Dear Mr. President

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

I am very concerned about the direction in which your Administration seems to be taking our educational systems.

I appreciate the concern for preparing our children for employment in a technology driven world, and thus the focus on building up the math, science and computer related aspects of the curriculum. However, I wonder if any of your advisors have connected the dots between the dysfunctional and destructive aspects of our governmental, political, and financial systems and the assault that was launched on the concept of liberalism and the idea of liberal arts in an educational curriculum.

This assault probably began earlier, but I first noticed it with the attacks on Adlai Stevenson. The assault really gained momentum with the first term of President Reagan and eventually made the concept of liberal and government into  dirty words. It has gone on to all but destroy the liberal arts curriculum in many, many of our primary and secondary schools.

Yes. We do need to focus the vocational aspects of our educational systems more on the fact that technology, in all of its many aspects, has replaced many, many of the "jobs" that needed doing in our society. This trend will undoubtedly continue to replace many more areas of employment that were the core of the industrial revolution. There are, however, other issues that need addressing which are core to our society: How are equality, freedom, liberty, and justice for all going to fare under this technological paradigm? These issues can only be addressed by individuals who have some inkling of what they mean.

The toll that the assault on a liberal education has already taken is causal to the dysfunctional and destructive aspects of our present situation. We need educated citizens at least as desperately as we need well-trained citizens. However, under the relentless assault on the ideals which make up the purpose and goals of a liberal education, what has happened over the years is that the notion of the purpose of education has shifted.

The purpose of education has shifted from the study of what makes a human being human—what it takes to make a government of the people for the people and by the people. The goals of education have shifted from teaching children or drawing forth from the children the understanding of their own wonderful, unique, innate value and goodness, their shared equality with the rest of humanity, and equipping them with the knowledge, wisdom and will to strive, to climb the ladder of compassion and brotherhood with all people, to bring forth that human being that exists in everyone.

The purpose of education now is not to teach or draw forth but to indoctrinate children with values of competition and exclusivity. We teach the skills and provide information necessary to climb the ladder of income, of exclusive personal power and prestige. The ladder of character is mentioned, if at all, as a quaint pass time, an elective if available. Our public schools need to be seen as the first line of our progress as a people, enabling individuals to be able to do what they discover they want to do not training factories for workers.

While some form of a liberal arts curriculum still exists in most secondary schools, the focus has changed from teaching us to be human beings to training us to be employable beings whose goal is to be able to climb the ladder of income, rather than to be a participating thinking member of the people, the true Common Wealth.

Rather than preparing our children to be inclusive of others, to be conscious of the interdependence of the world, to be thinking and self-reliant, the schools are rapidly becoming centers where human beings are viewed as raw material for Employers or Owners to meet their production, manufacturing, data processing or whatever, needs. These employers, small and large, are really not interested in having employees who think, who know who they are, who have opinions about the equality of the relationship between the Owners and the workers. They really want robots, and the educational system that your administration is proposing is tending very strongly in that direction.

These same employers are generally aligned against programs which serve the common good and general welfare, specifically educational  programs like head start or "pre-school" programs. These programs foster an enlightened people and work from the center of a democratic people out and actually include everyone. The recent "adjustments" to the student loan program are a glaring example of the retrogressive direction in which our educational systems have become steadily more exclusive and turned from schools for the benefit of the people to businesses which profit and serve the few.

It is true that the sectors of our society that concern the common good and general welfare— the environment, transportation, communication—can provide many "jobs" in the immediate future; however, most of these jobs will eventually be done by machines. The education and health care sectors right now would provide many millions of wonderful human jobs, jobs that machines, no matter how sophisticated, will never be able to do.

We need millions of teachers to teach millions of ourselves to do this work. These are service functions. This labor carries rewards to the individuals who are engaged in it, far beyond the ladder of income. It benefits others, is totally self-sustaining, does not damage the environment, and generates understanding and appreciation of our planet and each other. We are allocating Public money. Surly wisdom indicates that we make this sector the priority receiver of our common wealth.

Lots of love

-Tom