– A Policy Statement –
A LONG ROAD DOWNHILL
We have made the case again and again, that the systems that are the foundation of America’s existence are failing. Nothing illustrates that more than what has happened to America’s system of public education.
In trouble and failing for many years – certainly since the 1970’s – the system has been shredded by the pandemic as badly as the recent volcanic earthquakes have destroyed parts of Turkey and Syria.
More than 1.4 million children are no longer in public schools. More than 130,000 NYC children are missing.
These children have entered private schools or are being home schooled or are simply truant…but they no longer attend public schools.
The average professional life of an elementary and secondary school teacher is now less than five years.
There are teacher shortages all over the country.
A system which essentially began in the year 1635 — more than 100 years before we became a nation – with the establishment of a single Latin school in Boston, Massachusetts so that children could learn to read the Bible – is on complete life support.
To even suggest that it is working at all is a self-deception like dealing with fool’s gold; it works if you don’t scratch the surface.
PRELUDE
One school in 1635 led to others in Massachusetts and in Virginia until they began to reach the other colonies.
It was all done on a rather haphazard basis with school attendance requirements based on the size of towns and the need for teachers. At the time Harvard was the only established college.
It wasn’t until 1852 that Massachusetts made school compulsory for those from 6 to 16 years of age and began to establish certain educational criteria for those who would be teachers.
Until then there were rules regarding what teachers must know which depended upon how many children were attending a school. It was specific but not very educationally demanding.
By 1900, 13 States had compulsory, ‘common’ schools for those children between the ages of 8 and 14. By 1918, every State required its students to complete an elementary school education.
In all schools the educational focus was clear: teachers taught reading, writing and arithmetic.
[In the 1930’s, John Dewey’s educational philosophy that the schools should help each child reach his or her full potential was misunderstood and misapplied then and now.]
19th century classrooms were most often limited to one room for all those attending; in many instances the ‘students’ were older than the teacher. Townspeople would often hire teachers for the cost of room and board. School books for students were rare.
The Federal Department of Education was finally established in 1867. Its original purpose was to collect information that would help States establish their own school systems. While changes have been made since, States have primary influence and power over their own schools and the Federal Government continues to provide information and guidance.
By 1890, the Department of Education began to assist in the development of higher education in America…as well as bringing vocational learning and trade schools into being adding to what had been academics only.
After the Civil War, American schools entered the world of Reconstruction. When former slaves expressed a desire to receive an education, they found American schools to be formally racist.
The US Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 established the idea of “separate but equal” into American education. The concept became part of the nation’s ethos until 1954 when the Supreme Court in Brown vs the Board of Education ruled an end to segregation in schools. It took years before that decision reached across the entire country.
We lived in the deep South in the years immediately following Brown and heard the cries of anguish and anger at the decision. It was obvious that segregation in schools would last for decades and that even when African American children were eventually permitted into previously all white schools those feelings would not change.
Immediately following the end of the Second World War Congress would pass what many consider the greatest piece of legislation ever written – the GI Bill, which offered a free college education to every veteran. Blacks veterans were not included.
In 1960, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson helped establish Head Start not only to educate poor young black kids, but to give jobs to black teachers who were not welcome in white schools which had desegregated.
THE BROKEN TRIPOD
The national effort to win the Second World War has had a lasting impact on public school education to this day.
In the process everyone in America who wanted to work, had a job. Coal miners, auto workers, African Americans, women worked. Rosie the Riveter became a joyful national symbol as tanks, battleships, bombers and all sorts of war materials flowed out of places were refrigerators, autos and even women’s nylon stockings used to be produced. (The nylon was used to manufacture parachutes.)
That was the beginning of America’s Middle Class. We became the only nation in history able to establish and support an economy which made it possible for blue collar workers to buy a home, live in the suburbs, own a car, take a vacation, send their children to college and live a decent life.
But in those years after the Second World War, families found that Mom had to help not only run the home, but add to its income through work…and women rose to that reality and personal opportunity.
By doing so, Mom inadvertently broke what had become by then the “tripod” in public education that made it the best in the World: Teacher, student and Mom at home making certain homework was done and done well adding every day to the educational opportunities found in school.
Now it seems unfair and damning to blame women who were Mothers for the eventual decline in public school performance. But the truth is obvious to any adult – men do not have the emotional or physical capacity or strength of will to do what women can do – Mother, breadwinner, leader of the family – and so when they stepped away from the tripod that made schools work, the educational system that worked so well – broke..
By the 1970’s, almost half of Moms were working and the results of tests showed the decline of public schools. Little by little curricula changed putting more and more effort into teaching math and English…but radical changes in the way those subjects were taught produced nothing but increasing failures.
The training of teachers fell behind the growing technology that fascinated students and truly captured their attention as school no longer could.
Political leaders around the country grew alarmed and assumed direct control of the schools insisting that frequent testing would raise the results. They were wrong and the results simply got worse.
Almost a third of the way into the 21st Century public school results have dropped America down into the middle of international testing results: our schools no longer work — other developed nations are leaving us in the dust of history.
The pandemic and the additional misery it caused among young people of all ages: serious depression, the use of drugs, higher suicide rates and a college dropout rate especially among young men, is previously unknown in this country.
Recently the Federal Government and several very major corporations announced that they had really good jobs available for those without a college degree.
What is this step saying to America? First that there is no longer a Middle Class with college among its goals. Then, that the singular purpose of college for so many – to get a better job than someone without a college education – no longer counts.
But more than that – there is a new awareness that so much of today’s educational structure has been used up.
With all the damage done and none of it remediated, change is necessary and necessary now.
– A Policy Proposal –
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: READY, WILLING AND MIRACULOUS
If you have not been reading about the stunning, almost unbelievable brilliance of artificial intelligence, we suggest you start reading now because without even discussing some of the its capacity now – like one simple thought becoming a 60,000 page book in 20 minutes or one photograph discussed in every single detail – we are already in a New Age of technology which will change how we think, act, plan, create, work, learn, govern, commit crimes, cheat and fight wars.
We are not going to discuss the brilliance of AI to understand the complex structure of 194,000 proteins, still one of the most challenging puzzles in biology, because last year AI revealed the complex nature of 200 million proteins.
The major tech companies in America – Meta, Google, Microsoft are all in the development game. Each is seeking its own individual approach investing billions in what OpenAI has provided in the iterations of its developing ChatGPT.
Some have compared these developments as being as important to all of human- kind as the discovery of fire. Lives will change forever.
AI AND SCHOOL
The pandemic has brought millions of working Moms (and Dads) home – and at least for now – home to stay.
Can this reality return the third leg of the educational tripod that made our education system work? Is Mom home now to focus on her kids, able and willing to bring their educational development foremost in the ebb and flow of their lives and so returning school systems to a former level of success?
Not really. This generation of Moms has little to do with Moms of the past. News is that Moms working a hybrid schedule have more to gain than ever as they see career first and career successes ahead.
Are they entitled? Certainly. But just ask any grandparent or great grandparent what this means to the children involved and you’ll get a straight answer – and it won’t be pretty.
And so our answer to the failure of our schools cannot be, must not be, an end to schools systems themselves….because in its own way AI could make that happen.
Yes it would save billions in taxes, lessen the need for well-trained teachers, end the atrocious- often dangerous – classroom behavior that is chasing teachers out of the profession at an unprecedented rate.
So school systems must continue for some semblance of order and community within a child’s life.
But teachers will no longer be responsible for teaching as they once did.
The provider of information will come from each child’s computer in a way that reaches and involves that child because AI sees that child and can deliver the information necessary FOR EACH CHILD and at each child’s level and in a way that appeals to that child.
This singular ability to teach each child at his or her own pace has never been achieved by schools UNTIL NOW.
Further, AI can do something now that teachers never could: teach a child to read, to understand what has been read and to write about it ALL AT ONCE. No teacher in history has ever managed to do that …or to even try.
In an everyday reality, each child will have his or her own teacher for all subjects, all interests, all curiosities, all creativities: all through AI.
If all this sounds like science fiction, it is not. Nor is it ten years down the road.
It can happen as soon as America accepts the fact that schools no longer work, that children’s lives are being seriously damaged by these failures and that an answer exists NOW.
As for teachers, Schools of Education can go out of business or adjust their curricula to teach teachers how to deal with children’s psychology, performance behaviors, personal concerns, personal humanity foregoing anything else that no longer matters. They must learn to understand what is being taught by AI and be able to step in and help a child to deal with the instruction being offered.
So yes, the human factor exists for teachers in a very important way.
But not the way we’ve known it all our lives.
Is AI a miracle of the human mind? Yes, another miracle though we are cautioned by the fact that it is not government initiated and controlled but driven by private corporations for profit.
Every Liberal knows what that can mean.
But if well and truly done it can mean this: it could bring American education to a level unknown in our history even when we led the World in education successes. By so doing, these successes could bring America back to an exceptionalism we can believe in once again because it is real not a political fantasy.
Do we have the courage to accept such change?
This is an interesting historical overview of education in the USA. All I know of it is my experience of it sometime in what seems like a previous geological epoch.
Having mother at home while father provides is quite beneficial even if neither parent contributes to education.
Artificial intelligence may have a role to play in this yet cannot impose discipline and conduct physical education. I don’t know enough to predict0 its future.