A Defense of Public Education
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.Politics is not the focus of this blog. But politics often invades everything. Over the weekend, Republican candidate for President, Rick Santorum, weighed in on public education:
—John Dewey, educational philosopher, The School and Society, 1907
“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”While there are some anachronism in the current system of education -- (to name a few)
Oppel, Richard A. Santorum Questions Education System; Criticizes Obama, NYT February 18, 2012.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/us/politics/santorum-criticizes-education-system-and-obama.html
- the requirement that students attend school only none months a year.
- the idea that education comes in tidy bundles of minutes - carnegie units
- the idea of school provided one-to-one computing,
The Center on Educational Policy publication, Why We Still Need Public Schools, cites six missions of public education. Our schools:
- Provide universal access to free education.
[T]he fact remains that the whole country is directly interested in the education of every child that lives within its borders. The ignorance of any part of the American people so deeply concerns all the rest that there can be no doubt of the right to pass laws compelling the attendance of every child at school . . .As an online teacher, one of my concerns about the online education programs is that online education can increasingly be privatized. Why is this a concern? Because as people make choices about education, I have seen parents choose an online educational program for their children based not on quality, but on the program that has lesser graduation requirements.
—Frederick Douglass, African American writer and abolitionist, speech at the National Convention of Colored Men, 1883
Local based education makes it possible for states and localities to emphasize local needs. National companies