Miles Ahead

In 1948, George Orwell published his masterpiece, 1984. The novel took us into a totalitarian World which combined the brutality of authoritarianism with the masterful use of technology specifically designed to enter and manipulate the thoughts and actions of everyone living within it.

Orwell’s years of working within the British imperialistic system, his failed attempt at working with socialism and his abandonment of living in a communist system had prepared him to understand totalitarian government in a way unmatched in the literary world.

His novelist’s imagination led him to “invent” such useful technology as wall-sized TVs permitting the authorities to control the viewing and content of everyone in that society and to know exactly what was happening within it at all times.

He foresaw cameras and listening devices everywhere which could not only hear the conversations but understand the unstated thinking beneath them.

He imagined the total authority of a “Big Brother” not a President or Emperor, the total acceptance of “thought Police” and the reality of torture and other personal violence to not only guarantee the full acceptance of what existed but to support it as well.

He never imagined the pocket-sized “smart phones” which not only exist but are operated by addictive components within them which provide endless opportunities to deceive and misdirect a population entirely dependent on them from school age to old age.

As for “listening in” to an entire population, Orwell did not imagine a table-top Alexa listening to far more than the commands to turn on a TV or a ceiling fan. But he did foresee the need for Big Brother to know everything, to have people working night and day in nondescript office buildings listening and learning what people thought, needed, felt and even ordered from stores so that certain business elements could always know what sells and what doesn’t. How easy it would be to fill those buildings not with Amazon employees but with government agents. Do we know they are not?

FAILING

We have spent the last year and a half outlining the historical steps leading to the significant weakening of the institutional systems that guide our nation.

It has been a sad and so frustrating list of negatives.

We have stated that America’s education system – its public schools – are just going through the motions and students graduating from all levels are just being pushed along to graduation from level to level and then out. The nation’s focus on technology has turned male students into college dropouts, if they attend at all; female students into lawyers, doctors, dentists, business executives but not teachers.

Among the results: There are no longer great American novelists, artists, playwrights, classical music artists at the piano or violin or orchestral conductors. As someone said recently, the only art form left in America today is business…or maybe just making money.

We have seen our healthcare system deteriorate through the powerful control of private insurance companies and Medicare’s policies significantly reducing physician fees so that have been increasingly driven toward corporate medicine where doctors become employees of corporations supported by Wall Street money. Medicare Advantage seduces an increasingly uninformed population by paying to fix a dental cavity but saying no to serious surgeries and expensive treatments.

Law and order seem lost words of the past as Police have disappeared from public view no longer seeking to prevent crime but content to pursue it, while thieves run rampant on the streets of our big cities no longer fearing arrest because they are freed immediately by those new politicians who believe that crime is racist and the inability to pay bail secures those criminals in jail unfairly.

Our financial structure now sustains the world of technology no longer supporting the building of manufacturing or international trade. We manufacture nothing but weapons.

Our political system seems used up and exhausted… either ignorant of ways to institute good work, too stupid to care or simply embarrassing. Some stay too long. Some should never have been there at all. A Presidential election finds one party never bothering to publish a party platform and then not bothering to govern. Their candidate takes credit for being the cause of this behavior, but those who understand all know that millions of Americans have just been waiting to find someone who knows as little about government than they do and can care less. He did not make them, they made him.

While the other party has no generational leadership. It cannot find people to step toward the future with the credentials to run for the job. On local levels it turns to millennials ill equipped to understand how to do what they want to do. In big cities, it becomes the only active party. History shows us that in one party communities, corruption rules.

FINDING NEW WAYS

If we do not revise all of these systems, they and the country, will continue to fail. Despite the uniqueness of a country which still believes in itself, that belief is not enough. Without change, we will become part of history as yet another super power which stopped educating its children and in time, lost that power never to regain it.

It took us more than 275 years to reach our zenith and then in less than 75 years begin our descent. We can afford to take the time necessary to redesign our systems to genuinely meet our needs and so regain our status if we have the will to do it.

What follows is an attempt to describe the first steps to that redesign. None of it will be easy. Most ideas will have critics opposed to change because they are comfortable with what we have even if it fails. Others will fear that change will make things worse. Those fears make it easy to leave things as they are and simply watch the downhill slide increase the national feeling of uneasiness and dismay. But that is not our plan.

EDUCATION

In Education, change must exist if we are to educate our children again. To succeed, these changes must focus on the way teachers are taught to teach, changes in what they are teaching and changes in the way classrooms are arranged to help them know and help each student.

Ed Schools, know that the best women now choose to attend medical, law, business and dental schools and not schools of education.

They acknowledge that once a teacher’s best aide – a Mom – is now working and no longer at home to support a serious focus on helping teachers help children learn. Teachers must finally be taught to compensate for this loss… to handle the entire responsibility. There has been no evidence that such changes in the preparation of teachers have been since the turn of the mid-20th Century.

Teachers alone grew from two changes in that time period.

Women had gone to work to support the war effort. Everyone was “enlisted” to fight a dual World war in Europe and the Far East. Women too. And when that happened American families had two salaries and an income large enough to make Americans the World’s first middle class. Families could now afford to buy a home, own a car, take vacations and send their kids to college.

In the mid 60’s the bio-medical community produced a safe and effective birth control pill which gave women utter control of their reproductive lives and by so doing changed society forever.

As women saw a life with broader opportunities then they had ever known or believed that they’d have, the total responsibility of parenthood shifted and with it, parenthood itself.

Today parents want to see their children happy. A happy child is their measure of a successful parent. And to make that happen came a series of acquisitions: a baby’s pacifier, then a plastic toy computer designed to mimic what children saw around them, an IPhone which every pre-teen or teenager has, and finally, a credit card giving a youngster independent purchasing power… all elements parents found to keep their children happy.

Does this indicate direct parent involvement to you? Nonetheless, happiness is a fundamental parental goal and all the rest is up to the child…and school.

Schools of Education now recognize this reality. They have been tragically slow in dealing with it. Steps have been taken. First schools began to provide meals that children would not have had without them. Today schools are bringing in clothes washers and dryers to help children live in clean clothes. Teachers must be aware and trained to do so much more than provide an education.

Is this the way it should be? We think not but must deal with reality not ignore it.

A teacher-in-training must begin by entering a local public school system in the first months of their education not in the last months of Ed school four years later as they do now. And they must remain in those classrooms throughout their college career.

Nurses are trained this way…in hospital settings in their first year and they do not stop until graduation. It works.

Schools of Education must stop pretending that there are 200 ways of teaching reading but go back to what worked: phonics…sounding out letters and words.

Nothing has worked like phonics although a lot of textbooks and approaches have done little but make money.

The same is true of mathematics. America continues to ride the bottom of the international success list in math.. Our kids cannot add, subtract or make change. What worked before – emphasizing repetition and memorization – the basic superstructure of learning – is all gone along with the serious teaching of history, social studies, civics, languages, art and music. And vocational schools.

Those elements worked to make America the most educated nation on Earth and led to its stunning industrialization, along with educated European immigrants and the business brilliance of the Fords, Carnegies, Harrimans and Edisons.

Our primary and secondary level education system has focused on reading, math and science. In so doing, they have all but dropped everything else.

Without this broad background, the classical Liberal Arts degree offered in our higher education system is worthless…simply an expensive way to flow through until graduating into a professional school or out into a growing tech industry society. Along with these failures, our colleges have become an example of how to place students in debt for years and years within a system which grows daily, beyond death with no other way out. There is no such similar debt structure in our society.

Last but certainly not least, this: the truth for a growing shortage of teachers is not about pay – teachers have never been paid enough or treated as if they were that important in our society no matter what unions might have pressured out of communities.

We no longer have teachers because there is no longer enforceable, committed discipline in schools.

What is taking place in our lawless streets where people are mugged, cars are stolen, jewelry stores are ripped off in the middle of the day and UPS trucks are stripped of entire shipments – is taking place in our schools.

Teachers are harassed, threatened, ignored, and literally attacked with no way to either stop any of it because students are no longer disciplined for any misbehavior nor any of the above activities.

Parents want their children to be happy in school not necessarily educated. If a teacher tries to enforce work habits or correct behavior, they are open to attack. School administrators no longer ship difficult children to special schools or even out of the classroom for very long. It appears that the student is in charge. Genuine violence and the potential of continuous chaos exists with little help for the teacher.

Unless we again look to the past about maintaining discipline no change in a teacher’s education or income will make it worthwhile to teach. Or to learn.

And so this reality: We already know that 100,000 children are gone from NYC schools. They left during the pandemic and have not returned.

These numbers are being mimicked in schools throughout America – in the big cities and of course, to a lesser degree but statistically equivalent – in smaller cities and towns.

No one knows where they are and in New York City there is no longer a strong, enforced, truancy program looking for them. America says that schooling up until teenage years is an enforceable activity. Children must go to school or the system can find the reason why – legally.

No more. Last year in NYC one of every three children were truant during the year – a total of 900,000 truancies. And no one looked for them.

And so children are disappearing, teachers are leaving, colleges are reporting drop-outs at a rate never seen in America…and this from a country faced with the historical certainty that when a nation stops educating its people it loses its World power.

Return to what worked. Give up what hasn’t. Methods and policies exist to bring us back. We won’t do it overnight but life is made up of tomorrows which can become todays.

The World is a mess and we are being tested.

We believe that as a country offering opportunity for life, there has never been a nation like America. People around the World still look up to us for the same reasons.

Now – in brand new and challenging ways – we have to prove it…and can.

A look at what changes must be made in our other systems to strengthen our nation and bring it back will follow.