Public education is under attack.
We are told daily that there is a crisis in the classroom: Bad test scores they say. Bad teachers they say.
But don’t worry. Corporations are coming to our rescue replacing public service with the free market.
BEWARE
When corporations get involved in the learning process everything becomes ‘commoditized’ or assigned a worth in the marketplace. Children become products. Teachers become workers. Parents become consumers. And schools become factories focused on making a profit.
The latest aspect of this is the use of value-added measures to determine a teacher’s competency by his or her students’ test scores. Implicit in this system is that students shouldn’t work for the inherent value of knowledge, but rather do the work for the sole purpose of earning a grade. Furthermore, the unnecessary adversarial relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and other students coupled with school financing disparity due to local wealth or poverty [See post Occupy 101], tend to create schools where students learn to rule or to be ruled and creativity and the love of learning take a distant second place.
How do corporations propose to fix things?
- Privatize as many schools as possible
- Cut costs
- Cut teachers
- Those left must do more with less
How do these changes help improve our children’s education? As Diane Ravitich says: “Teacher’s working conditions are children’s learning conditions.”
Everyone in education should watch her video
The corporate monster which stalks the planet wraps its tentacles around public education under the guise of “reform” and improvement of education when what they are actually doing is setting up the game to control training of future employees (slaves). Stripped of benefits and independence future workers become humble, easy to control automatons.
I’m glad TEACH PEACE NOW is calling attention to this important fact of our age as corporations insert their other tentacles into rural areas and state government through GOP control of state houses/governorships. As corporations assert control of the states, our countrysides (by exploiting them for so-called “energy independence”) and education we, as the 99%, must fight back! And there is no recourse but each other! Don’t let them turn us against each other! After all our own Supreme Court has amplified and encouraged our democracy’s death by their Citizens United decision and our ubiquitous cable news media exists under corporate permission as we must suffer natural gas PR during breaks in the Rachel Maddow Show. Stay united and occupy what is already ours.
Monster is the right word. And the problem is teachers are all so overworked, focusing on the needs of their students that this monster has crept up on us and blindsided us.