In The Tao of Politics, Thomas Cleary translates the lessons of the Masters of Huaninan who point out the difficulties in trying to live with virtue and intelligence in an environment polluted with the desires of the ambitious and greedy. As the masters put it, "Place a monkey in a cage, and it is the same as a pig, not because it isn't clever and quick, but because it has no place to freely exercise its capabilities."
While I take issue with the disparaging tone toward pigs, this quote is still useful in questioning the recent slash and burn philosophy adopted by some education reformers such as former Chancellor of D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee. I don't doubt Ms. Rhee's sincerity in wanting to change the way we educate children. As she so accurately put it in the recent documentary, Waiting for Superman, our children are getting a "crappy education." But chief among Ms. Rhee's plans to improve education was a full-throttle drive to get rid of all bad teachers.
Certainly, we need to weed out teachers who don't belong in the profession. Just was we should be weeding out doctors, politicians, and financiers who are harmful to our well being. However, if we look at recent international test scores, American students are seriously behind other countries and sinking lower by the year. To what extent is bad teaching the problem? In 1983, that landmark study of our education system, A Nation at Risk, warned us that our education system had been in decline since the late sixties. There is plenty of evidence to show that decline has continued unabated. This means nearly everyone now running the education system and our country was educated by a system in decline.
The list of graduates from the system include not only Michelle Rhee but President Obama, former President Bush, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as most members of Congress and the presidents cabinet and advisors. The state of our schools as well as our government, health care system, financial institutions, and the environment suggests that advanced degrees from even the most prestigious universities have not imbued our leaders with the character, sense of justice, and problem-solving skills required to ensure the well being of the poor and middle class. We the People have also not learned how to demand better from our leaders.
All systems are the same system, and the system in America is not just broken; it's corrupt. At the heart of this corruption is an education system that places more importance on percentiles and winning than on character and wisdom, more importance on science and technology than the wisdom of the arts and humanities. Today in many schools, thirty thousand years of what it mean to be human have been reduced to an occasional elective.
The real problem in our schools is not bad teachers. The problem is that even the best teachers are hampered by a system created by leaders who for the last fifty years have legislated out nearly every impetus for compassion, creativity, intellectual integrity, and sound teaching methods. Could it be that if given a more just and creative system, those "bad teachers" might receive the kind of training and opportunity that would enable them to flourish.
It's the rare person who goes into teaching without wanting to teach and to make a difference in children's lives. Michelle Rhee and those who support her slash and burn policies give no evidence of understanding the history of education reform in America and why what's happening in our schools is defeating the efforts of even the best teachers.
For more on the history of education reform in America, please visit The Gulliver Initiative, and check the navigation bar for the section on the history of education reform.
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