As a classroom teacher and teacher of teachers during the last half of the 20th Century I have been a witness to the so-called reform of education. The latest catch-phrase in this process is the “No Child Left Behind” promise that has never been realized after seized upon and reiterated as a campaign slogan in recent elections. Everybody wants Education Reform and certainly, No Child should be Left Behind. But behind this effort which goes back to the formation of rudimentary local education efforts in the Colonial period, are the conflicting pressures about who should be educated.
One of my best stories of anti-education beliefs of a good portion of our population (and this goes back to when I was a Junior High English teacher in Elizabeth, N.J. in the 1950’s) concerns an unusually good and promising student whose father came one day at my request to tell me why his son will forthwith be taken from my class and have no further education. This man explained that he never got beyond the eighth grade and no child should shame his father by exceeding him. This is not quite the same feeling towards education as expressed later by a student in Central High School in Newark, N.J. He told me that he didn’t care what grade he was awarded in History because the arrangements were already made for him to enter a college out in Long Island.
Every since I was a student of Educational History in the U.S. , I have pondered on the difficulties we are having while forces fight for control over the education of young minds in and out of our schools. One graduate student in a course quaintly called,”Modern Educational Practices”, questioned everything I taught. This was fine with me until I realized that she was coming from a Christian Home schooling background that needed a lot of filling in with history that I was trying to explain. But, instead of learning about the background of why our educational practices got that way and there was pressure to change from different directions, she denied the rectitude of the class and fought all the way through trying to point out to the entire class that lack of faith as a basis for study was the path laid out by the Devil. I kid you not. This happened in a class of mine at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
The struggle for control over education now involves scrubby attacks on PUBLIC EDUCATION and PUBLIC SCHOOLS by those who want an elitist education for the few and to hell with the children of the poor and undeserving. The whole elaborate “faith generated” attacks are because we have left God out of the curriculum and we must erect special schools for special students who must be elevated out of the mud people who have crawled onto our shores. Change, not reform is going on and children are still left behind. The mantra of “Nothing but the cheapest for our (Public School) children” is still the watchword of the faithful.