy with informed voters then public education is a must. Let alone the fact that without an educated workforce we cannot have a functional and competetive economy.

Now, without getting into the suppositions on the intentions of the Founders, I’m gonna plow on through with Exhibit C: Man as an Animal. Believe it or not folks, mankind is an animal- and a fairly weak and squishy one at that. How have homo sapiens managed to survive all these 200,000 years? Adaptation. Due to our soft and squishy nature, we have had to rely on our ability to critically think, solve problems, fashion and use tools, and create complex social structures and channels of communication. This has been a group effort from the beginning. If one ape-man created the hand axe but didn’t share the innovation with his fellow band members they would have starved because there wouldn’t be enough people with that knowledge to be able to skin animals and harvest their meat. Same concept goes for the spear, the bow and arrow, and… oh, yeah FIRE. Seriously, if ancient humans were as selfish as many of us are today, NONE of us would be here.  For adapatation and evolution to occur it is necessary to spread the wealth of knowledge. Learning is in the human job description. If you don’t do it, you can’t adapt and you will not survive.

In some of these conversations it has been said that kids don’t want to learn; they don’t care about anything. This is true to an extent, but I will refer you to Francis Galton: nature versus nurture. A child at the age of two is infintiely curious about the world around them; they constantly want to know why, how and what things are. If your child does not ask these things, I would advise you to throw your television off a cliff and try the novel concepts of reading and speaking to your child. Anyway, kids: infintitely curious. However, by the time this same child has gotten to 3rd and 4th grade they have been turned off. You ask them what they learned at school today and they reply “nothing.” This is not acceptable. This doesn’t really mean that kids don’t want to learn though. It means that our

primary education system is failing to stimulate and challenge them. I happen to believe that that stimulation comes by the way of introducing core concepts off math, science, history and philosophy through the proclivities the child naturally has. Kid love big cars that go vroom?

 

Lead the kid down the path of proclivity and at some point he or she will want to know HOW  and WHY that engine works, which provides you with the opportunity to explain those complex mathematical relationships and scientific principals as well as the history of automobiles. I digress. The point is that it is not in a child’s NATURE to be disinterested in learning. It is rather the way that we NURTURE them that is creating that outcome.

 

Are American test scores backsliding? Yes. Does this mean a total failure of the entire idea of public education? Not in the least. Our execution of the idea is what is failing. The United States was the FIRST country to ever provide public education and it made us the envy of the entire world. It subsequently created a better educated and more competitive workforce with more critical thinking skills than had been present in earlier agrarian America. This in and of itself  lead to greater philosophical introspection that provided the arguments for expansion of civil rights for women and people of color. To turn education over to the private sector would almost certainly ensure that it would become a luxury, available only to the wealthiest while middle class families would go into enormous debt just to try to ensure that their kids stay middle class. Don’t think it is a plausible fear? Look no further than the stratification of institutions of higher learning, or even the historical norms of education in Europe prior to their democratic revolutions. For me, an argument against public education is an argument against liberty. I can tolerate a lot of opinions that are contrary

to my own, but this is one that I cannot abide. To argue against education is an argument for ignorance and economic bondage.

As Horace Mann (1796-1859), the famed Massachusetts statesman, reformer and ardent proponent of public education said: “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”