turbine

May 6, 2010

“Why Public Education is More Important Than Wall Street, and What We Must Do”

All over America right now, public education is in crisis. Teachers are being fired as next year’s school budgets shrink. Next fall’s classrooms will be far more crowded. Some districts are going to four-day weeks. And the nation’s public universities are in deep trouble.

The answer is for the federal government to bail out public education until state and local revenues return as the economy strengthens.

After all, the government bailed out Wall Street. What our kids learn — America’s human capital — is more important to our economy than Wall Street’s financial capital.

In addition, we should rebalance the economy away from finance and toward people. Congress should enact a small one-half of one percent transfer tax on all financial deals. This might slow down Wall Street a bit but generate $200 billion a year for our public schools and universities.

Last year, America’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each — enough to pay for 20,000 teachers.

Please watch this video, and pass it on.

Let’s consider a service-based economy for a moment. Many people view a service-based economy as one made up of lawyers and accountants, bankers and real estate brokers. It’s a large pool of employees who provide services—more and more for other service people: lawyers taking care of accountants who take care of bankers, ad nauseum. But many people don’t consider the rest of the service sector: house keepers and shoeshine boys, car detailers and fast-food counter workers. Bellhops. A whole industry designed to serve others without the social cache conferred on bankers, lawyers and (in some cases) accountants. Like the old ads that said, “No one ever says ‘When I grow up, I want to be a junkie,’ few people feel the siren call of “bellhop.” This is not to say people can’t be happy being a bellhop. Some of the best days I’ve worked were spent in dark warehouses sorting books or crafting custom gaskets for large industrial factories. Part of it was the people I worked with. The other part is that I knew I wasn’t going to be there forever.

And yet there are many who need bellhops and can’t afford a bellhop uprising. And for those people, what could be the best way to keep a bellhop from throwing down his jaunty fez? Simple: deny him the skills and education to do anything but be a bellhop (just make sure you keep telling him that with enough hard work and determination, he can become anything he sets his sight on. It is America, after all).

I believe in education, but I’m having some difficulty continuing to believe in America’s public education system. More and more it’s being controlled by a group interested in a dumb public:

That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers … Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money.

Thanks, George.

My kids are getting good educations in critical thinking because I think it’s valuable and it’s a skill I try to help them develop. And I’m proof that good critical thinking skills can get you pretty far in this world, even in the face of bone laziness, a total disregard for details, lack of ambition, difficulty focusing, etc. etc. etc.

The sad thing is, other kids are not. More and more schools are teaching specifically to achievement tests, which, while testing bare competence in math, science, and language skills, really test a student’s ability to follow specific directions and mimic specific examples. To wit: here is how you clean a room, now show me how you clean a room. Here is how you press a shirt, now show me how you press a shirt. It’s a system that honors wrote memorization more than anything, which is a skill other cultures have been honing a lot longer than we have.

So what to do about it? Sure, federal dollars to schools rather than Wall Street would be nice, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

The first step is to vote in local elections. Places like Kansas and Texas get to remove evolution from text books and decide a conservative ideology is what mattered most in revisionist history because a demonstrably fringe element is able to drum up voters. And let me tell you something, in the broadest-brush, most divisive language I can muster: they get out the vote.

Half the anti-gay legislation on the books is often on there specifically to draw out the lunatic conservatives from their pine hollers and hard-scrabble settlements and get them to the polls. Once there, they vote party line, mostly because they haven’t been taught to think for themselves. Quite the contrary, in most instances. After all, one of the central tenants of conservative Southern (since that’s the region I’m most familiar with) Baptism is to do what you’re told, in a model strikingly similar to trickle-down economics: obey god, obey your preacher, obey your father, obey your husband, obey your parents.

So vote locally. Donate money to local schools (even if you don’t have kids). Seriously, they need it. And write a letter to the school board urging them to begin teaching critical thinking in school. It’s true that human capital is where this nation can excel, but to get there, your community has to excel first. Then your city, county, state, etc. And the only way we’re going to produce the next generation’s group of problem solvers is to teach them how to solve problems. And the only way we’re going to do that is to solve this first one ourselves.

9:37am | URL: http://tumblr.com/ZlJibyYLy4l

(Notes: 173)