WHY THE EDUCATION "DEBATE" IS BULLSHIT FROM THE GET-GO

Part of an ongoing series here at Real Art. From CounterPunch:

Blaming the Teacher

Because public school teachers have to play the hand they’re dealt, what are they supposed to do with a classroom full of uninspired, truant, tardy, undisciplined kids who are there only because the law requires it, and whose parents offer little or no support or encouragement? What are teachers expected to do with students as unprepared, and unreceptive as these?

Answer: They’re supposed to play dumb. They’re supposed to pretend that these students’ home life doesn’t matter, that the universe begins and ends in the classroom. They’re supposed to shut up, stop whining, and go about the task of getting these kids ready to achieve high test scores. Get them to behave like “serious” students so that the American tax payer won’t feel cheated by underwriting teachers’ salaries.

Ask any public school teacher, and they’ll tell you that their “dream class” would consist of students who had gotten sufficient sleep the night before, eaten a nutritious breakfast, completed their homework assignments, and are sitting at their desks, bright-eyed and busy-tailed, ready and relatively eager to learn their lessons. The students don’t need to be budding geniuses or Junior Einsteins. They don’t even need to be above average. All they need to be is relatively prepared.

More here.

The current public discourse on education focuses exclusively on the teacher. All other factors are ignored. It is assumed that "good" teachers can take any student, from any background, under any social or economic circumstance, and get him to "learn." "Bad" teachers cannot do this. In this construction, the student's willingness to learn is ignored. Non-school impediments to a student's ability to learn are ignored. Culture, economic status, ethnicity, social standing, self-esteem, all these issues are unimportant. Our education "debate" is about one thing and one thing only, the teacher.

It ought to be obvious to anybody who thinks about it for, like, two seconds that this "understanding" of education is deeply flawed. That is, it takes two to tango. You simply cannot teach a child who is unprepared to learn. I mean, sure, you can make some headway, and a few isolated cases might end up with relatively well trained intellects, but you just can't reproduce the kind of results in the ghetto that you get in the upscale suburbs. It's impossible as far as educating large numbers of students go.

It drives me mad that what are essentially social problems, poverty, drug addiction, cultural attitudes that do not value education, hunger, and on and on, are dressed up as education problems and laid at teachers' feet to be solved. And then, when inevitable failure ensues, teachers get the blame. Well here's an undeniable truth for you: teachers can't solve social problems. Only business and government, you know, society, can do that. But society apparently has no interest in doing so. They'd rather blame teachers.

That really pisses me off.

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