Hey Deep Daddio -- talk is cheap. What do you intend to DO about it? (I know you've started to answer this question here, but give us more of a strategic plan if you could, please.) Would you ally yourself with fundamentalist Christian politicians who rant and rave about public schools but who will probably cop out with voucher systems which will make both private and public school systems worse? Would you encourage lots of people to drop out? (Will they get jobs if they can't show their prospective employers a high-school diploma?) Would you become a teacher and subvert the system from within? (Won't the students rebel against your imposition of intelligence upon their stupefied brains, as they did against me?) Would you run for public office, presumably on a school board? (Do you have the credentials to win?)If you think there's some great conspiracy to stupefy America through public education, have you considered the possibility that most of the conspirators are doubtless products of the public school system itself, and thus might too stupid to pull off such a conspiracy?
Or, hypothetically: if the public school system were to be abolished tomorrow, what would happen to the kids whose parents couldn't afford private education, whose parents didn't have time or resources to home-school them? Would they go back to child labor, which is what they did before the system was created? (Maybe this question is predicated upon my suspicion that America is the land of self-absorbed narcissists who don't care about kids or anyone besides themselves, thus perhaps there are worse hells for American kids than public school, hard as this may be for you to imagine...)
All I'm suggesting here is that maybe the problem is with America itself and not just with its public school system... here are some questions I've been asking people, to tease them with the possibility that American education isn't all it's cracked up to being... perhaps you'd be amused to read it...
IMHO this Net dialogue needs to get a lot closer to what Paulo Freire called "problem-posing education," to ask the question, "what can we do here and now with what we've got?"
