Churning Out Drones

Decades ago, a friend quite teaching kindergarten after many years because the "reformed" and "improved" public school system demanded she turn out what she called "peas in a pod" instead of allowing her to encourage each child's individuality.

That was the height of individualistic teaching compared to what the public education DEformers are trying to replace public education with today.

Digby:

And that's really the whole point here: destroy teachers' unions, eliminate the possibility of the government being able to attract decent teachers, then use the resulting chaos to privatize the entire education system. The billionaires want to do this not only because private education is a big, booming business, but also because they want to change the way children are taught to make them more docile, pliable units fit for the brave new corporate workforce of the 21st century. That's what the anti-Proposition 30 efforts were all about, and that's what the Vergara case is all about.

It's certainly not designed to actually help children. We already know what produces good results in education, based on examples around the world: 1) incentivizing adults to pursue a career in teaching by paying a decent salary, 2) teaching real critical thinking skills instead of rote memorization; and 3) properly funding education. As long as teachers can barely make ends meet and our society encourages every bright college-age student to try to become the next Wolf of Wall Street or SnapChat millionaire, we're not going to be able to fix education--or anything in society for that matter. As long as we continue to preach the lie that anyone who can't do advanced calculus is not only destined to live in poverty but ought to do so, we can't fix education. And as long as we continue to believe that it's more important to lower taxes on billionaires than to properly fund our schools, we can't fix education.

We know how to fix education. But the billionaires aren't interested in actually fixing education. They're interested in profit. If they get their way, the country will be much the worse for it.