The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Keep in mind as I speak that I spent 26 years in public school classrooms. My perspective is that of an insider, not an outsider. You have been warned.

We live in a time of great school crisis, and that crisis is linked to a greater social crisis in the general community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore. Without children and old people mixing in daily life, a commu-nity has no future and no past, only a continuous present.

We live in networks, not communities. Everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy, just as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among races and social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wan-der through subway trains begging, and sleep upon the streets.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 27 years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes any more that scientists are made in science classes, or politicians in civics classes, or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides, and even as administrators. But the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care, and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic – by which I mean it has no conscience.

It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he memorizes that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor, or that a man named Columbus discovered America even though millions of people were already here.

The idea that schooling and education are the same thing was never a convincing one, but in our lifetimes, yours and mine, it has become an exhausted one. ( more…)

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At some point today, I will be adding links of people/organizations that really do a good job (I think) in making the case for school reform and/or school choice. This posting also serves as a lead-in to the piece that I will be doing in the very near future that will continue my series entitled “The School System: A National Lab Project”.