Corie made a very important point in her recent article It’s History, Not Legend when she noted that “James Madison, and all of the great individuals who aided in the founding of America were educated.” It seems the topic of education reform is forever on the table.
Ron Paul advocates a step in the right direction by promising to shut down the Federal Department of Education. It wasn’t all that many years ago that we had the understanding that education is a local matter. Even then, however, education was not in reality local because so-called compulsory attendance laws had started showing up in the middle of the 19th century, making education a state matter. That was the beginning of the end we now suffer and so Ron Paul’s step is really only a first step.
That said, I would like to share the following letter I wrote to the editor which originally appeared in the MetroWest Daily News (Framingham, MA) on Sunday, January 7, 2007:
Share This Sphere: Related ContentGovernment-Confiscated Education
With reference to “Raising the bar, raising confusion, with MCAS” (Gary Dzen, MetroWest Daily News, December 25, 2006), you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can make a child go to school, but you can’t make him learn.
Enter the MCAS.
Designed to “raise the bar” by making children learn, it is actually revealing the folly of government-instituted education systems. It is not surprising that these are prohibited by law.
It is a requirement of our law that our Legislatures and Magistrates encourage the interests of Literature and the Sciences. The officers of our government cannot compel interest but can only encourage it by encouraging the interests that naturally arise as a result of our corporate lives. Yet since 1853 children have been compelled to learn what someone in an increasingly distant office thinks they should learn, not what their parents think they should learn, or what they themselves are interested in, but what a stranger thinks is good for them.
Enter the MCAS.
Children and those who care for them are no longer people. The system got rid of parents in the mid-1800’s and now it is getting rid of the teachers. Here is what this is about: Government confiscates education and the money it needs to build a system “for the people.” Putting aside that we never authorized government to define education, when it can’t deliver on the promises made it proceeds to confiscate even more funds to save the sinking ship.
Why not take children out? There are practical reasons of course, but also this: believing there is a law that requires you to send your children to school, you think that if you don’t send them you will have to submit to government authority on the matter. Better to send them than to have to realize that you are not free to educate your own children. It may be of interest to some that there have been at least two cases in the Commonwealth in recent years where parents who questioned the authority of government agents over the education of their children have won in court.
Our towns (that’s us) have failed to resist government intrusion into our affairs. What was repugnant to our law in 1853 is still repugnant today.
Enter the MCAS, tip of the iceberg.
(Amazon)
Posts
Very good point, Sue!
I was forced to take the MCAS in high school, and I must say, it was absurd. Since it was mandated by the government and the results of different schools were listed publicly, it became a reputation competition. As to not risk the town’s school system being branded as incompetent, the administrations would force teachers to take time out of the curriculum they’d been consistently teaching for years and with purposeful design to teach for the MCAS. That led to at least a month of class in both English and Math to being ‘MCAS Crash Courses’ where we learned how to pass a test that essentially tells us nothing instead of learning what an expert in the field of teaching on his or her certain subject wanted us to.
The government involving itself in education and healthcare especially, I find to be inherently wrong. Political policy makers are not education or health experts by any means. They claim to want to make things better, but they are only lessening the ability of the people to help each other help themselves without arbitrary authority coming in unnecessarily.
I’ve heard that refrain many times before Corie, and it’s not only the money being wasted, but your time, the teacher’s time, all for the game of MCAS. Hmmm…it sounds a little like Mike Huckabee’s take on the “War” in Iraq … we should stay for honor? You can’t get honor out of something dishonorable. Test preparation does not an education make.
About government non-involvement in education, you might be interested in this post I put on the Daily Paul recently in response to the subject of life after Ron Paul becomes president, ie the somewhat difficult changes will can expect:
I’m way over the edge when it comes to this issue in that I see absolutely no reason for formal education until the individual seeks it himself. From my experience this means young people get interested in formal schooling at around 16, if at all.
Okay, what about the people who see it from the other side? Babies in day care, toddlers in school at 3, all children reading by the third grade. To them my view is total culture shock.
But what about this:
1. repeal compulsory attendance statutes and close all government schools
2. parents are in charge again
3. free market creates exactly what we need
ie both ends of the spectrum will be accommodated and the confusion caused by government involvement in education will be history.
My wife is a teacher and I can speak from her experience that standardized testing really restricts what she can and can’t teach. And that’s not the only problem with standardized testing. The excellent book Freakonomics
has a great chapter about how standardized testing creates incentives to cheat–for teachers!
I was lucky enough to attend a private school for 9 years growing up and when I got to college I was shocked at how unprepared many of my classmates who had attended public schools seemed to be. As many as a quarter of the students in my first year program (something unique to my alma mater, St. Lawrence University) didn’t know how to write a research paper. What was especially striking to me was that the quality of education my peers seemed to bring with them was directly related to the kind of town they had grown up in.
This leads me to ask: if the quality of a public school education depends so much on where you live (due to wealth and the proportion of taxes going towards education), what the heck is the US Department of Education bringing to the table besides a one-size-fits-all testing system that ultimately hurts our childrens’ educations?