I grew up with educators and I have been teaching since I was in Boy Scouts. Education, by that I mean educating people, all people, in the U.S. has always been a cornerstone of my personal beliefs. For years I asked people of all stations, “what does it mean to be educated? What do we expect from our public education systems?”
The only answer I ever received was “well, educated, you know, completed school, educated.”
I finally came up with my own definition of what it means to be “educated”, but it turns out what I didn’t understand was that the stated reason didn’t line up with the real reason which can be derived by observation. From what I can see, the real reason for public education in the U.S. is to hold children and adolescents in supervised detention while people of legal age to join the work force.
In plain language the real reason for public education in the U.S. is Public Incarceration.
If education were the goal, each student would have a curriculum designed to meet his or her needs. If the education of individuals were the goal, there would be sufficient instructional staff to do the time consuming work of determining each individual’s deficits and surpluses in the various areas such as mathematics, reading, language skills, critical thinking and logic. If educating the individual were the goal, there would be data on his or her status collected daily and used to diagnose learning difficulties and prescribe specific learning activities to further the individual’s goal to become educated. If education were the goal there would sufficient resources allocated to the task of giving every student the knowledge and skills to be a productive member of our society.
This type of education takes time and people and technological resources and most of all money. In this is the kind of education educating the individual is foremost not marking time while the person is kept out of the way of the real world of business.
If Public Incarceration were the goal, then every minor would be required to daily submit to staying at a government run facility that is operated to keep the individual occupied with activities designed for the individual with below average motivation and learning skills. If Public Incarceration were the goal, then these facilities would be staffed by people with the charge of keeping records of each individual’s attendance and at the same time keeping violence at acceptable levels. If Public Incarceration were the goal, the systems for accountability would be more focused on tracking the accumulated time spent in the institution rather than the individual’s status in terms of what they know and can do. If Public Incarceration is the goal, then the national standards used to measure success would be set at the most trivial level: recall of information, to speed up the collecting and scoring of tests rather than aiding the individual’s learning. If Public Incarceration were the goal, the scores from annual testing would be scheduled so that scores from the test would have no impact on the learning of the student’s who took the test.
Based on observing this system, the answer to the question, “are our schools failing?” is apparently no, the vast majority of public schools are opening regularly, and keeping their students within their supervisory domain for the required daily duration.
In this regard, where our schools are failing comes from those individuals who refuse to submit to the daily confinement, which means we need to increase the force that polices truants. Better yet, why not turn our “schools” into juvenile detention centers? After all, in Georgia, we taxpayers vote regularly to spend $40,000 per year on each inmate in the official penal facilities, so we will have to increase the spending from the $6,000 per year per regular school student now spent in the existing educational system.