For a while during my time as a school teacher, I questioned a lot of what involved me but soldiered on to become the best teacher I could be.  I learned a lot that turned out to be what my students taught me – things the books and professors could not in my Teacher Ed classes.  However, there was this time before my time to teach that the corporate structure of business became the model for how the schools should be run.

In reality, the first school is at the child’s mother’s knee and in the father’s workshop.  When becoming literate became important, you had professionals who knew how to read and write and do arcane mathematical things that mother and father turned to.  Eventually, since there were so many homeless children abandoned and running about in the streets –(when there were no schools) that PUBLIC SCHOOLS were imagined, fought over and became the norm which was equated with bulwarking democracy. An educated public would ensure that civic responsibility was drummed into children who would turn out to be leaders (thank Jefferson for that) while the rest would become productive workers.

The wheel of time turned and the schools turned out to be giant factories where children were formed up into classes and moved from job to job and eventually to wearing ridiculous Medieval flat hats and gowns showing that they had earned diplomas and degrees.  But, the charge that schooling was a bad thing has followed the PUBLIC SCHOOLS since tax monies supported them and people have a way of hating taxation and avoiding it.  Superintendents of schools were created to see that the public’s money was not spent frivolously and at times in the turbulent history of the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, such things as “frills” (music, art and such) were done away with although free sports as part of education were transformed into vast classes of exercise so that your Johnny and later Janie could become willing and buffed up soldiers. Teaching became indoctrination.

Alternatives to PUBLIC EDUCATION were based on the notion that PUBLIC schools were bastions of liberal ideology with liberal teachers spouting unpatriotic seditious ideas and drumming disloyalty into the heads of educands. That battle still rages and the latest sprout of an old idea is breaking out of the soil of the universe of discourse and is labeled - unschooling. By that, its backers mean to have schools NOT corrupt children that early.  They want kids to teach us about what they want to learn.  We could go back to Rousseau and Dewey for germs of this idea but it simply goes back to Mom’s knee and Dad’s workshop.  Nothing is new under the sun and this too will be futile.  What we will do is still have to “educate” homeless children who fill the streets and look for trouble.  The schools were dreamed up as a cheaper place to build than jails and this is still true.