The San Francisco Mime Troupe performs free in parks across northern California all summer. Their current performance satirizes what is called “education reform.”
In “Schooled,” the San Francisco Mime Troupe argues that the purpose of education is to build citizens, to prepare young adults to make informed decisions in their civic life. The company’s free summer show of its 57th season also makes a compelling case that art is foundational to a healthy democracy.
As is tradition, the troupe will stage this show in parks throughout Northern California until Labor Day, so the context of each performance will vary greatly. But as performed in Dolores Park on the Fourth of July, “Schooled” juxtaposed stark extremes.
The Mime Troupe is run as a collective, with “The Communist Manifesto” required reading for all members. All its shows impart that work’s philosophy. “Schooled” is no different. It pillories the flaws in the U.S. education system, especially its dependency on digital technology as a Band-Aid for deeper structural problems — underfunding, the achievement gap — and, in tandem, its overreliance on the corporations that profit from that technology.
In “Schooled,” the evil corporation is Learning Academy of Virtual Achievement, or LAVA, which seeks to “spread” to Eleanor Roosevelt High School. LAVA’s emissary is Fredersen J. Babbit (Lisa Hori-Garcia), a dead ringer for Donald Trump, complete with the hair and mucus-ridden vocal cords. He peddles learning tablets, cleverly rendered by the props department with an iridescent surface, so that as an actor rotates one, its screen shimmers in the sun.
Public schooling is not a Communist idea; it is a democratic idea. It is the way the entire community takes responsibility for the learning of the children of the community.
The bad guys are not just the guys peddling technology and wanting to make a buck. The bad guys are the ones who insist on privatizing what belongs to the public and use their money to buy support.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Art implicates life.
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Interesting they chose Donald Trump as the emissary when in reality it was Obama, Gates, Duncan etc. I am no fan of Trump but seriously these shenanigans have escalated during the Obama presidency.
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“Public schooling is not a Communist idea; it is a democratic idea.”
Communism, in its idealized form (not as it’s ever been implemented), *is* pure democracy. Every individual participates in self governance of the community. It’s capitalism that is antithetical to democracy, not Communism.
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Thanks Dienne! You made my day. I’ve been trying to explain this my whole life. There never has been a communist society.
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The reviewer did the play a disservice by that irrelevant mention of what the cast reads. Far more significant are the issues actually raised in the play. I’ll send you the theatre’s own statement which may be worth sharing on this blog.
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Education. It’s like the weather: everyone has an opinion but nobody does anything about it. That’s how Livina Jones feels about her son Tom’s new school, Eleanor Roosevelt High….The nanny-state government has failed to see students as individuals, and failed to give them the real-world skills they’ll need to get ahead. So who says it isn’t time for some big money, for-profit schooling?
Ethel Orocuru, for one. She’s the long serving history/civics/American government/basketball coach at Eleanor Roosevelt, and she’s willing to fight for her version of education as long as her reconstructed hips will allow. But is she fighting for a system that can be fixed, or is she just too blind by her past to see how times have left her and her school behind? And when an efficiency expert, Mr. Babbit, is assigned to improve her class is it a sign that Ethel is behind the times, or a sign of something more sinister? And with privatization on the line, and a Wall Street heavy hitter lined up to fold the entire district into his conglomerate, suddenly the next School Board election is more about a hidden agenda than the open curriculum. And when did the hall monitors start wearing brown shirts and arm bands?
(from San Francisco mime troupe website)
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Thank you Lauren!
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The Mime Troupe used to perform in LA (when I was a child). Why don’t they come back to L.A.???
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Go mimes! What a wonderful development in the fight against corporate reformers. When artists get involved, it means the fight has entered public consciousness. If you want to skewer tyrants, tycoons and tamperers, there’s nothing better than satire.
Having said that, we should be careful about lumping together corporate reform and educational technology. Some technologies which are finding their way into schools are helping teachers. They’re part of the digitizing of curriculum, the shift toward mobile and cloud-based computing, and the expansion of social and professional networks—all unstoppable movements which will certainly change the meaning of education and how it is “delivered”.
On a more pedestrian level, who can say teachers shouldn’t have electronic gradebooks, email and text messaging systems, content databases, and what used to be called “desktop publishing” tools? These advances can—but, of course, don’t always—increase productivity. At least they hold out the promise of an educational system where teachers have more time to work one-on-one with students, to tailor lessons for classes of mixed abilities, to give feedback, to remediate, and to challenge.
When talking about educational technology and the reform movement, it may be useful to distinguish the tools which actually help teachers—i.e., to teach, coach, mentor, and inspire—and those which are designed to control and/or replace teachers. The latter includes just about any program which falls under the guise of “data driven instruction” or “personalized learning”. The latter also includes hardware systems and devices whose sellers claim will revolutionize teaching and learning but which instead are a drain on teachers’ time and school budgets.
Perhaps someone can come up with a good rule of inversion for educational technology: the bigger the claim, the more likely it will waste money and get in the way of quality education. The catchwords will be “revolutionize”, “transform” and “disrupt”.
Technology which enters the classroom organically, because it serves real needs and is desired by teachers, is technology that *should* be funded. The rest can go the way of iPads in LAUSD, Amplify tablets in Guilford Co, interactive and underutilized projection systems all over the place, data-mining widgets and badges, and lots of other horrid ideas that have made the investor class richer and the public education system poorer.
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Regarding Diane Ravitch’s claim, “Public schooling is not a Communist idea; it is a democratic idea.” the prudent among us will look not just at the generality, i.e., Public Education, but at the actual curriculum content. Content is becoming ever-more Communist than democratic let alone a curriculum befitting a Constitutional Republic such as the United States of America which is not a democracy.
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jring,
are you suggesting that America’s public schools are Communist? You are nuts.
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Ms. Revitch,
1. No. I am not suggesting any such thing. If you read with care I said ‘curriculum content is becoming ever-more Communist.’ If you care to read the 42 item list of CPUSA objectives you will be able to see why.
2. Your assertion clearly indicates your lack of a good education.
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Let’s see the facts to support your over arching statement. Dr. Ravitch has the credentials that show an outstanding education. What are yours for making such statements?
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