An ounce of prevention
As you all know, we're currently in the midst of a rec(depr)ession and things look bleak. What I like to remember during times of deprivation, is what our bodies do when put under severe stress. They work to preserve the most important bits. For instance, when you're stranded in the snow, your extremities are sacrificed in favor of your core. Because you can continue to live without your fingers, but if your heart freezes you're gone.
I'm pretty sure that my long time readers know I'm a big fan of education and that's one of the items that's currently imperiled in a major way. In most all states education budgets are being eviscerated to a degree that is truly staggering. Usually I'd write my own piece but today I discovered a short essay by Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley. She presented it on March 4th as part of a statewide march on Sacramento and it's a powerful statement of what education means, not only in California but across the US and, indeed, the world. A suggestion of what could happen if we sacrifice "the core." Here it is.
Not long ago, California public education was an international beacon of excellence. Through much of the 20th century, Californians were committed to quality public elementary and secondary schools and an accessible multi-tiered system of higher education — from guaranteed access to community college for every high school graduate, to great research universities and professional schools.
After decades of demonstrating that this was possible — that there could be affordable mass access to high-quality education — California begin to unravel its own accomplishment. The 1978 passage of Prop 13 marked the beginning of this unraveling, pitching our elementary and secondary schools into the downward decline that today finds teachers facing overcrowded classrooms, insufficient books and supplies, inadequate compensation and lay-offs, and throwing a spectacularly successful higher education system into the mud.
This devastation of our public education and the rest of our public sector is not the consequence of our state being poor. Certainly we have suffered from the recession, the financial meltdown, the collapse in housing wealth, unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. But California still generates nearly one sixth of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, and were it a nation unto itself, our GDP would place us among the top 10 nations in the world.
California, rich in resources, rich in human talent, rich in industries, and very rich in the rich, can afford a first rate education system. But our quagmired political system (minority rule), anti-tax political culture, upsidedown state budget priorities, and the configuring of higher education itself on the model of a business — these have demoted public education to the status of a failing discount store.
Indeed, there is more at stake here than the loss of a great system of education, than the madness of permitting oil wealth, real estate wealth, Silicon Valley wealth, banking wealth, Hollywood wealth, agribusiness wealth and prisons to grow ever larger while starving our schools. There is more at stake than the madness of cutting the fuel to the economic engine that generated so much innovation and capacity in California during the last century. It is also the case that there can be no democracy without an educated citizenry.
Without quality public education, we the people cannot know, handle, let alone check the powers that govern us. Without quality public education, there can be no substance to the promise of equality and freedom, no possibility of developing and realizing individual capacities, no possibility of children overcoming disadvantage, or of teens reaching for the stars, no possibility of being a people guiding their own destiny or of individuals choosing their own course. Above all, there is no possibility of being a self-governing people, a democracy:
As the world grows more complex and integrated, as the media grows ever more sophisticated and powerful in shaping events and ideas, what maintains democracy is not the technical instruction into which resource-starved schools are rapidly retreating. It is not the reduction of high school to 2 years, college to 3, not vocational training for the many, but the kind of education through which future citizens learn to understand and engage the complexities of this world.
For democracy to survive, let alone thrive, the people must be able to know and analyze the powers organizing our lives. The people must be able to reflect on the perils and possibilities of our time and develop considered views about how to navigate them. The people must be able to analyze written and oral arguments, journalistic accounts, images and sound bytes…distinguishing the reasonable from the sensational, the serious from the simplistic, the well founded from the fatuous.
If such capacities have always been important to democratic citizenship, our increasingly complex world demands them all the more, and quality public education is the keystone to their acquisition. Without quality public education in our future, there is no future for democracy.
Without quality public education in our future, we face a huge divide between the educated and uneducated, corresponding to a divide between the rich and the poor and magnifying the power of the former, the powerlessness of the latter. This is plutocracy, not democracy.
Without quality public education in our future, we face a populace taught only the skills needed for work, ill-equipped to understand or participate in civic and political life. This is corporate oligarchy, not democracy.
Without quality public education in our future, we face a people manipulable through their frustrations, mobilizable through false enemies and false promises. This is the dangerous material of democracy's opposite — despotism if not fascism.
So California's disinvestment in education not only entrenches and deepens inequalities, not only breaks the promise of opportunity for every able student, not only chokes the engine of invention and achievement that built California's 20th century glory. It destroys the fundament of democracy itself — an educated citizenry capable of thoughtful analysis and informed judgment.
California must recommit to first class K-12 education and the California Master Plan for higher education. We must come to our senses, quickly, about preserving the most esteemed public university system in the world. And we must do so not only because education is what lifts people from poverty, equalizes opportunities, reduces crime and violence, builds bright individual and collective futures, but makes democracy real.
Educate the state. Sí se puede.
- And that's today's word from the bird
I especially like the part about "false enemies and false promises." It reminds me of a song by a young musician named Justin Nozuka. In his song Don't Listen to a Word You've Heard, he says, "You're told you're being attacked by terrorist invasions, but over and over and over again, it is YOU who points the gun."
I've noticed that people seem to think that the world is heading somewhere hopeless and beyond repair, but I've also noticed that more and more, especially over the past few years, people are taking interest in things like this; like being informed, educated, thinking for yourself and actively participating in change. There's strength in numbers!
It's always a shame to see cuts in educational offerings. But at the same time, I don't find it particularly compelling to see an educator saying "tax more to pay for us!" If she wanted to impress me, Ms. Brown would point out everything else that could be provided for students if teachers were paid 10% less.
I won't hold my breath on that one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming teachers for the current problems. I think they could use more accountability and don't particularly believe on the average they're underpaid, but it can also be a tough job and most do care about it. I am saying that 1% of your real estate value (what Prop 13 was about) is already a lot of money, and the problems we face deserve a better solution than "just spend more of someone else's money."
(You'll note she gave repeated references to how much California makes, but not a single mention of the $37 billion already spent on K-12 education. The entire "California has resources, spend more money!" argument is completely blind to that reality and is therefore ungrounded. I offer this as proof: You could double the education spending and next year give that same speech word-for-word.)
Were I to take a hand to improving the schools, I'd look to separate value from busywork. Are schools teaching the skills that must be taught in classrooms, and encouraging a learning-for-life approach that will enable people to continue growing independently? Or are teachers using the captive audience as an opportunity to pass on wholesale conclusions via phrases like "corporate oligarchy?"
But we do need to find more money to spend, and perhaps we should start at UC Berkeley. How about this: let's count how many Political Science blogs are out on the web vs how many Math ones there are. How much time is spent in the media covering political statements vs equations and proofs. Whichever one is more covered we'll cancel that department and give their budget to the underrepresented one. Surely Ms. Brown would approve.