Daily Kos: Our fight for public schooling is a fight for democracy:
by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)
Our fight for public schooling is a fight for democracy, for one-for-all-and-all-for-one solutions to our problems. But what is this democracy idea? Or as the Occupiers say: "What does democracy look like"? We need to use schools to sell democracy—even to explain it! It doesn't just live on neglected and compromised. Even many of our parental allies seem content to view public education as a private concern for their kids' futures. Period. In such a world the only thing that matters is rank order and, as I used to remind colleagues, no matter how fast kids line up, there's always just one in the front all the way back to one at the end. We're fighting each other these days to see if by hook or crook we can get "ours" nearer the front. (And "cutting" the line is allowed.) We live, too many of us, in a climate that makes us all compete for the shortage of private goods rather than tackling the "shortage" issue.
The words are those of MacArthur Genius Award winner Deborah Meier, in the Bridging Differences blog she shares with Diane Ravitch. Her most recent post, from which these words are taken, is titled
Phony Stories About Schools, and I urge you to read it and pass it on.Let me offer one more paragraph:
How to overcome the tendency to pull into our private well-armored tanks, fending off enemies everywhere once the barbarian within us all has been set loose? That is the question. Schools that can belong to all of "us" are too few, even among public schools. So we have a dual fight—to prevent privatization and to shore up public ownership.
Read the post.Pass it on.
