Bored of Education

Over the past couple of years it has been brought to the attention of the American public that America is no longer amoung the top ten countries in science and math and reading.  This fact has come to be tied in with the understanding that it is science and math which allow countries to be competitive in the area of production and invention.  As America has lost its coveted place on the top ten, we have been lamenting the fact that this is going to drastically affect our statuts as a world power in the future. 

There are things in this country that we discuss with great fervor but with a particular lack of resolve, two of them affecting children directly, namely education and their health and welfare.  We talk fervently about the state of education in this country.  But what we are really talking about though, is the state of education in minority or underserved communities.  This simple fact accounts for one of the reasons that pretty much nothing will be done, because it involves minorities and underserved communities. Where there are issues in education in predominantly white schools, those issues are taken care of and pretty much never see the light of day.  However, in minority/underserved school districts problems are permitted to linger and fester.  Statistics in education that we are most acquainted with are primarily statistics about how bad a school or district is doing.  This is in keeping with our concept of "news", that it is the bad stuff that gets the attention of the populace.  Those schools or districts are overwhelming minority/underserved in their demography.

Society has a tendency to judge serverely those who are on its lower rungs and to leave their welfare to the fates.  Yet, it is said you can judge a country by the way it treats its poor.  Further, it is a primary tenent of most religions that the poor are to be cared for. We forget that the poor own or possess nothing, therefore they have no "titled" interests.  Without such interests or a possibility of obtaining them the future usually looks pretty bleak.  It is such bleak futures that lead to riot and revolution, which it is the duty of the State to prevent by investing in its infrastructure.  The greatest pilar that underpins the "consent to be ruled" is security and protection of the populace.  The population agrees to abide by and be bound by the rules and regulations of government in return for security and protection.  When the poor are unemployed and unemployable, their lack of security threatens the security and peace of the upper classes.   We saw this with the revolutions in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917.

 People seem not to be able to make the connection that if you secure the foundation (the poor, and in some instances the middle class) you secure that which it is built upon.  The poor are the foundation of any country the same way that the legs are the foundation of the body.  In Hinduism there is the concept of the Body of Brahman.  The Body of Brahman is composed of the head, the arms and shoulders, the torso and the legs and feet.  It is said that each section represents a caste or group of people.  The head represented the priests; the arms and shoulders the nobles or aristocracy; the torso the merchants; and the legs and feet were the poor, servants and laborers.   Ever since I learned this I have believed the Hindus misapprehended the teaching (bold, right?)  If you think about it intelligibly, no one part of the body is more important than another, you need the entire body to function properly.  What good is the body without a head, or the legs without the torso?  I suspect the teaching was supposed to convey that we each are born with a tendency toward something,  a tendency toward study and scholarship, a tendency toward entrepreneurship, a tendency toward the service industries.  I am still trying to figure out the purpose of the nobles!   These tendencies, if we are permitted the freedom to develop as individuals, lead us to our career paths.  Such is the glory of the Western nations, with their underpinnings of democracy.

And let us be clear, there is a difference between investing in your population and throwing money at it to keep the peace.  One leads to a healthy ecomony and healthy population, the other to complacency and indolence.  This can be seen clearly at work in the economies of Germany, China and to a lesser extent Japan (which has stumbled).  Each of these economies invested in its infrastructure and a decade or so later reaped the benefits.  In the US we do not invest in infrastructure, as a nation.  We invest in what is going to give us the quickest, fatest return.  The heart and soul of investment is growth.  What better prospect of growth than an investment in education?  What greater prospect to a better city, state or country that an investment in the people who live and work there?

We need a true Board of Education, one which has as its sole function, the health and welfare of the school district.  This should work in conjunction with a yearly audit of the school system from top to bottom.  Too often the news simply portrays the problems with education as having to do with teachers, but teachers are merely one aspect dictated to by an administration, which is more often that not, top heavy.    The problems in education seem complicated and intricate.  Yet concomittantly they are simple when the focus is put back on education itself.  Once we do this and get back on track, we will no longer be "bored" of education.