Thank Goodness For Bad Education!

by Shelton Hull

If I were to call for a show of hands in assent to the proposition that the American education system sucks, I feel confident that at least two-thirds of you would raise your hands. That’s a pretty profound sentiment, since most of us aren’t armed with the reams of statistical affirmation available to professional scholars of scholarship. All we have is a lifetime of anecdotal evidence, perhaps some collected fragments of essays from education experts, which together form a collective bank of accepted truisms on the subject: Teachers are underpaid. Classes are too large. Violence in schools is getting worse, to the point that exceptionally prolific hooligans around the country are being cast for a traveling stage production of Lord of the Flies.

We, the “average Americans” whose opinion is supposedly so prized by politicians, might be surprised to know that our feelings on education are at best a secondary (or even tertiary) concern. Or we might not. We take it for granted that the next generations of Americans will be intellectually and culturally shortchanged though, as has been reported elsewhere, they’re the ones who’ll be taking care of us when we’re old, decrepit, so tragically Republican. Aren’t the stakes high enough to warrant some serious attention? You can see concern on an individual level, where everyone has an opinion, an idea, a few moments to ponder pedagogues and the problems facing them. I’m sure everyone here has had numerous discussions and debates with friends, relatives, co-workers, about education, unless you work for the Department of Education, in which case the topic never really comes up.

Now that’s not as funny as it sounds. I’m not joking: I really feel that education is not the subject of extensive theorizing at DoE headquarters, or anywhere else in that useless labyrinthine bureaucracy beyond the classroom. Why not, you ask? Because, from their perspective, there’s nothing wrong with education. Their needs are not entirely consistent with those of, say, students, because their job has significantly less to do with education than with regulation. Their job is to enforce a strict uniformity of style and content of learning among states, cities, counties, schools, classes, individuals. To this end they neglect their responsibility to students and teachers, who should be able to teach in a sympathetic environment.

So I was wondering: why does the American public mostly accept what we tend to regard as a failure to meet the most basic criteria of a democratic society? Are we stupid or something? Well, I think we know the answer that; as distasteful as it might be, the debate would benefit by shedding the “monochromatic diplomacy” popular in elite forums. On the administrative level, all that we consider wrong with education is hailed as perfection. If test scores and GPAs rose across the board to the level that the “average American” demands, the administrators would all be fired. They’re not doing the job, which requires that a certain number of people are denied a fair shot at life because the schools don’t teach them properly. They parse the truth like a small child caught in an act of thievery, “uh, we’re just tryin’ to instill respectable values,” respectable as dog shit with a pretty bow wrapped around it. Now don’t get me wrong: the elites always get a proper education, no matter how many times they wreck the family Porsche¨ or fail the bar exam. That’s their right, because they are American citizens and endowed with the Constitutional right to a solid foundation of learning. But it’s everyone’s right, and for many it just doesn’t happen.

“Uh, some just fall through the cracks…” Again, total nonsense; it’s more like people are being pushed, or nobody bothered to help, or nobody bothered to say “hey, fella, watch out, you’re gonna fall through that crack there.” And why not? After all, this wonderful free-market fantasia, WTO/World Bank bonanza can only function if there are a certain number of people, foreign and domestic, multi-ethnic, who are forced through lack of quality education to do menial labor for pay that you or I would laugh at on the way to the coffee bar. I’m not saying it’s right; I’m saying someone thinks it’s right. How else can you explain it?

Nothing like cold statistics to provide the writer with rhetorical ballast. In a recent issue of the Progressive Populist, economist Edward N. Wolff of NYU estimated the number of millionaires in this country rose from 2.8 to 3.2 million in the ’80s. By 1998, it had risen 25% to four million, double the increase of the previous decade in four-fifths the time. Sounds like success to me. Forbes magazine’s most recent list of 400 richest Americans included some 60 billionaires; they estimate the next one to have 250, though probably not Steve Forbes. It’s getting where being a millionaire doesn’t even qualify you as rich.

Millionaires? Billionaires? That’s a rather elite level. How are “average Americans” enjoying the economic boom? Susan George offered some numerical data in “A Short History of Neo-liberalism: Twenty Years of Elite Economics and Emerging Opportunities for Structural Change,” a lecture delivered in Marcch 1999 at the Conference On Economic Sovereignty In a Globalising World. She told the assembled audience in Bangkok, Thailand (interesting place for such a gathering): “Over the decade of the 1980s, the top 10 percent of American families increased their average family income by 16 percent, the top 5 percent increased theirs by 23 percent, but the extremely lucky top 1 percent of American families could thank Reagan for a 50 percent increase. Their revenues went from an affluent $270,000 to a heady $405,000.

“As for poorer Americans, the bottom 80 percent all lost something; true to the rule, the lower they were on the scale, the more they lost. The bottom 10 percent of Americans reached the nadir: according to Phillips’ (Kevin Phillips, ex-Nixon aide, author of The Politics of Rich and Poor in 1990, from which the stats were appropriated) figures, they lost 15% of their already meager incomes: from an already rock-bottom average of $4,113 annually, they dropped to an inhuman $3,504. In 1977, the top 1 percent of American families had average incomes 65 times as great as those of the bottom 10 percent. A decade later, the top 1 percent was 115 times as well as the bottom decile.”

Well, it’s good to know that the ubiquitous “widening gap between rich and poor” is a statistical reality. It’s a good thing that Republicans are pushing so hard for tax cuts to help “average Americans” make their way through the money jungle. We can only hope that they are as helpful as those surveyed by the Bostom Globe’s Pat Oliphant, who wrote that the top 1% of households have received, on average, $40,000 per tax cut since 1977. That’s $9,000 more than the entire after-tax income of one-third of America’s households. But why bother paraphrasing when the quote is available: “During 1999, in other words, the widened income disparity is such that the best-off 1 percent will have as much after-tax income as the bottom 38 percent combined; that 2.7 million people will have the same combined income as 100 million people. The mere rise in income at the top will exceed the total income of the bottom 20 percent.”

So a lot of people are getting rich, and they’re getting tax cuts, thus stagnating the Treasury’s income for no other reason than to appease certain constituencies. FDR started the New Deal in the thirties; LBJ’s War on Poverty dates to the sixties; and the Reagan/Bush Trickle Down “Voodoo” economics programme has morphed into Clintonomics, which is soon to give way to the fiscal fetishes of Bush, Bradley, Gore or Trump. Different people, different parties, different policies, and their only connection has been a steady increase in poverty and tax rates for all but a fraction of the population, who have seen their incomes rise to heights never seen by mankind before. Sounds like success to me! Amidst all that, education funding has been steadily reduced. With all this computer technology digitizing the landscape and turning people into millionaires faster than George Soros and Regis Philbin combined, many students are having a hard time with books. The test scores used to justify the implementation of vouchers should have been used to purge the entire lot of bureaucrats, to cut the red tape and double salaries for teachers, who would then delegate the administrative duties amongst each other.

A common defensive tactic is to speak of the importance of parents in the whole scheme of things, which is a good move since you can’t really question the importance of parents. Every parent has a responsibility to teach their children certain vital information that is not dispensed in the most liberal of curricula; but that’s only a portion of all the knowledge that’s available for consumption, some useful, some not, but all better to know than to not know. The educators’ task is to provide 12-16 years’s worth of knowledge to each kid. With lifespans inching ever upward for those of us lucky enough to live in a first-world economy, surely that 12-16 years is only a fraction of all the learning one does in a lifetime. But that depends on your perspective, which is determined by your experience in those 12-16 years, for another task for educators is the cultivation of a thirst for knowledge, or at least not an instinctive repulsion to it. Given that each kid is an American citizen and a future worker and taxpayer, that isn’t much to “Average Americans” to ask Santa for this Christmas.