Part Two: Origin
ESSENCE
If one has been fortunate enough to get a decent education in it, history teaches us that the great nation-states of centuries past -the Greco-Roman Empires, Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain – eventually all lost their empirical powers because they failed to educate their people.
Once lost, that power was never regained.
If we study one or all of them, it is difficult to find the exact and specific ways they did not educate their young.
Those who focus on public policy and political science seem to agree that it was easier for Empires and Kingdoms to function as they pleased without an educated and involved public.
Here in America the rise and increasingly evident fall of this World power is easier to trace even if we refuse or cannot recognize the fall is happening.
FREEDOM
The year was 1960 and the stunning news of the day was that the FDA had approved the use of the first safe, effective oral contraceptive. It quickly became known as The Pill.
We remember Dmochowski, looking thoughtful and saying in his thick Polish accent: “This will change our society as nothing else ever has”.
It didn’t seem like much of a prediction at that moment, but it was absolutely correct.
With that single scientific development women finally had the reproductive freedom – at least theoretically – to choose when or if they desired pregnancy.
It took several years until there was widespread use of The Pill but it was already obvious that it was going to have societal implications.
Could one pill cause a revolution or could that one revolution begin to crack the glass ceiling under which women lived since the founding of this nation?
A look at the growth of women’s involvement in all areas of our society since 1965 suggests that it was the domino that started the avalanche of all the others.
Up until that time, the middle of the 20th Century, women were Mothers, homemakers, secretaries, nurses or teachers. Few were college graduates, fewer sought advanced degrees. Few ran significant businesses or sat on corporate boards. Law, medicine, dentistry, business, were fields that belonged to men. Women worked in the government bureaucracy but few ventured into holding political office.
Teaching, the field of nursing and administrative office work were roles for women that had found a familiar and acceptable place in our society. They were roles a woman could fulfill allowing her to be both a Mother and a professional working woman.
But the advent of The Pill had opened the World to women who wanted to do more.
Look now at how many serve as Mayors and Governors. A woman is Vice President of the United States.
See more women in medical school, law school, dental school, business school than men. Soon they will dominate these professions.
Women run major corporations, are behind the majority of start-up companies in the digital world.
Wherever you look women have left the past and have found their place in American society – and are thriving.
We live in a moment where women are once again feeling their reproductive rights threatened by the Supreme Court’s action concerning abortion.
Can anyone doubt that they will see to it that Congress passes a law overthrowing the Supreme Court’s decision. It won’t be as easy as taking a pill, but it will be done.
The Pill and the freedom it afforded women simply opened a door that would change the dynamic of family relations. Unintentionally, it also changed what had been the pathway to America’s status as the most powerful nation in history: It’s system of public education.
FAILURE
Life teaches that for every good thing there may be a bad thing and vice versa. Sometimes it takes time but that special balance beam never stops swinging this way and that way.
This is not the place for a study of the development of America’s public education system…but a quick look will help.
America’s movement westward beyond the cities in the Northeast and the cotton fields of the South to the settling of the vast wilderness all the way West to the Pacific Ocean.
From one room schoolhouses where all ages met to learn to read and write to the need to expand the space necessary for the numbers of children who needed to learn, women played a singular role. They became the teachers in the community with no more knowledge than they had teaching their own children.
What was taught then met the needs of children growing up in an agricultural and cattle producing country. Simple arithmetic was added to the curriculum of reading and writing.
School time was limited to just a few hours a day making it possible for women to be the housewives they needed to be.
But as the 19th became the 20th Century two things had become very real…Henry Ford had introduced mass production through his assembly line approach to manufacturing automobiles and that approach swept through the world of all manufacturing.
The industrialization of America was in full swing and it had become obvious that American workers, soon to be joined by European immigrants, were going to need an education far beyond reading and writing.
The realization of the importance of education at that moment in time caused the establishment of Normal schools – schools that would focus on the teaching of teachers…providing for the first time a level of professionalism to this new field.
The school day expanded to a “full” day ending at 3 or 3:30 with early morning starts. What was taught expanded greatly to include some science, history and even economics. In time the expansion included music, art and then workshops to teach girls about housework and boys about house care techniques.
The attempt was to educate through a mass produced, one-size fits all approach with the single purpose of educating an America whose citizens were capable of governing themselves.
And when the US government passed child labor laws in 1930, schools suddenly had all the students they needed.
No other nation had made such an attempt. When it worked as it did for generations, it was a marvel and the backbone of America’s rise to become the most powerful nation ever known.
But something broke it by the 1970’s and as it has not been fixed. The breakage is taking us down the drain of history.
Something happened that changed that successful system – one which was bolstered at the end of the Second World War when America sent those veterans who wanted more schooling to college – for free.
The public education system had been built on a solid tripod of teacher, student and Mom.
Teachers could depend on Mom to make certain that homework was not only done but supervised…there ready to answers questions and help. When Mom couldn’t help with arithmetic, Dad did.
The Parent Teacher Associations, started in 1897, worked on a school by school basis in elementary and junior high school levels. They existed to guide parents in helping teachers. The cooperation was close and appreciated. Parent and teacher working as one.
And all the while America was building a middle class – one that would be in evidence by the end of World War 11. America’s education system prospered. The powerful influence of unions to help the working class grew. And little recognized then the genius in the development of Processed foods brought a new world of ease to the home.
By 1995, 55% of women worked.
By the turn of the 21st Century 87% of women worked.
But well before that Mom working broke the tripod of education.
The system, successful because of the close working relationship of teachers and Moms, could not sustain itself. Little by little, year after year the success of America’s education system weakened and produced less and less.
As the failures mounted, politicians intervened. Education became a series of tests. The full curriculum that was designed to provide a genuine education was reduced to the teaching of reading and math. The failures continued.
Schools of Education did nothing whatever to change the way teachers were taught to teach despite reports which proved they were failing.
Seeking new sources of profit California changed the way reading and math were taught. Those methods swept across the country. In time, they failed.
Politicians stepped in again to support the development of charter schools. These would be free of State Departments of Education – which control education in America. They would be free of Teacher Union contract obligations.
They could govern and teach as they chose. What worked would be “offered” to public schools.
But it has never happened and professionals say it never will.
The average career length of today’s teachers is now 5 years.
As we start the school year 2022-2023 we now have 280,000 fewer teachers than we need. School systems are talking about hiring inexperienced retired military people to teach.
And the US military reports that two of every three new recruits cannot meet the educational standards to be in the military. It is setting up schools to help them do just that.
UNDERSTANDING
So Dmochowski was right when he predicted that The Pill would change society as it has never been changed before.
But reproductive freedom for women was just a trigger for change – good and bad.
So much could have been done to maintain the high level of education that we’d achieved. But those who should have made those changes didn’t.
Generational changes indicate that parents seem more concerned that their children are happy in school and not about whether or what they are learning.
The drop-out rate in colleges is unprecedented. Young people, young men especially, can’t do the work.
And as the Limbo bar gets lower and lower and fewer and fewer people can squeeze under it, more and more don’t seem to care.
We look at the deep weaknesses within our political parties and see futility and ego, personal success instead of national service, a deep distrust and dislike of our government.
We know that what are children are being taught comes nowhere near the original goal of preparing our people to govern themselves.
Without knowledge there is ignorance. People who do not know what they do not know…know nothing.
History says that nations that do not educate their people, fail.
Can we recover by making education critical again and beat history’s conclusions?
8/20/22
As always, a good article and think piece. I firmly believe that we as a nation can recover by making education critical again (in the interest of full disclosure, my “second career” now is higher education, teaching public administration and public policy to the next generation of public service leaders). There are some bright spots; consider,
– 4,000,000 Americans graduated college in the USA this past spring;
– In New York State, college at public institutions is becoming more affordable, with the Liberty Scholarships Program, etc.
– We may very well see a Federal program of some debt forgiveness (awaiting President Biden’s approval). For the record, I don’t support 100% debt cancellation and would support an expanded program of public service in return for debt forgiveness.
There is much more work to be done, especially in the area of American history, civics education and emphasis on critical thinking and realistic standards for academic performance.
Time will tell on this front.
Ancient empires eventually dissolved due to failure to properly educate its citizens? I’d like to learn about that since it’s an entirely new concept to me. The French and especially British empires dissolved due in part to education of colonials.
Could the placement of American women in “drivers seats” in so many realms of society be attributed to a new method of contraception to to processed food?