Bring Back Civics!

I mentioned yesterday that there were two crucial issues that gave me the most concern. Today I focus on the second issue—education.

We are witnessing a revolution today among educators. There are statewide strikes occurring in state after state as a result of decades of neglect by our legislators in supporting education for our children. It is a fact that most statehouses are in the hands of Republicans and they have embarked on a decades long assault on funding our primary and secondary public education infrastructure. First West Virginia, then Kentucky and Oklahoma, and now Arizona and Colorado are windows into the results of years of appropriations neglect.

Broken buildings that never get fixed, books that are 10+ years out of date and in terrible physical shape, teachers who are paid so little that they have to have second jobs as minimum wage employees at fast food restaurants, teachers spending their own money to buy supplies like pencils, scotch tape and paper are the hallmarks of neglect and deprivation.

On a national level, we have a Secretary of Education who doesn’t really understand or support the public education system. She has been accused of supporting redirecting public monies to private schools via vouchers or other schemes, which is tantamount to defunding the public school system. She never attended public schools and favors the proliferation of charter schools, some of which are organized as for-profit businesses. On a recent 60 minutes program she was unable to defend her belief that public schools can perform better when funding is diverted to the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. At one point, she admitted she hasn't "intentionally" visited underperforming schools.

One of the byproducts of this kind of institutional neglect is the disappearance of instruction in America’s schools for a civics curriculum. This is a true tragedy for our children. Perhaps one of the most important things we are NOT teaching our children is how our government works and how individuals have a responsibility to make it work. ‘Man on the street’ interviews produced by comedians like Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel illustrate how our citizens can’t even identify the three branches of government, who is President, who we got our independence from in 1776, or anything about our Constitution. Our voter turnout continues to diminish with many states exhibiting less than 35% turnout in a presidential year.

And as a result we find that our populace is more divided than ever before. Issues that divide us are not clearly understood by a majority of our citizens and most discussions devolve into angry confrontations causing people to surrender friendships and beat each other up with vitriolic accusations. There is a broad swath of our citizens that are so uneducated about the workings of government, that all they can do is rail against ‘the swamp in Washington’ without even knowing why they are calling it ‘the swamp’.

Arguments and discourse about our national issues are reduced to buzz words and invective. People are not able to listen to each other and analyze opposing positions, which leads to an inability to compromise and find common ground.

It is probably not unreasonable to say that the lack of attention to our educational system is now exhibited by symptoms of breakdown in our societal norms and ability to reason with each other.

There needs to be a change. The vanguard of that change, thankfully, is coming from our teachers who are on the front lines. It is a surprise to many that there is such anger and despair in the educational community. Republican legislators have been more concerned about funding more weapons for the Defense Department or patronizing special interests than educating our children. Education is the caboose of the budget, getting the last consideration, which has resulted in a slow and steady disintegration of our public school system. Finally the teachers are shouting loudly enough, and those states which have had the longest Republican leadership, are being forced to consider higher taxes so that our children can regain their educational footing.

Only if our children are properly prepared to take their place in our society as productive, informed and effective agents of change will we succeed in repairing our collective awareness to acknowledge the real issues that we need to face. Informed discourse about our issues is the only way to finally find solutions.

It starts with a proper and fulsome education.