Education is Broken, part 72

                Here’s a good one … I have 10 years experience teaching Advanced Placement English and 10 years experience teaching and coaching Debate, but my school has decided in their infinite wisdom that my talent would be better used in teaching a generic, undeveloped English 12 equivalency class as community college dual enrollment credit.  Why?   The answer is as simple as the bottom-line destruction of education in general:  they are after an elusive end product which looks good on paper.  The decision (made by the people with education degrees of course, not content-area degrees) nods to the proliferate idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold.  Just as Machiavelli said the citizens of a state were inert, so are the students in the public school system.  They don’t matter in the larger scheme of things.  Results matter.  Test scores matter.  It seems like the results and the test scores would be directly related to the students, but that’s an illusion.  Teachers record scores; students don’t necessarily earn them.  If a teacher is told to hit 75% proficiency, you bet your ass 75% of the students will hit that number.  It’s just a number.  It means nothing. 

                An interesting fact to insert here is that most teachers have degrees in education.  Why?  Those degrees are incredibly easy to get.  Online.  Cheap.  English degrees aren’t easy to get.  I guess that’s why I am one of only two people in the department with a subject area degree.  Hmm.   So the teachers are just like the students they bitch about every day?  Taking the easiest route?  Shocking.  Who would have thought … ?

                Currently, my students are embarking on one of the hardest books we read all year:  Plato’s Republic.  While much of what Socrates and Plato espoused was too idealized to ever work in practice, they had one thing down rock solid:  education should be about argumentation, discussion, questioning, debate, and rabble-rousing.    Thinking should be the most important thing a student gets from education.  If a person can’t THINK, they are going to suck at life in general.  It has nothing to do with test scores or college or job markets; it has everything to do with having common sense and not just doing what you’re told or thinking what you’re told to think.  Life is too important to hand over to the direction of other people.  What are we telling our students when we give them college credit for a regular English class that is NOT college level work?!  We’re telling them that there are always shortcuts to be found.  Always exploit the system as much as you can, because college is the same as high school is the same as life.  But nothing could be further from the truth. 

                If Socrates were put in my position, he’d drink the hemlock.  Bloody hell.