Schooling

(That's a movie quote, read on to make it make sense.)

The idea of community colleges (and education generally) as the engine of economic progress and social mobility came up in comments here, and I think it's worth many separate blogposts and discussions. I mean only to start it off with this one, but I feel the need to set the table with a little common context first, because I've been struggling mightily to find it in a few other discussions lately, and maybe I'm not the only one. Even if I am, that counts for something, right?

I think reasonable folks understand that ideas, beliefs and practices ought to stand on their own, independent of our personal feelings about any idea's advocates and detractors. Yet I've drawn a couple of dismissive responses here because I am a "homeschooling" parent, as if that were a disqualifier to be taken seriously in mainstream education or progressive discussion of any kind. And even among context-sharing progressives, political thought about education so predictably veers off into the hypocrisy of personal affinity and animosity (for these guys, against those guys) rather than doing the tough work of separating our lizard brain instincts and impressions from our highest-order systems thinking and power of story.

So merely to balance that wrong assumption --but not to confer any special authority on myself, even though I'm pretty sure someone or other will accuse me of that -- I state for the record that I wrote my doctoral dissertation in education leadership and policy on community college effectiveness criteria; my major professor was considered the father of Florida's community colleges, James L.Wattenbarger, who was a longtime colleague of my management professor dad. (They also shared demography as white southern officers and gentlemen, along with generational history and education-economic-patriotic values as children of the Great Depression, both of whom joined the Air Force and later studied their way to doctorates and academic careers.)

So what do we think about The School That Oprah Built?

Not many hand-picked groups of 150 girls have $40 million standing behind their learning . . .

In school your payoff comes from giving up your personal responsibility, just doing what you're told by strangers even if that violates the core principles of your household.
Shocking Origins of Public Education, John Taylor Gatto

I will be coming out soon from a gag order I've been on discussing anything having to do with education. I have been reticent about writing on the subject for a whole variety of reasons. When we were homeschooling, or may I say "unschooling", life became our learning platform and as many of you know by my writing there's not a lot I write about my private life, especially when it comes about my kids. It's hard to write without including massive details about the spawnage. I do believe children have a right to privacy.

Now that my kids have been in school since September, I am ready to explode. I have been biting my fingers and tongue because, grock, I hate the culture of schools.

Homeschooling in New York is a double full time job for secular parents with no church groups to pick up the slack of classes, workshops, study groups or just plain old playtime and baby-sitting. If you are one of the thousands of evangelicals, mormons or conservative jews homeschooling in New York, you will have a church, tabernacle or temple as a support system that's got your back. If you are an atheist like us, good luck.

Schools bag purses in class - USATODAY.com or, why it's in the little things like banning a girl's purse that schools demonstrate how they are not about freedom of expression but about domination and control.

US economy chugs ahead despite auto and housing slumps - Yahoo! News or, how US business are succeeding in road-blocking economic independence among that pesky of servant classes, the middle class.

Dolls lose their innocence - Yahoo! News or, are we using sex to sell toys to kids or to adults?

Funk veteran Prince to play at Super Bowl show - Yahoo! News, or how to insult an aging pop star.

Iran hosts Holocaust doubters at conference - Yahoo! News or how Iranians get to do what most Republican wingnuts can't.

Would serial killer Dahmer have been an evangelist? - Yahoo! News or, how this article proves my theory that Christianity is all about sublimated cannibalism and necrophilia.

*** BTW, Hodgepodege is a wonderful dutch comfort food made of mashed potatoes, lettuce, bacon and cream that I had the pleasure to try out in Amsterdam earlier this year.

Been blogging at Snook about school dress codes and the degree to which costumes constitute culture, connecting that to how best to prepare for all possible futures and for disasters of all types -- natural, manmade and fashion disasters!

Which no doubt connects somehow to Liza's "taxidermy fashion as politics" too, but to me the main power of story is (as always) educational. Visit the original blogpost if you can, to see other links, comments and connected ideas, including how military hero Colin Powell's dress code fits into cultural warfare, but here's a little tease:

It’s the Culture, Stupid. Change their culture, change their world, which put in current culturally relevant terms might evoke “save the cheerleader, save the world”– and saving her doesn’t mean fretting over her algebra grade, much less clucking at her cleavage and throwing an old shirt over it in the guidance office…

Kids and teens live in a very real culture even if it seems like a comic book, one that School does not control or define (much as it wants to believe otherwise) and marginalizes itself further by refusing to engage.

Nance Confer and I are playing with a new learning-is-the-universe type blog we've dubbed "Cocking a Snook!" for reasons you can discern and snicker at if you like, when you visit. Here's the kind of thing starting to show up there; comments and eyeballs welcome, especially from Kitchen regulars. (Waving to Liza, sea, Lorraine and the guys --)

If culture changes like the Internet can actually change individual brains, those changes will in turn change institutions, or obsolesce the ones it can't --this morning I heard NPR guests discussing the extreme need for institutional change by Congress, the Supreme Court, etc. see if you can check it out on a podcast!) As our population hits 300 million this month, each Senator represents 3 million of us. How well represented does that make you feel as an individual?

No WONDER government institutions are foundering and as individuals, we'lre mad as hell, not gonna take it any more. Mucho maladaptations that won't be helped just by changing the color scheme of the decor from red to blue, or back again . . .

And when I say institutional change, I mean overhaul if not revolution.

I've enjoyed a half-century of thrilling school sports -- personally I bleed orange and blue -- but I'm prepared to argue that it is immoral and degenerate (if not downright sick and twisted) to school little kids as if they were competitive commodities in big-money academic sports franchises.

September 11, 2006
NEWSWEEK Cover Story
The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon
Among affluent families, the pressure to succeed at younger and younger ages is an inevitable byproduct of an increasingly competitive world. . .Parents are acutely aware of the pressure on their kids, but they're also creating it. . .
"There comes a time when prudent people begin to wonder just how high we can raise our expectations for our littlest schoolkids," says Walter Gilliam, a child-development expert at Yale University. Early education, he says, is not just about teaching letters but about turning curious kids into lifelong learners. It's critical that all kids know how to read, but that is only one aspect of a child's education.
. . . childhood takes time.

Giving little kids TIME to love reading and learning sounds great, doesn't it? But see how once again we twist general good into specific harm. As usual, we do it simply by misapplying force instead of respecting the individual. We love both nature and humans -- why such little love for the nature of little humans?

So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.

Do you know what words of advice inspire the greatest players in the world as they enter Centre Court for Wimbledon, to show what they know and can do?

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”-
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?

I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling.

Thoughts about the vagaries of voting machines today put me in mind of the mandatory tests used once upon a time--not just in the South either-- to prequalify voter fitness by proving oneself to the government already in power, by passing whatever tests it sees fit to impose on you, without your consent to be governed by test results because you can't vote yet.

Talk about a high stakes Catch-22!
I feel a rant coming on --

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. . . Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.