SOME DIRECTION FOR OUR SCHOOLS

OUR POLITICIANS' EDUCATIONAL PRIORITIES ARE OUT
OF TOUCH WITH STUDENTS' NEEDS

Give our students the right tools and they will build a future worth living in.

Perhaps no crisis more directly affects the direction and future of our society
than the crisis in public education. Our schools are deteriorating, good
teachers are abandoning the profession in lemming numbers, students perceive
little value in the subjects they're taught, officials of other nations openly
mock our educational standards and institutions.

And our candidates are largely ignoring the issue.

Education, when it's stressed at all on the campaign trail, is most often
mentioned as a means of restoring our industrial competitiveness. Education,
then, becomes an aspect of our economy rather than a fundament of our culture.
Vocational education, one can imagine, outweighs all other aspects of education
in an election year, at least in the candidates' eyes.

What a confusion of priorities! It is as though our elected officials-and those
who wish to join their numbers-understand less about economic competitiveness
than they do about education, and less about the nature of our nation than about
the economy or our schools.

Our economy and our society thrived because our public schools produced
graduates who could read and write. But we also thrived because the nature of
public school education imparted to many if not most of those students the
ability to use reading and writing as means of coping with the world, not simply
of filling out job applications or unemployment forms. Literacy was viewed as a
right, essential to functioning in a democracy. If you were literate, you could
not only cope with the world around you-even manage to prosper-but you could
also reach out to the larger world, drawing on its resources to further enhance
your understanding of its nature, its delights, its challenges.

Literacy was a tool rather than a skill. There's an advantage here: Tools can
be continually sharpened and reused. Skills grow outmoded.

Through reading, one could approach history, learn from great writers and
thinkers, find entertainment and diversion, navigate through an often confusing
world. Encounters with history, with science, with other cultures, with critics
of one's own culture, all were made possible for those who learned to use
reading as a tool rather than as a limited skill.

Writing, as it was once taught, was also a tool. In public schools, generations
of students learned that the parts of a sentence combine to make a thought, and
that a written thought can itself be a powerful tool for advancement, for
change, for analysis.

Naturally adjunctive to this approach was the ability to fill out forms, read
applications.

Nor should our educational past be over-romanticized: There were problems,
injustices, oversights, prejudices, slights. Which is to say that our
educational process was a living thing. That might be more than we could say
for it today.

Consider an alternative. Suppose we return to the idea of education for the
sake of social well-being rather than economic health or industrial
productivity. What would happen to a candidate who reminded the populace that
education for the sake of education serves not only the economy, but also the
larger society and its culture. Could one get elected on the strength of a
commitment to revamping our educational system so that students are once more
provided with lifelong tools rather than occasional skills, with the ability to
learn throughout life rather than a limited capacity to function well enough to
get by for now?

An approach like that, given teeth and put into action over a generation, would
yield social results and economic benefits. We are told constantly of the need
to provide citizens with skills that will enable them to compete in the
Information Age world, but we only rarely hear suggestions that what are needed
are the tools that will enable citizens to turn information into knowledge. The
two are quite different, yet when education is discussed in the current
political environment, it's information that gets all the attention. Education,
knowledge, true learning, receive only the most minimal lip service, if that.

Yet I think a candidate who espoused a real commitment to real education could
stand a real chance of winning office. Stranger things have happened, I
suppose. It's just not going to happen this election year.