: I hate both teams, but in the Superbowl of life, I’m obliged to root for the Crazy Christians. I hope they tear the Putrid Public Educators a new asshole. I’d get behind just about anything that would stick it and stick it good to these fucks. Let the Christians have their stupid vouchers – I hope it DOES make the public education system worse. Maybe vouchers will be the boot kick that finally topples this abomination over into a heap of rubble. I’m gonna cum just from THINKING about vouchers.SDF: If you want to find out more about vouchers, read Martin Carnoy's "Lessons of Chile's Voucher Reform" (Rethinking Schools, Winter 1995, p. 3). Chile instituted a voucher system as part of Milton Friedman's redesign of the Chilean economy under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The result was that the private Chilean schools were rendered more capable of skimming off the cream-of-the-crop of public school students, at no profit to themselves (and incurring to such private schools additional costs of expansion) and the public schools in Chile went downhill, having lost some of their "best" students. These results were also found in voucher experiments in Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which explains quite nicely why the advocates of vouchers are always pointing to the rather limited and poorly-studied experiment in vouchers in Milwaukee.
When thinking of ways to change schooling, it's a good idea to keep in mind that schooling won't change as long as the dominant adult attitude toward the education of children is that education is to be made into punishment and that children are to be forced to swallow it down like so much bitter medicine. If you want to see an attack upon schooling (such as you've launched here) directed against a private school, read Peter McLaren's SCHOOLING AS A RITUAL PERFORMANCE (which also contains a great methodology for the study of schools, btw.)
: As far as strategic plans go, I have nothing at the moment that would deserve that description, but I do give considerable thought to what such a strategy might entail. I think of my participation in this forum as a possible breeding ground for a more organized and coordinated assault. Currently, my greatest weapon is my own passionate disdain for this demented institution. I’m quite certain that, given access to the minds of large numbers of kids and parents of public school children, I could plant some very potent seeds of revolt.
SDF: Have you introduced the kids you know to Grace Llewellyn's book THE TEENAGE LIBERATION HANDBOOK? They could then start working on their parents. I think they can order it here -- there's also plenty of stuff on homeschooling on the Web of course, most of it for fundamentalist Christians, though there's also the stuff of the anti-school people. This is a big list.
: I’d like to start, or be part of, a grass roots movement to educate parents and children ABOUT public education: where it comes from, what its for, what its doing right now, how it performs. For example: I think if more parents knew that their child has a 50% chance of coming out the other end of this system as a functional illiterate, they would take alternatives to public education much more seriously. An ad campaign publicizing such statistics could do wonders: newspapers, TV, radio or, with a smaller budget: mail, email, flyers, etc.
SDF: It's possible something like this already exists.
: I’d favor a strategy that would piss some people off right away, get the boat rocking harder, draw some attention, but without appearing too fanatical. I can see making some borderline slanderous (but defendable) public comments regarding the public school system’s atrocious record and social agendas. Done correctly, this could attract some very interesting lawsuits. Once in court, we’d appeal to Christian congregations around the nation to lend their vocal, moral, and financial support to our cause. We’d use the lawsuits to draw a line in the sand that no self-respecting Christian would dare to stand on the wrong side of. The media, unable to resist the spectacle of indignant Christians, would pick up on all of this eventually. I’m sure that, somewhere and to some degree, this type of event has already unfolded or is currently unfolding, but, regardless, this scenario would be well worth repeating, especially if it was instigated intentionally in a coordinated and planned fashion.
SDF: Unfortunately, the politically organized Christians in this country are of the fundamentalist persuasion, like Stuart Gort, and I'd hate to see them make you into a pawn in their obvious and daily and well-organized efforts to turn America into a theocracy.
: Samuel: Would you encourage lots of people to drop out?….
: DADDIO: Either that or encourage kids to bring fake guns, knives and drug "look-alikes" (such as Tic-Tacs) to school thereby invoking the new "zero tolerance" policies that have some parents gasping in disbelief already. Mandatory expulsion or suspension is usually the punishment for violating these policies. Aside from being a very effective way of getting your child out of school, this could have some distinct advantages over just plain withdrawal. Its more political on its face and would be more attractive to the main stream media, it reveals to the parents just how incredibly stupid most of the people are that are in charge of educating their kids, and, I suspect, it could cause a comical train wreck with state truancy laws.
SDF: People just aren't that committed to ending public schooling for good. Awhile ago, there was a big protest at a Baltimore high school over something I don't remember what it was, and the principal responded by suspending 2/3 of the student body -- but lo and behold! most of the student body wanted to go back to school! Sorry I can't find it on the Net...
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: Samuel: ….(Will they get jobs if they can't show their prospective employers a high-school diploma?)
: DADDIO: Let’s save their souls first and worry about the jobs later – their just kids for God’s sake. And who says they won’t have a highschool diploma? There are already excellent alternatives to a public highschool diploma (home school, private school, Christian school, correspondence school, GED). A mass exodus from the public schools would provide a fertile customer base for these alternate institutions which would naturally and happily expand to accommodate the influx of new students (necessity is the mother of invention). And this is a market where demand should drive price down instead of up, making these alternatives more accessible to lower income families. (I’m not an economist. I would appreciate being checked on this last point)
SDF: Check out the January 1999 HARPER'S magazine, where Barbara Ehrenreich details how the folks earning minimum wage make a living, in a high-rent part of the Nation. The name of the game for such folks is either WORK TWO JOBS or BE AN EMPLOYED HOMELESS PERSON. The problem for many parents is that they are either too narcissistic or too financially broke to care about the education of their children. I remembered being a "new teacher" (actually I was a substitute hired long-term until the principal got off his butt and hired someone more credentialed than I to teach in a school with no library, no resources, and only a few teachers with brains) trying to call parents to get them to tutor their children in a poor neighborhood -- no go, and these were kids who hadn't learned to read and write in English yet. I also remember taking a lunch break when I was doing an ethnography on another such lower-class school for my dissertation -- I went to a corner stand to buy a burrito, and a little head popped out of the Mexican bakery next door, and the head said, "Hi Mr. F." -- what you've got today in some places is a lot of kids being pulled out of school, "dropping out" in the principal's words, to work on the family's business. Since this is going on today in the US despite truancy laws and labor laws sanctioning such things...
What's more, I would gather that the Fortune 500 corporations are already pretty heavily indebted to child labor, and releasing kids from the schools would be one step toward allowing these corporations to do the same business here that they do in Haiti etc.
The point is that there ARE worse things than schooling for many children here in the US -- I'm not worried about the kids whose parents are earning $70,000/ year... and that possibly the only virtue of the public schools (especially the inner-city ones -- last I heard no one was complaining about Beverly Hills High School) is that they are available to everyone (and not just those willing to pay), so that people such as Seymour Sarason have been recommending that we tear down the current system and build a new such system from scratch.
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: Samuel: Would you become a teacher and subvert the system from within?
: DADDIO: I don’t think I could muster up enough self-hatred to become a public highschool teacher. I’ll leave that angle to the poor suckers that are already there.
SDF: You might consider being a substitute teacher -- there's a great demand for the services of substitute teachers, and you wouldn't have to go to college to get a teaching credential (which you would probably consider more of the same), and you wouldn't be beholden to principals or parents because no one but the students would be watching you. Though, as a substitute teacher, I generally prefer the lower grades as the younger students have been less "modified" by their experiences with the system. You might also consider working with the schools in the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools, though the pay isn't that good I'm sure...
: Samuel: …(Won't the students rebel against your imposition of intelligence upon their stupefied brains, as they did against me?)
: DADDIO: I don’t see why they would. They don’t rebel against the imposition of the complete STUPIDITY that the teachers place on them now. Of course, if this imposition has resulted in a brand of stupidity that makes students feel threatened by intelligent and novel ideas, then we’ve got a big problem. Is this what happened to you? I’d love to hear more about that. At any rate, that’s one challenge of being a teacher that I might actually enjoy…..corrupting young sell-outs.
SDF: Remember, Daddio, they're controlled by the system for a long time, so that when they get to college they expect to conform to the same sort of punishment they've been dealt in high school, and they're highly disappointed when they are asked to do onerous chores like thinking for oneself -- don't get your fingers burnt...
I'll get to the rest later...
