Union Warp of American Public Education Against Enterprise?

American public education may rank near the bottom of world standings in efficiency. Considering how much K-12 educators are paid and how costly American public schools are to taxpayers it is difficult to imagine that students of Liberia and the Congo wouldn’t finish ahead of U.S.A. in cost-per-student vs. achievement-per-student efficiency. In Boston a fat kid drives an El Dorado to a vast H.S. parking lot filled with student’s gas guzzlers; in Kenya a future winner of the Boston Marathon might run miles to school, if a school exists. Reforms are needed to sharpen wits and scholastic ratings of students.

In some respects physical parameters for American public education haven’t changed in a couple of centuries. Concentration of students from one-room schoolhouses expanded to multi-story dwellings with thousands of students. Students herded like cattle into K-12 corrals are moved from grade to grade ram-rodded under bureaucratic cowgirls ripening the cattle on correct book-feed lots until ready for market.

Americans are not invariably quick to accurately implant new technology in order to increase citizen security and  empowerment. In the recent Michael Brown killing in a suburb of St. Louis one police micro digi-camcorder pinned on a uniform might have eliminated voodoo legal procedures presenting what really happened for grand jury as well as mob review. A five-foot six policeman could have pressed a button to activate a wireless connected cam-corder on his uniform and saved the incident with Brown on his car’s computer keeping a virtual witness of what the gentle shoplifting giant walking in the middle of the street did that brought the cop to fire his gun.  One might wonder if short cops are responsible for most police shootings of tall black males or of short criminals shoot most tall cops. Digi-cams that record audio-video for 5 minutes when activated might help jurors determine legal culpability. Students and teachers have been drawn into the classroom-of-the-absurd paradigmata of real reality TV.

Public school teachers in Washington D.C. have been given a ‘starter packet’ to help discuss the loss of another American to violence with grieving, angry or curious students. When Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were killed such Maoist quality teacher-indoctrination class room time did not generally occur-and look what happened. To a certain extent students need to be taken out of mass indoctrination loops and allowed to pursue their enlightened self-interests in personalized educational settings.

I am somewhat skeptical about the value of union and bureaucratic controls on public education where little changes and too much is standardized. My grandfather had just a 4^th grade education at the turn of the 20^th century and though I took a Bachelor’s degree, he had a better quality of life.  An outdoorsman in the state of Washington in the first half of the 20^th century experienced a healthier ecosphere than in the present era of accelerated mass species die-off.

 Practical Tex-Mex males during the last building boom dropped often out after completing the legally required 8^th grade in order to work construction, perhaps brick laying, to raise a family instead of pursuing pie-in-the-sky goals of higher education that can lead to nowhere. Deferring gratification when there will be no gratification later doesn’t seem too smart. Higher education in modern America can be a bridge to nowhere.

A close relation between mass production of engineers and manufacturing creates realistic economic applications for education. In the U.S.A. high schools have become something of a culture for themselves with education somewhat down-sized and not uncommonly irrelevant to actual job prospects.

College graduates after the 2008 financial crash had a much harder time finding a job. Decentralizing schools and students might be a way to return the focus to education instead of spectator sports, gangs and standardized curricula more suitable for Maoist China than a free enterprise society.

Concentrated capital tends to promote the most vicious to political and economic power. Competition to remove government regulation of capital internationally is a self-reinforcing phenomenal assault upon democracy and the idea of government by and for the people.

Government and economics exist to serve the interests of the people, especially the overwhelming majority of the people, yet that point is too easily lost within self-reinforcing corporatism supported with media propaganda and sycophant politicos. American students do not learn to invent new reforms to government and capitalism that would restore free enterprise and downgrade extreme capital concentration. They do not learn the philosophy of philosophy, free thought and the relationship of free enterprise to democracy, or that unfettered capitalism is not the sole alternative to communism or socialism. Free enterprise can be killed off with excessive capitalism.

It is a real point that unlimited capital concentration is not required for free enterprise and that economic adjustments through government regulation rightly adopted can direct the entire free enterprise field toward more competition, inventiveness and responsiveness to the material and spiritual interests of the people of the United States.

With an abundance of vacant office spaces it should be easy to rent private space for small public education classes. Listings for quality-rated classroom space might arise on eBay. Classrooms could be located closer to neighborhoods reducing transport costs. Students ought to be able to walk to a classroom with ten or twenty students. School districts could in effect have numerous franchise outlets in rental spaces tied together through computer electronics. Classrooms could be given chalkboard size tablet computer screens on which a teacher could write upon images. A life-sized remote teacher could see and instruct students. Perhaps qualified assistant teachers could help in some classrooms for less cost than an actual teacher. More quality private teachers could contract for teaching just one class-as adjunct professors might in college. There would be no room for gangs in school.

Decentralizing schools would save costs refurbishing obsolete and decrepit school facilities. The private sector ought to be involved more in public education it is presently. Even the Army contracted many of its former soldier tasks to the private sector. Empty meeting halls, vacant convention centers, high-rise office buildings and empty shopping malls might be good places to have ten or twenty carefully selected students gather for a semester or two perhaps before moving on to another location in the future. New jobs could appear interfacing with decentralized school facilities that are closer to being privately financed.

It is possible that with a higher percent of students attending decentralized schools in private facilities that a blending in of actual existing private schools with the decentralized school system could be synthesized.

Private schools classes could be rated and certified.  Education contractors could interact with the school district education programmer so students could move in and out of private and public school courses seamlessly. Working toward graduation goals could be monitored by a computer program following each student’s progress and providing lists of all of the available course outlets relevant and available in the school district in public and private school facilities. Some private employers may want to hire a student-intern for a semester. Course apps for available classes and classroom locations and spaces available ought to exist live on each school district’s student access URL.

Students working closer within a civil economic and neighborhood setting instead of being alienated within separate, hierarchical, institutional pubic school corrals might better understand the relationship between what is learned in the classroom and what they experience every day in the real world. With so many jobs being outsourced from the U.S.A., with so many illegal aliens and legal foreign immigrants, with entire career fields disappearing as quickly as morning dew in sunshine and with such a high cost of post-graduate continuing education to private citizens changing the setting of secondary and post-secondary in the U.S.A. might be a way to bring education to a closer working synthesis with real economic and spiritual needs of the people. Making education more responsive and adaptive than it is presently would be a first step in creating a future U.S.A. capable of being a leader in inventive and creative thought and applying that knowledge pragmatically.

Without a better and reformed public education system American democracy will continue to wither away under the influence of corporatism, media, concentrated wealth and foreign competition.