Some of us are old enough to remember a different America. We remember neighborhoods and communities where the shopkeepers knew our names and called to tell our mothers if we got into trouble. Then the big chains moved in and put those shops out of business. Then the big box stores moved in and killed off the chains. The people who used to run the mom-and-pop stores became greeters at the big box stores. Then Walmart moved in, and we lost most of the big box stores. Now Internet businesses are squeezing out the big box stores.
A reader had similar thoughts:
“Growing up, there was a little convenience store in my home town. It was “Chris’s Sack and Save”. It’s where my friends and I would buy our soda’s, chocolate, and chips to energize us to ride our bikes back to our homes, or to our “wherevers”.
When I was around my 11th or 12th grade year, this little convenience store got sold. Not only did the name change (to what, I really do not recall – it’s been changed quite a bit throughout the years), but I no longer got to see the smiling face of the owner, greeting me when I paid for my goodies (nor him giving me the extra change to pay for my mom’s cigarettes). It just didn’t feel the same. It was kinda sad.
This is what happens when charter schools, education management companies, and any other capitalistic change enters our community-owned, public school system. The names are not the only things that change. The people change. The values change. Who is served changes.
The school no longer belongs to the community. There is a new line of segregation: “us” and “them”. The ballpark is renamed. Corporate sponsors come in and the teachers and administrators behave differently: Maw-Maw called it, “putting on airs”. Even the teachers we saw as second mothers or grandmothers or uncles are gone.
The heart and soul is gone.
What made that school ours is gone.
Sure, there is money to be made with change. But does it help us as human souls to nurture that sense of “belonging” Maslow told us was so important in development of the self?
Sometimes the more things change, the less they stay the same.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The great changes and prosperity promised in the post WWII explosion of capitalism produced a better standard of living for a brief while, maybe 2 generations. Now, however, the microscopic minority who benefitted the most and who made billions of dollars have become the rentier class and they know only how to extract more and more profit and they don’t care about the cost of those profits on our society in general. They are ending the promise of a better standard of living for all, a social safety net, robust and effective free public education, libraries, a well-maintained infrastructure, etc. These things are seen only as obstacles to ever-increasing profits. Profit is their god and profit is never appeased nor big enough.
I saw this same phenomenon first hand in my first career working for a family-owned business that had survived and thrived for over 112 years. When the “greed is good” era rolled around the business was passed onto the son who was indoctrinated in Friedman-esque philosophy and the business was bankrupted within 3 years and totally destroyed within 5 years. Gone were the personable, human, and caring approaches to management that valued employees as treasured assets and instead it became all about data and profit margins and spreadsheets, much like the reforms in schools today. The company passed through a few greedy hands that extracted whatever profit they could and then they sold it off until it was drained of all value and its employees were left to blow away like dust in the wind. It was very, very sad and pointless.
The center cannot hold. It is impossible to have a profit/data driven, rigorous school system while maintaining equity, fairness, egalitarianism, and the promise of the American dream. Diane is right when she says that the current system will collapse of its own hubris and idiocy but I still mourn for the generation caught in the machinations of this stupidity.
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And the spell check turned damned into darned!
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You believe the median standard of living in, say 1939, was no lower than the current standard of living? Life expectancy at birth was 62 for men and 65 for women, over a decade shorter lives than those born today.
Perhaps you could talk about some measure of living standards and show how they are lower today than they were pre-world war two? What rights did women or people of color have in the 1930s that they do not have now? There was strange fruit to be found in the south during that time.
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I am weary of your constant disagreement for the sake of what? The lost standard of living is not measured in your damnable economic data but in qualities that cannot be measured. This generation is the first to see its children do worse than they did themselves and their grandchildren will do even worse than that. Younare not universal and your experience is not commonality. We face a terrible and uncertain future on a sick planet and your god of the economy is the basis of all that is wrong.
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Non-measurable things like respect for human dignity? The expansion of individual rights to women and those of color? It seems to me that the country has made huge strides in these areas since those halcyon pre-world war toe days your speak about.
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TE is making valid points. The good old days were pretty awful for a lot of people. (I would only add that the strange fruit was not limited to the south.)
I may not always agree with TE, but I believe he brings up valid points and is always respectful.
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Chris & Diane….what great reflections.
History is full of well-meaning, ignorant reformers. I am not sure if this era of reformers are well-meaning, but they are ignorant.
We have lost much of the magic you describe.
Thanks for sharing.
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As inadequate as a public education may be or as inadequate as government in general may be, our country has learned the hard way that it needs government. Without it, capitalism inevitably leads to monopoly after competition finally eliminates itself as a snake eating its own tail.
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“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur
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Communist Teacher: a large and critical part of the headlong rush to privatize and charterize and voucherize is to re-educate the general population to accept the unacceptable. And part and parcel of that re-education is miseducation, including attempting to make people forget what they already know and even more, not to have even the inclination to look for the inconvenient facts and data.
Frederick Douglass articulated it well: “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”
Then, of course, he did what growing numbers of teachers and concerned citizens are doing now—he got religion, the best kind, the sort that reminds people that the Lord helps those that help themselves. Although Frederick Douglass put it even better: “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
This blog and others like it are playing a crucial role in giving legs to the effort to ensure a “better education for all.”
Thank you for your posting.
🙂
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I wonder if you would be as comfortable with the moniker “Nazi Teacher”? Communists murdered far more people than even the Nazis. The Communist governments of the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, E. Germany, etc….by a conservative estimate, over 100 million people slaughtered in the 20th century (and still counting). Communist evil is always glossed over by the American/European Left in academia.. Nazis and Communists were exactly the same–totalitarians who devalued humanity and ruled by fear and murder. There hasn’t been one Communist-controlled government that didn’t result in a bloodbath of its citizenry. I pray that you don’t teach history.
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“That sense of belonging Maslow told us was so important in the development of the self” is being sought by many young people who desire to stay connected through social media and other online resources. They also want a voice.
I think one of the reasons your blog has been so successful is because you provide an opportunity for people to have a voice for expressing their ideas and feelings and to engage in dialog.
It will also be the voice of many students, parents and teachers speaking out against destructive educational policies and practices that will eventually get them changed to something constructive.
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For the past few years, I’ve had a steady stream of “experts” coming into my classroom to “observe.” The students do not like this. They ask questions, such as, “Who was that woman? Why was she here? ” They feel that they are being spied upon. Some students view them as “snitches,” which is a very bad thing in an urban community. It is very disconcerting to have some stranger come in and take notes.Nobody feels comfortable. We are all just glad when the “expert” leaves. The “expert” has no relationship with my students. In education, relationships are everything.
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This all started looonnnggg before privitizing became derigueur–and I hail from the state whose former leader is the king of privitizing, and that would be Indiana. He’s now the president of Purdue. Be that as it may, the ‘change’ concept we speak of here happened back in the mid 60s when the big “C” evaporated small schools everywhere in this country, and that would be consolidation. Not only did this chip away at our identity, it put a great big dent in competition. How was it that those small county schools (and small city schools) operated just fine for centuries, then someone said they were economically a drain and must come down. Along came…bussing, a topic worthy of multiple dissertations. Those old masters of architecture have near totally disappeared and when I come across one, I stop and…gawk. They are truly beautiful buildings with truly wonderful memories.
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One thing many people did find in 1939 was the internal self-direction which progressive educators call “agency”. It’s what enabled individuals to stand up to Fascism. How much progress have we seen on that front?
It’s interesting that we can’t point to the organizations or philosophies mentioned in this discussion as a reliable source of such agency (possible exception goes to “communist teacher” up there). The Catholic Church certainly has a spotty record on individual moral agency, but it nonetheless holds that up as a central educational value. I like this letter from a group of Catholic scholars, addressed to the bishops of the US. Valerie Strauss ran it today in the Washington post:
“Catholic scholars blast Common Core in letter to U.S. bishops”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/02/catholic-scholars-blast-common-core-in-letter-to-u-s-bishops/
My favorite quote is, “the Common Core reduces reading to a servile activity.” That’s my objection to it, in a nutshell.
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