The election is upon us, and we're all getting bombarded with television ads that tell us how bad the opponent is. And the pundits frequently are not much better.
One of my wise old friends puts it this way: "The election is good for the media people -- they make a lot of money without having to think. And we citizens are being given a choice as to which of the two candidates is to be our dictator." My friend is exaggerating -- we don't have a dictatorship (at least, not yet). But his basic point is valid: the election is more about manipulating us citizens than serving us.
I can say, from the vantage point of a long lifetime of watching our governments from close up, that the transition from service to manipulation has been gradual-- so gradual as to be barely noticeable. We've been "outsourcing" our democracy and, in the process, we've been outsourcing children's educations.
Thoughtful educators have been telling us for years that children's learning cannot be outsourced -- not effectively: when we outsource education policies to government hierarchies we are subordinating the children (and their teachers) to systems that have been moving more and more toward manipulation.
I heard just yesterday (on C-SPAN) a speech by an intelligent politician calling for more standardization -- and more of the manipulation that goes with treating the children as if they are all alike. And that intelligent politician seemed to actually believe that treating children as cogs on an assembly line is just what the children need.
I saw, early in the week, a school that is totally committed to connecting students with the real life in the community; the students, to cite but one example of the kinds of real-life projects that they do, write and publish the town newspaper (with the support of a retired journalist in the community.) This school, a small school in the Appalachian corner of Northeast Alabama, is the best example I've seen of students being full-fledged members of their community. The school made me feel good: it gave me proof positive that we can have excellent schools. But the scarcity of such schools makes me sad.
When educators first started telling me about the damage being done by top-down manipulation, I believed that the solution to the problem was conceptually pretty simple: we citizens needed to join with the dedicated educators and explain the situation to public officials. I was naïve, to say the least. As of now, our public schools are so intertwined with our political systems that putting learning back where it belongs -- in the communities where the children live and where the professional educators and the citizens are partners with the students -- requires delicate surgery. Public schools cannot operate without money, and much of the money must come from governments; separating children's learning from top-down manipulation, and doing so without endangering government financial support, is at best a huge challenge. And times are not the best.
I've made it a point to compare notes with some of my elder friends from the world of politics and bureaucracy. (And I have also done lots of reading from people who know about governments.) The fact is that we don't know where our democracy is headed. The public is unhappy with governments -- lots of people realize that they're being manipulated and they don't like it. But this unhappiness is not necessarily taking us away from manipulation -- it could, in fact, go the other way.
My core conclusion here is that, although governmental manipulation is causing most of the problems in public education, there is not now a strategy for correcting that governmental problem. Those of us who are supposed to know something about government need to get ourselves a supply of humble pie. But that doesn't mean we need to give up: we citizens -- We the People -- have been, are now, and will be the source of our democracy's strength. And thanks to people such as those I've talked about in the mountains of Kentucky and Alabama (and such young people as Erica Goldson), we know the difference between learning by manipulation and learning by partnership.
Bob Cornett
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