Why is it that suddenly public school teachers have become the “whipping boy” for everything that is wrong in the good ol’ U.S.A.? Looking through the newspapers, watching the nightly news, browsing across the Internet, one know-it-all after another seems to believe that educators are the major problem in this country. When did being educated become a bad thing? When did fear and ignorance take precedence over strength and knowledge? Who started this fear mongering amongst the ignorant? What has caused people to turn on their own, baring fangs ready to attack at the jugular? Why in hell have we become backward as a nation?
Everywhere I turn I see one talking head or bureaucrat after another screaming like a banshee about the downfall of the American education system. Therein lays the first problem; if you’ve never spent time in a classroom as an educator you cannot write or dictate policy. It’s simple, it’s plain, and it’s obvious to all but the talking heads and bureaucrats. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claims to have all the answers and yet all I hear is “think outside of the box”, “do more with less”, “funds are being cut”, “your school had better pass the test”, “teachers and principals will be fired if your school doesn’t make the grade….” All of this crap gets spewed and yet there are no answers from him on how to fix the problem. President Obama has sworn to continue to support education. And yet now, at his insistence, we have districts across the country competing for millions of dollars (Race to the Top) at all costs. Competition such as this will only create teachers and administrators that will do whatever is necessary to garner the funds. That includes cheating on the numbers and cheating on the standardized tests. Corruption on state testing is rampant across the country. Districts are afraid of losing funding. Teachers are afraid of losing jobs.
Suddenly, being an educated person is a bad thing in this country. Anyone with a college degree, especially teachers, used to be well-respected and thought well of as vital community members. Nowadays, educators are called names, threatened with job loss, put into unfair working conditions, verbal and/or physical abuse hurled at them from students and parents, all while receiving little, if any, support from their administrators. Educated people are considered to be uppity and being ones that look down from the mountaintops with disdain for the uneducated. Quite the opposite is true. Educated people have made sacrifices to be educated and well-trained. Many of us want to help the others up the hill and out of the abyss of ignorance and fear. We put ourselves on the front lines each and every day to help others reach their goals and to hopefully have those same people surpass us.
Educated people are not uppity. Many of us have been on both sides of the poverty track. We sacrificed and struggled as college students, working a job, if not more, while juggling studies, classes, research, and internships. We are not uppity, we are proud. Proud of what we have accomplished even when the obstacles seemed overwhelming. As an educator I want that for every individual, that sense of pride and dedication. But it must be done with perseverance and determination, not apathy and learned helplessness. It must be accomplished with an open mind free from the barriers of ignorance.
Personally, I have seen so much of this take place since 9/11/01. What should have been one of our strongest moments as a nation became a chasm of hatred, fear, and bigotry. This has finally trickled down to the classrooms, more in terms of finance than anything else. Keep this generation uninformed and frightened and you can make them do whatever you wish. Funds are being cut in the schools. Textbooks are being rewritten to exclude the facts and are being replaced with opinions. Charter schools, private schools, subsidize the rich kids. That’s where the government would like to have your tax dollars spent.
Rush, Glenn, Sean, Ann, Bill, Carl, Rumsfeld, W., began so much of this bullshit. They played on the fear of the ignorant, the uneducated, and the white males who believed they would always be the ones in charge. Now that ignorance and bigotry, the vitriol, have moved across this country like a dust storm on the Kansas plains, wiping out everything that had been planted before. In seven short years they managed to undo all that Freedom Marchers had worked for, to undo all education reforms that had been accomplished and to trample on women’s rights, replacing it instead with a corporate mentality, oppression, and the four-letter word FEAR. The right wing nuts used the fear to pad their own pocketbooks, getting rich off the fear and uncertainty of whites in America. Educated and informed people know that the wing nuts are just a bunch of big dumb jack asses. But the ignorant are thriving on the fear, the hate, the animosity, the bigotry….confusing it for fact.
We are talking steps backwards in leaps and bounds. Many in this country would have women stay at home, barefooted and pregnant. Education is being made so expensive that only the elite will be able to attend college. Will we return to segregation? It’s happening already in America. Ignorant, frightened, uneducated; keep the masses all three of these things and corporate America will own all of America. America will no longer be the country of diversity and freedom. It will be a never-ending loop of the “Jerry Springer Show.” Look around you. Listen to the hatred and anger coming from the wing nuts. Look at the freedoms the tea partiers and Rethuglicans are trying to take away or already have taken away. Listen to the speeches, underlying bigotry so subtle as to nearly be lost to all except the educated and informed individual. They have us by the throat. Will we be strong enough to thwart their attacks on personal choice and freedoms? Will we be strong enough to continue to educate our young people to be free thinkers and encourage them to embrace diversity? Or are we going to let them rip the flesh right off our necks, drowning in a pool of our own blood, our own making? Education is where the answer lies. We must continue to educate our population at all costs. We must have the viability to withstand the condemnation of education in our country. Education equals freedom and I don’t think the wing nuts want the populace to have an education. After all, education kills ignorance and leads to a well-rounded and informed population. One sure way to make a Rethuglican’s head explode, make him or her argue with a well-informed general public. Works every time.
-Patty O'Malley