It’s a small case, at least in the great scheme of things, but it’s a great example of the Big Lie. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s ‘Back-To-School’ time, with lots of sales of the exciting crap, new and old, with which every child is supposed to be armed before venturing to educational glory. Except for the financial strain some of this nonsense puts on plenty of ordinary families, the mania is nearly harmless.
The Big Lie, as it’s generally understood, comes out of Orwell by way of Adolf Hitler, whose propaganda minister frankly explained that people could be brainwashed en masse simply by repeating a lie. The bigger the lie, Joseph Goebbels said, the more it would be believed.
I periodically rant on this blog about various mechanisms used by people to control public policy, including political assassination and the destabilization of various governments around the world, not exluding our own. Because these manipulations and shootings occur as manifestations of agreements among these people, they are, by textbook, conspiracies.
It is but one hilarious aspect of the Big Lie in America that those who raise troubling questions or point to inconvenient facts are dismissed across the mainstream media as “conspiracy theorists” –– the meaning of which is not in the term but in the ridicule it’s meant to incite. The public is thus predisposed to ignore these things. The murder of an American president, to cite one example, is popularly regarded as equal in significance –– and as mysterious and unknowable –– as such matters as the existence of space aliens or whether George Bush the younger is really Nancy Reagan’s love child.
Talk about anything of real import and you will be dismissed as a nutcase. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has not been incarcerated.
As Vonnegut might have said, since he said it all the time, and so it goes...
School, though, specifically public schools in the U.S., they’re good or bad, we like ‘em or we don’t. Teachers are underpaid, or not. Teachers unions are positive or negative, depending. Students go to classes and, after a while, they get pieces of paper which permit them to go on to the next school, and eventually they turn into accountants or worse.
But the failures of the school system, whatever they may be and however vague our own interest in or knowledge of particulars, hey, it’s hard to get it right. Our educators, the ones who emerge from graduate programs where any remaining sense of humanity has been leeched from them, are well-meaning, fine people who know what they’re talking about so that we don’t have to. Right?
Well, no, no, and no. Not fine, not well-meaning, and know what they’re talking about like Sarah Palin understands health care. You’ve got to admit, it takes real genius to help lead a populist movement which seeks to shaft the people.
If you think educators are better at running the school system in America than Palin would be running Health and Human Services, you are wrong. It’s that fucking bad.
When it comes to education, we seem to have been enveloped in a weird, gossamer fantasy; the rot could be seeping right up through the floorboards and we think it’s roses. I’m not sure what it is, this fantasy, maybe we think educators are intelligent and though we don’t like or trust intelligence we are ready as hell to turn over the structural mechanism to it because we’re too busy doing important things ourselves.
Public schools in America are in serious, serious trouble. More accurately, the students are in trouble.
Once upon a time, it was generally accepted among educators that the best schooling was that which invited inquiry, which involved students in the rather significant work of learning to think critically. Public education in the U.S. exploded in the aftermath of World War II. Schools were built and teachers recruited, and the baby boom generation was on the way. There is near-universal agreement that the public schools reached their peak in the early 1960s. America was in a race to the moon by this time, and there was great excitement about careers in science and mathematics.
The new teachers and even some new administrators just went hog-wild wherever they could get away with it, and there was money for the arts, lots of money, and courses in logic or philosophy. High school students read Plato and Aristotle, and talked about it.
There was also widespread agreement among educators, and in the society at large, that students, especially high school students, needed a balance between academia and the other parts of their lives. Adolescents were permitted to be adolescents; they were afforded time and space to develop socially and emotionally as well as academically.
There was a recognition that Learning involved an array of pursuits. Schools were expected to provide intellectual resources. Students were expected to ask questions, try things out, make mistakes. It was, in retrospect, a golden age. And, no, I am not forgetting the fact that during this time many schools and districts in the country had fewer financial resources than others, that there was widespread segregation, de facto if not de jure, and that girls did not enjoy comparable athletic or academic opportunities to those available to boys.
So if you want to talk about increased equality of opportunity, fine, but that’s another conversation. Because while various mechanisms have been used to broaden and democratize opportunity, the opportunity to which they apply has been evicerated. In other words, now everybody gets a slice of pie, the only problem being that most of the pie has been eaten by others and what remains is dried-out and probably poisoned.
There is today an enormous difference between the quality of instruction theoretically available from brilliant and dedicated teachers and the quality of instruction finally delivered to students by the system and its ruling assumptions. In these differences lies the key to seeing what’s wrong and why.
Before we begin that scary exercise, consider this: should not the quality of our public education be at least roughly equivalent to the quality of the teachers we’ve got? One can use the best ingredients and still turn out a meal which is somewhere between inedible and fatal if actually ingested. To any sane person, this would indicate that the cook got the recipe wrong. But in America’s educational kitchen, the response is quite different: kick out some ingredients, try a few other brands, use ever-more-precise measuring devices, and reassure the vaguely-uneasy diners that the next meal will be just terrific.
In the last stage of the disintegration of the industrial age, we are seeing the limits to which that form of ordering our universe can bring us. We have become the cultural manifestation of that expression about the person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. We can measure the shit out of any detail, and thus have come to uncritically accept the ludicrous notion that only that which can be measured is of value.
You know what can’t be measured? Learning. Know what can be measured? How many factoids can dance on a pinhead.
Once this became the central focus –– for political reasons as much as for any other, but that’s the subject of a different writing –– it was off to the races. Schools were turned into testing factories, education reduced to a common denominator devoid of inquiry, thought, passion, curiosity, and intellectual engagement.
In order to pull off something this damaging, a Big Lie was essential. After all, when you’ve got waves of high school graduates who can’t seem to manage elementary logic nor locate Afghanistan on a map, people begin to notice. Thus, in the 1980s, by the time the failures manifested in ways too obvious to ignore, the politicians and educators had to come up with something that looked good.
In California, with our astounding escalation in encarceration –– America jails a higher proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world, with a wildly disproportionate percentage being black and latino, nearly all of them poor –– prison construction gobbled up the spare cash not already siphoned-off by other schemes, the educational system wasn’t going to get real money. But the public was clamoring, newspapers were editorializing, realtors were getting restless, and something had to be done.
Into the breach rode the testing companies, a sort of Readers Digest consortium of fake experts and second-level intellects. What they promised, and subsequently delivered, was a cheap mechanism for calming down the voters. Thus came the era of unending standardized tests, the claim being that with these tests the educators could fix whatever was broken (and weed-out teachers whose students could not raise their scores).
It is a recipe for failure to demand increased “productivity” of people to whom you do not allocate increased resources.
What ensued was predictable. Pressures for academic numbers forced the perversion of the schools’ curricula; fewer and more expensive openings for college admissions drove high school students toward depression and suicidal ideation; teachers had less time to devote to inquiry because the system required memorization of what testing companies declared to be important ‘facts’; students routinely found themselves with three and four hours of homework every night, and the simultaneous demand that they bulk-up their resumes with athletics and/or community service.
Because college admissions had become much harder, a fifteen-year-old sophomore finds herself taking ‘advanced placement’ courses in order to score a grade point average higher than 4.0. I know what I’m talking about. I met more than a hundred of these kids while serving my sentence on the local high school board.
While the testing mania continues to serve as a smokescreen for the utter vacancy of the system, it causes enormous damage to the adolescents –– and, now, pre-adolescents, because the pressures have followed the obvious downward spiral and now infect elementary schools everywhere –– it claims to care for.
California administers a week of testing in the spring called STAR. School ratings are published and comparisons made with previous years, and for a while, until the cash ran out, there were monetary awards to spur-on the troops. STAR is comprised of norm-referenced tests, which is to say they record outcomes by comparison. This means that for every school whose numbers ‘improve’ there is another whose numbers ‘get worse’. It is not necessary to be Einstein to figure out why this renders the entire enterprise useless.
And then there is the nature of the testing itself. We are concerned not just with the decisions about which facts are important and which aren’t or, as it actually is, the inclusion or exclusion of what is worth knowing. That alone is a crime against learning. But we had better acknowledge that any test, regardless of who wrote it, cannot help but contain the cultural perspectives of its creators.
Check out this recent Chronicle headline: “Gaps in test scores remain wide”. Guess what? Hispanics and African Americans have not managed to “close the gap” in testing with their white fellow students. The Chronicle, in its unconscious idiocy, captioned the scores with the term “Achievement gap”.
Yup, those blacks and latinos just ain’t as smart as us crackers. Unless it turns out that the test-makers, being us crackers, albeit intellectual crackers, are of the same variety as the fresh-faced boys and girls in white suburbia high.
Oh, the wailing and rending of the garments among educators.
And now we have something else to hammer the kids with: the exit exam. In California, it is not sufficient to have passed your classes for four years in a public high school. You must also now pass a grand final exam, dreamed up by educrats and other moral failures, and if you don’t you will be denied a high school diploma.
Predictably, there is a steady stream of kids who don’t pass and therefore are denied graduation with their peers. Add to this the growing number now who drop out before that. What do you have?
You have a guaranteed low-income work force for the nation’s corporations –– Starbucks thanks you, the Gap thanks you, McDonald’s thanks you –– and ready ‘volunteers’ for the all-volunteer army.
Consider for a moment the obvious: if you give high school students an ‘exit exam’ which they all pass, then the exam was too easy. Thus the exit exam is inherently calibrated to fail a given percentage of students, regardless of their grades, their records, or their true level of education.
By the way, bet you can guess who’s seated on California’s state Board of Education, the folks who dream up this great stuff... that’s right, Donald Fisher of the Gap. Just another liberal trying to help out the kids.
Do not look for help out of Washington. The complete collapse of “No Child Left Behind” hasn’t shaken bureaucratic and political support for its poisonous central tenets, and Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan of Chicago, is a proponent of standardized testing as the organizing foundation for educational policy.
The reason I keep talking about the Big Lie in this context is that, while we have sometimes selectively applied it to cover Bush policies, we as a society show zero awareness that it is routinely used by damned-near everybody. Because people are gullible, because the mass media has been totally prostitited, and because it works.
The machine rolls. That’s the point. It and its mechanisms are now ubiquitous in American life. Men and women in business suits sit around polished boardroom tables and discuss the ways and means of empire, and they act on them.
When the public’s business is run, directly or indirectly, by corporations, it is run by the wealthiest and most powerful. We are not to be entrusted with the truth about it.
Recently, it was disclosed that the CIA under George Bush had instituted a program in which Navy Seals and other special ops personnel worked as death squads, going into other nations with lists of people to be killed. Then came the disclosure, yesterday, that Blackwater assassins had been used as well, with plenty of killing farmed out to a private contractor.
The cover story for this latest astounding revelation contained the assurance that the program never actually got implemented; nobody got murdered, according to the government. However, the people who initially leaked the story of the death squads to famed journalist Seymour Hersh did so because they were “sickened” by the systematic executions of people they thought were probably innocent.
Does anyone reading this believe that with the election of Obama and the appointment of a new CIA director this program will be discontinued? No, it has simply been driven further underground.
The reason the education scandal is so bad is that we are systematically ratcheting-up the rat-in-the-maze pressures on our children. The results of this are predictable. And most of America remains dangerously ignorant.
