Web Learning 2.0: A Defense of Public Education

Web Learning 2.0: A Defense of Public Education:

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.
—John Dewey, educational philosopher, The School and Society, 1907 

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:

“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.” 

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

 While there are some anachronism in the current system of education -- (to name a few)

• 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,

there is no doubt that the idea of publicly funded and mandated education is an idea that still carries great weight in contemporary society.  I am not saying that we don't need to improve public education (we can discuss those improvements - like online education in later posts), put rather public schools are not anachronisms.

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.

Public schools are the only way to assure that ALL  children have the benefits of education. The school choice movement is a movement toward the privatization of public schools. The idea that parents should have a choice in their children's education is a market-based argument. Market-based solutions, while providing an "efficient" outcome, do not always produce the best outcome. Market-based solutions assume that access to products is equal. Issues like transportation to and from schools are crucial parts of the decision.

[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 . . .
—Frederick Douglass, African American writer and abolitionist, speech at the National Convention of Colored Men, 1883

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.

Local based education makes it possible for states and localities to emphasize local needs. National companies