Dismantling Public Education

     The Old Testament talks about teaching the children the history. Passover meal is a history lesson. "Why is this night different from all others?"  Tell the children the story of the mighty acts of God in the history of the Jews.  Proverbs is a whole book of instructions. "Raise up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it." My mother always consoled herself that it did not say that while the child was young he would not depart from that way, but when he was "old".
   
      The New Testament spends a lot of time fighting off false doctrines. The story of Jesus Christ, and him crucified was all that Paul said was necessary, but he had to spend a lot of letters teaching the early church what that meant for daily living.

    Certainly the Roman Catholic Church is nothing but a huge teaching institution. All churches are in the education business.  Like so many other things that the Church did that society saw were good and so adopted them for all people.  Education was first done by the church and then it was decided by society that it was something all people should have and so public education by the state was begun.

     One of the great advances in history and in the United States was the creation of public education and the requirement that all children should be educated at least to the age of 16.  Nothing has fueled the advances, the raising of the level of living, the development of the arts, the inventions, the books, the movies, the whole culture more than public education.  Sports might be a way out of the ghetto for some minority people, but the public education of all children has been the way out for so many more.
 
    It is this great strength and tradition that is being dismantled in this country. In North Carolina this process is being rushed through by the Republican legislators.  There are bills that would remove the limit on class size. The more students in a class the fewer teachers are needed and the less teaching can be done. There have already been major funding cuts to all levels of public education and the university system faces a cut in $150 million dollars. There is a bill to create school vouchers so that parents might send their children to whatever school they want. The destruction of the public school system comes about by the fragmentation of education.  When one school teaches that all the information about the millions of years of creation is a myth, and another teaches zoology, anthropology, and biology as evolving we are setting up a horrible problem for our country.  When one school wants to teach that the holocaust never happened, and others teach it as fact, we have a problem.   When sex education ought to be required to help reduce the number of abortions, there will be schools that never bring the subject up.  There is a bill in the N.C. legislation to remove tenure from teachers and to establish standards for evaluating teachers.   Many agree that teachers need to be evaluated and that better education happens with good teachers, but to establish these kinds of standards and expect to get teachers who can measure up and still pay what the legislators want to pay them is just to court disaster steadily.

      There is plenty of evidence that our current public schools are struggling to provide what is desired. There are chartered school which are providing examples of how education can be done better, but the mere creation of 1000's of chartered schools does not guarantee that they will be any better than what we have.  Public Education needs help, but slicing it up and imposing all kinds of new standards on the teachers does not seem to me to be the best way.