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Authors: Laura Penny
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and demagoguery. In one of hismany letters on this topic, he anticipates the bumper-sticker chestnut “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. 21
In his final years, Jefferson made his ideas about education concrete, founding and designing the University of Virginia. It was one of the first schools in America to offer a political science program, and it had no faculty of theology or a campus chapel. Instead, the centre of Jefferson’s campus was the library, housed in a rotunda he modelled on the Parthenon.
It’s very picturesque and makes for a great photo op. Perhaps this is why, way back in 1989, when Bush the Elder called a meeting of the fifty U.S. governors to discuss national standards for the education system, they met at the University of Virginia. It may be difficult to remember this two decades later, after watching his son play the role of edjumacation prezdint, but Bush the First also pitched himself as an education president. Speaking from the steps of the Rotunda, he called for national performance indicators for schools and urged “tradition-shattering reform.” First on the agenda? “Isee the day when every student is literate,” quoth Poppy, shooting for the stars.
I have to give the man points for insisting that America must be a “reading nation,” even though he wrapped this fine principle in the usual blah-dee-blah about staying competitive in the international market. He omitted the salutary effects of reading that Jefferson endorsed, such as not becoming – or voting for – complete fuckwits, but he did ask the following excellent question:
Education is our most enduring legacy, vital to everything we are and can become. And come the next century – just ten years away – what will we be? Will we be children of the Enlightenment or its orphans? 22
More than a decade later, in 2000, his son posed a similar question: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” The difference between these two quotes says a lot, and none of it good. Even the president’s childrens is not learning. Is this because our schools is sucking?
Chapter Three
IS OUR SCHOOLS SUCKING?
And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know … the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country
.
– JOHN ADAMS 1
E ven though the school systems in the U.S. and Canada are governed by a patchwork of state and provincial regulations, schools sucking has become a trusty political football all over North America. Education is a campaign stump staple and a perpetual crisis, one many crusaders can cut to fit their cause. Fundies, lefties, righties, and customarily apolitical people worried about their wee ones all spin the state of the schools to support their opposing pet initiatives. They can advance their particular agenda, be it religious, political, environmental, or purely selfish, in thename of the children, thus racking up double concern points. Triple, if you equate children and the future. Recycling/Jesus + Babies + All Our Tomorrows = Very Important Issue/Person indeed.
For politicians, education is a reliable source of photo ops and flights of rhetoric, as it gives them a valuable opportunity to wax enthusiastic about children and the future – two things they
Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. 21
In his final years, Jefferson made his ideas about education concrete, founding and designing the University of Virginia. It was one of the first schools in America to offer a political science program, and it had no faculty of theology or a campus chapel. Instead, the centre of Jefferson’s campus was the library, housed in a rotunda he modelled on the Parthenon.
It’s very picturesque and makes for a great photo op. Perhaps this is why, way back in 1989, when Bush the Elder called a meeting of the fifty U.S. governors to discuss national standards for the education system, they met at the University of Virginia. It may be difficult to remember this two decades later, after watching his son play the role of edjumacation prezdint, but Bush the First also pitched himself as an education president. Speaking from the steps of the Rotunda, he called for national performance indicators for schools and urged “tradition-shattering reform.” First on the agenda? “Isee the day when every student is literate,” quoth Poppy, shooting for the stars.
I have to give the man points for insisting that America must be a “reading nation,” even though he wrapped this fine principle in the usual blah-dee-blah about staying competitive in the international market. He omitted the salutary effects of reading that Jefferson endorsed, such as not becoming – or voting for – complete fuckwits, but he did ask the following excellent question:
Education is our most enduring legacy, vital to everything we are and can become. And come the next century – just ten years away – what will we be? Will we be children of the Enlightenment or its orphans? 22
More than a decade later, in 2000, his son posed a similar question: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” The difference between these two quotes says a lot, and none of it good. Even the president’s childrens is not learning. Is this because our schools is sucking?
Chapter Three
IS OUR SCHOOLS SUCKING?
And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know … the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country
.
– JOHN ADAMS 1
E ven though the school systems in the U.S. and Canada are governed by a patchwork of state and provincial regulations, schools sucking has become a trusty political football all over North America. Education is a campaign stump staple and a perpetual crisis, one many crusaders can cut to fit their cause. Fundies, lefties, righties, and customarily apolitical people worried about their wee ones all spin the state of the schools to support their opposing pet initiatives. They can advance their particular agenda, be it religious, political, environmental, or purely selfish, in thename of the children, thus racking up double concern points. Triple, if you equate children and the future. Recycling/Jesus + Babies + All Our Tomorrows = Very Important Issue/Person indeed.
For politicians, education is a reliable source of photo ops and flights of rhetoric, as it gives them a valuable opportunity to wax enthusiastic about children and the future – two things they
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