AMERICAN SOCIETY AND EDUCATION ARE THE GUILTY

[Morpheal]

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND EDUCATION ARE THE GUILTY

The more poorly and inadequately educated a society is the more regulation and enforcement it tends to require, to prevent it from collapsing into chaos.

This means that the more police that a society needs, the less effective and the more inadequate its education system really is. Similarly the more jails it needs and fuller those jails are with criminals, and the more severe their crimes tend to be, the more inadequate the schools really are. Congruent to that is the factor that the more adequate and effective the school system tends to be the more adequate and effective the adult remedial education tends to be for newcomers who have not had the advantage and need to catch up. The poorer the system is in the first place, the poorer that expectation and provision for its fulfilment tends to be. This further contributes to the crime and policing statistics, but not as much as the original failing of the system to educate young people. Where school education is poor in quality, content and methods, the expectations on newcomers to the society as to citizenship training, language skills, arithmetic, and general knowledge tend to be much lower than in a society where the education system tends to achieve exceptional standards. Standards in society as a whole are significantly, even if not wholly, a product of the education system with in that society, and that includes standards as to newcomer educational requirements, opportunities and attainments. In summary the less we expect from our own the less we expect from others, until at the bottom of the heap we tend to expect nothing much at all. That bottom of the heap is largely where the matter has sunk down towards.

All of this has another effect, and that is a statistically related increase in social violence, violent crime, and disrespect for authority, requiring even more regulation and enforcement. In fact it becomes a vicious cycle fed by ignorance, frustration born from ignorance, confusion, and anger.

The idea that anger of that type, or any type, has positive economic merit and makes for better people, more able to provide economic means for themselves is easily disproved, and there is plenty of valid sociology and psychology on that subject. We need not regurgitate the science on that subject. It’s there. That no one in power gives heed to this fact tends to be a major problem. As much a problem as is the failure of education, which is a failure that remains invisible due to the convincing con tricks that promote continued belief in a system that is both inadequate and gone bad. If you are told, often enough, by “experts” that all is well, and that good is being best served, you tend to accept it. After all they are more educated in the subject than you are. Unfortunately they are also the stakeholders who’s own stake in the system depends on convincing you that all is well and good. What they don’t tell you is to look at society to see whether all is well and good. There you could see for yourself what remains less than transparent in the educational system itself. Results speak louder than theories of pedagogy, but pedagogy tends to seek to insulate itself from society and its troubles. It takes no responsibility for happens outside its doors once the final bell rings.

Therein there has to be a major change. Education must begin to take responsibility for its products. If you get a lemon from Detroit, you take it back and you expect rectification. Detroit offers a warranty and they have to fix it without it costing you for the repairs. Education, unfortunately has never been put in that same position. Its shoddiest products are shipped out into society without warranty and with relatively no recourse against the education machine that churned them out. Clearly, looking at society, we know that that machine failed to produce product of sufficient quality to meet the real needs of society. We know that in too many obvious ways to count. A fiscal crisis of the magntitude we have now seen happening, and a long litany of other disasters, could never have happened if education had produced a quality product, most of the time, with few needs for recalls and warrantied repairs. Unfortunately we use our overloaded justice system, the courts and their judges, to handle recalls, and we use our ever growing number of penitentiaries as warranty depots, expecting them to correct the defects. Again, we know it does not work very well that way. The damage done by poor education, and its lack of quality products, cannot be that readily repaired. We question if we even have sufficient resources to attempt such massive repairs to so many units of production. They are too damaged. Considered scrap. Beyond repair. Beyond even salvage. How could that happen if we have an educational system that produces quality ? The answer is that it could not.

What is the answer to this spiral of systemic demise ?

One answer is get the con tricksters out. Suspend beliefs about the education system and stop listening when they tell you that it is a good system, producing good products, of good quality. That’s what they want you to believe. Have faith, and everything remains status quo, in continued decline, never to really improve, because progress requires change, a shake up, it is hard work, and the con tricksters running education don’t want to work that hard. It’s an easy life churning out product they do not have to really be responsible for. What could be easier ? Imagine the Detroit three freed from all responsibility for every car their produce off their assembly lines. Imagine no recalls, and no warranties. Imagine no quality standards for finished products, as to their intended function. Where would you be if you had to accept cars on that basis from the big three ? We know exactly where you would be. No doubts there. However, knowing that you were educated that unregulated human nature is fundamentally good, you could put your trust, your faith, in Detroit to give you something good, something functional, something that will give you no real and serious trouble, can’t you ? A lot of educators are teaching exactly that belief. We know it isn’t true. We know what happens without regulation, and without measurable standards, imposing real responsibility for the product. The same is true of education. Educators are people. So they are fundamentally good, and their products therefore are fundamentally good. They just bring the goodness out that is already there. What could be easier. That and some reading, writing and arithmetic added in. Well, that naive assertion, as common as it still is, has to go out the window. Trash. Pure and utter trash. We know that not everyone starts from such naive premises, but we also know that even if they don’t they sill don’t take responsibility for the quality of their products. They don’t go home and gnash their teeth, pull out their hair, mortify their bodies, seek penance, make confessions, agonize and contemplate falling onto their ceremonial dagger (or paper knife). Their consciences are clear. They don’t ever think about the growing number of penitentiaries, crowded court rooms, overcrowded jails,. unsafe urban streets, family breakdowns, shoddy business practices, disregard for human lives and liberties. In fact they don’t think of any of that at all, not even the erosion of basic constitutional freedoms, and the condition of the infrastructure, as being measures that all indicate the total failure of education. They have to begin to think that. They have to begin to understand that every one of those failures, affecting society today, is a failure of education. It si the educators failure and if they cannot do a better job at it then they should get out, and make way for those who can. It is time for a change.

When a child goes wrong and the trained expertise of the educator realizes that a child has gone wrong, society is responsible. Society must learn to accept that responsibility as a whole, and not shirk it and shrug it off onto one or another rationalization. It is society that went wrong somewhere down the line in the root cause analysis. Not the peer group, the gang, the poverty, the toilet training, the parents, the uncles, or Santa Claus. It is society. Simply society.

Society then needs to provide the mechanism, the most advanced and effective scientific means, for correcting what its wrong. The teacher must be responsible not only for inculcating discipline, values, morality, ethics, communication skills, social skills, team skills, guiding experience, and knowledge of what is truly right and good for life, but the teacher must also be the front line defence there to identify when something has gone wrong and is beyond any rectification that normative classroom education is able to offer.

Then society is responsible, being itself guilty of the ultimate causes of the wrong, even if those are generations of ignorance, misunderstanding, misdirection, lack of adequate education, dysfunctional practices and wrong beliefs. That responsibility means that society must via legislation and funding provide the best means to remedy what it has done wrong.

When society refuses to do this, and that irresponsibility of society extends to the irresponsibility that is allowed to its educators, its teachers, then what society does is produce another worse wrong. That is the ultimate irresponsible wrong of creating a lifelong suffering victim. That is when we have an irresponsible society, and its irresponsible educators, filling every court room a and jail that can be staffed and can be built with its victims. Many of those are in fact from groups that can be designated as ethnic minority, black, poor, underprivileged, disenfranchised, newcomers, and other victims of prejudice and mistreatment. Some are from families who’s own lack of adequate education added to the increased burden of ignorance. Some are the failures of medicine to pick up the pieces where education failed to recognize the illnesses. Or where education ignored what it found too challenging to deal with, sliding it through, diplomatically (pun intended). Another further form of irresponsibility on the part of society compounding the problem. Every time the gavel comes down and another prisoner is sentenced, society is guilty. Education is guilty. Guilty of refusing to take responsibility. Refusing to accept and endorse the need for real change and real progress. Guilty of all the ruined lives and all the suffering in every city, in every town, in every jail, in America.

Equally guilty when business downturns, vicious economic cycles, upheavals of human lives, excessive stress, frustration, destructive pressures, displacement, ruined dreams, failed hopes, abandonment, social loss, and all the other negative effects of unethical, immoral, business and economic practices, fail to serve the good of people. Fail to provide for their personal growth, the security and well being of their selves, and families, and fail to provide real opportunity for finding and developing unique talents and special gifts, wasting people, and leaving them frustrated, beaten, worn out victims of an economic system that is the product of that same society, and particularly of its educational system. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. It is time to execute that system as the torturer and murder that it has become. It is time for education to change and become responsible, producing responsible citizens, for a responsible society that is no longer able to shirk that responsibility, which it continues to so totally evade and deny.


Robert Morpheal

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