Sometimes I miss being a student. I like to think I’m wise enough to realize that in the bigger sense, I’m still a student and will be one until my last breath. This means bringing that same sense of expectation and openness beyond the buildings dedicated to learning.
So when I say that I sometimes miss being a student, what I mean is I miss the buildings dedicated to learning and that underlying sense of excitement which always accompanies the emotions of expectation and openness.
How many of you can remember what it was like to start a new school year? Our shared youth fueling a group emotion heady with anticipation and anxiety? Being battered about by a surge of humanity when the period bell rang and the halls filled like sluiceways. The social cues of how to belong, or not, as our and others’ perceptions dictated. The hammering of your heart when that person you couldn’t keep your eyes off glided by.
And then there was the structure of the day itself. I personally believe that the factory method of instruction as explained by Zinn, where groups of students are packaged together as a unit for one hour of single topic instruction which is repeated throughout the day, is not the ideal method for most people to learn. It also puts people who aren’t inclined to learn by listening to someone lecture or by reading for themselves at a disadvantage.
Given my druthers, I enjoy learning by reading above all other ways except one. The other way is dialogue. I can listen to someone passionate and perspicacious talk about their chosen topic and remain riveted for hours. Someone passionate and perspicacious that I can question and plumb, well, let’s just say I was more than one engaged teacher’s favorite student.
I was one of those people for which the public education system did more good than harm. This includes the horror that was my middle school experience. I also had the great good fortune to attend a private Catholic high school where I unequivocally received a better education than I would have if I attended the public high school I was slotted to attend. So I know from personal experience the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.
Later in life I chose to pursue a master’s degree in teaching, so I think I’m at least technically qualified to remark on today’s confirmation of Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education.
Let’s take my high school experience as a case study in what Devos is trying to achieve. She is an avowed enemy of public education and wants to see federal funding for it syphoned away towards her preferred institutions, charter and religious schools. Private religious schools like Salpointe Catholic High, in Tucson, Arizona.
Salpointe charged, according to my mother, $3,000 a year for me to attend. This didn’t include student fees and food. Oh, and that price was lower if you belonged to a Catholic church. That might not seem like much but this was in the early 80’s. Today, Salpointe charges $9,400 for tuition. I’m fairly certain the average American family does not have nearly ten thousand dollars per child extra in their budget for education. Most Catholics probably don’t have the discounted price either.
To be fair, I will be the first one to assert that my mother got her money’s worth. You have to give it to the Catholics, in my experience they place academic success near the top of their priorities. But not at the top. Molding good Catholics strong in the faith remains at the top. This is why they had a mandatory religion class. And why there was a definite tendency to weave Christian themes into certain soft subjects. By that I mean I never heard sister Mary Peter mention Christ in geometry.
But she could have. And I’m sure there are religious schools out there that do. How many isosceles triangles can you make out of the cross our lord and savior died on kids? This is the sort of education Devos and her religious friends want to use taxpayer money to promote, “knowledge” such as creationism, otherwise known as alt evolution.
It was already too late for any real chance of converting me, high school was my first experience with a nonsecular school and by the time I got to Salpointe I didn’t identify as a Christian, much less a Catholic. By the time the Catholics had their chance, I was reading Spinoza and convinced there was no one watching the contents of my head but me. I’m not so sure I would have been so resilient if they’d had their way with me since elementary school. And Betsy Devos, Catholics, evangelicals, and home school parents are keenly aware of this.
So what? You said yourself that you got a much better education at your Catholic high school than you would have got at the public high school you would have attended. Don’t they have a point then that private schools are better at education than public ones? Besides, I hear you say, not only do kids get a better education, they also get Christ, which will make them a better person. So why not let more kids into private school and let some federal funding in to help?
As much as I hate having to explain this to you, dearly despised opposition, here’s one reason why – private schools are by definition private. Which means they include and exclude students based upon their own criteria. So beyond the odious notion of having taxpayers fund religious indoctrination, Catholic or otherwise, they will receive public money while simultaneously being able to reject the public for whatever reason they like. Maybe they don’t want any Mexicans. Maybe they don’t want any Mormons. Maybe they don’t want anyone with an IQ less than 110 and willing to sign a morality contract. Mostly they won’t want anyone that can’t afford the $9400 tuition, which won’t go down one cent the day they receive federal funding. And if you think that belief in Christ will make you a better person, then why are our prisons filled with so many Christians and so few atheists, beyond and above their representative size in our population? Religion can make no claims on moral superiority.
One of the reasons why my high school was able to give me a great education had nothing to do with it being Catholic and everything to do with it being exclusive. I never sat in a classroom with more than 25 people in it. Most of the English and writing classes I elected to take (which, hardly surprising, were among my favorites) had less than 20. I’m convinced this is one of the reasons why I also had such good teachers. Not because they were paid any better, which I’m sure they weren’t, but because they had classrooms filled with kids whose parents could afford to send them to a private high school. Not only that, they were assured that the students in those classrooms were more or less grade level proficient. How do I know this? I had to take an academic assessment test prior to admittance. Think about how this is likely to effect the student parent relationship vis-a-vis bad grades.
I wager there are a fair number of teachers who would agree to give up a bit of salary or benefits if they were guaranteed classrooms of less than 30 kids who were vetted grade proficient and living with parents that were paying large sums of money for their education. Parents who literally enjoy both a vested interest economically while simultaneously having a vested interest in their child’s academic performance. This means their child is much less likely to be hungry. Or live in an impoverished neighborhood, which means a student better able and willing to learn. A student that can be expelled for academic failure but usually isn’t because there’s a pissed off parent to make sure she won’t.
There are problems with our public education system. I personally think the system is ripe for a major overhaul. But not in the way Devos and her supporters wish to see it.
I mentioned at the beginning that I try to bring that sense of expectation and openness which I often felt at school beyond the walls of school. Applying that in this case is not as difficult as you might think. While I fear the worst, I also see the opportunity inherent to what Devos wants to accomplish. The system is ripe for overhaul and she is eager to see it burn. Perhaps there is a way to judo her attempt in service to the greater good.
Maybe it is time for humanists to start a chain of schools, Montessori style.
A chain of schools founded on the classics; civics, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, music and humanities, mathematics and the other hard sciences.
It’s the school I’d send my kid to. The schools we sorely need.
Oh and there would be no fucking football. [Ed. Note: Future me has reconsidered this. There would be no American Football.]
