The Rise and Fall of Education: an excerpt

The Rise and Fall of Education: an excerpt

I was engaged in some light reading the other day, The Rise and fall of the Soviet Union by Michael Kort. Some passages struck me as mirroring what is going on in education today. Below are some illustrations I have paraphrased.

In the former Soviet Union they had two types of collectives, one private and one public. The private collectives with their autonomy were very succesful, 3-4% of the privately run collectives provided more than fifty percent of the food. Here we spend public money on two different types of schools. The traditional, public variety was obligated to educate any student who walked through its doors and to share its resources with all the other public schools. The charter schools, pseudo private schools, were allowed to pick and choose their students and could have much more stringent requirements for their students and their families.

The public schools were manned by professional educators who all had degrees and were obliged to go through continuous training. They were
typically not paid well compared to other professionals of commensurate experience. They were often over burdened with work, required to spend hours of unpaid overtime to keep up with many of the tasks they were required to do.

Worse though, these schools were not allowed to make their own decisions about what to teach or how to use their resources. Bureaucrats, who usually knew nothing about the conditions at the schools, made most of these decisions from their far off ivory towers. The theory was that everything was planned out, but those plans were not quite on target. The public schools were saddled with standardized testing and a one size fits all curriculum that was supposed to ensure every student go to college. They were crippled by nearly constant shortages. The lack of resources, unrealistic goals,and a frantic pace led to tremendous chaos and hardship. No excuses were accepted despite the fact that poor and unrealistic planning often produced bottlenecks and breakdowns. Very little was set aside for the ordinary student who would one day become the backbone of
society, building homes and businesses and then working in them. The
bitter truth is, as these students entered the 21st century, when more
and more opportunities should have opened up for them, the opposite happened. In the end, none of the targets for the grand plans were met.

The few things that have been accomplished have been done at a terrible price. Teachers have been forced to work under conditions not conducive for them to carry out their jobs. They have become scapegoats for all that is wrong in education. If they dare to belong to a union to protect their collective bargaining rights they are vilified and portrayed as standing in the way of education reform, and worse, not caring about children Yet at least they got the opportunity to be educated. Many of their students will have their desire to be educated stripped from them because of unrealistic policies. They will be regulated to living at the mercy of the state, unprepared for the workforce or college. The toll that their ‘modern education’ takes on the student is incalculable.

They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. It is but a small stretch to see the pattern here. For instance, in this country, by 2012, all students are supposed to read at grade level according to No Child Left Behind. Yet resources are being cut, teachers blamed, and unrealistic plans touted by those who cannot see. Must we always learn the hard way, or can someone with vision save us from the same disastrous course that led the former Soviet Union to run aground?