PART 4 of a SERIES : “THE MOST SUCCESSFUL TYRANNY”
Says Allan Bloom, “ The most successful tyranny is the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” Now I admit, I was never a fan of Allan Bloom, but in this regard he is certainly right about how our elite sheep education reformers have grasped hold of the media and have controlled “the awareness of other possibilities.” From Wendy Kopp to Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee, all we have heard is how the American Education System is broken and must be replaced. They have convinced the public that teachers are incompetent, lazy, union slugs. Try to convince people otherwise these days. The tyranny is in place and we must overthrow it.
All of the professional training in the schools our excellent sheep-like leaders has made them single-minded. Says William Deresiewicz, “Our rush to efficiency, our addiction to methodologies, and ‘metrics’—testing regimes, protocols…spreadsheets, the management mentality in all its incarnations—[the humanity of] humans has been torn from what they do.”
The professions many of our education reformers, leaders, and philanthropists enter too often ignore that. They are trained with specialized efficiency in mind. They plow ahead with that capacity to do what they believe their job is: to recreate education in this country to resemble how they see it: an efficient, metrics based, testing regime with school leadership based on the management mentality, not a “principal teacher” mentality. It is all they know. It is how they succeeded. Thus, those are the schools and systems they support. Those are the not for profits they support. Those are the charters they support. As much as they believe they are the dissenters, they, in fact are the tyrants who refuse to collaborate with their workers. They refuse to question themselves. They all live in the same “Ghetto of the Mind.” They become the Emperor or Empress with no clothes.
How does all of that effect teaching? These elite leaders who come from the same “Ghetto of the Mind” say that all it takes is to put a great teacher in front of every class and all will be well. Three things are wrong with that. First, most great teachers do not park themselves in front of the room and second, most great teachers don’t fit their concept of greatness. Deresiewicz tells us, “Teaching is not an engineering [STEM] problem. It isn’t a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another” and teaching test taking strategies so that test scores rise and all of a sudden a PART 4 of a SERIES : “THE MOST SUCCESSFUL TYRANNY” | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing:
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