Wendy Brown: Without quality public education, there is no future for democracy
05 March 2010
UC Berkeley professor of political science Wendy Brown was among the more than 200 Berkeley faculty members who traveled to Sacramento on March 4. A co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, she gave the following address on the capitol steps during the "Educate the State" rally.
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.
Wendy Brown, professor of political scienceAfter 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