How to Change the American Soul, as Applied to Education, without Getting Politically Shot Down

© 2010 Peter Free

 

19 September 2010

 

Objections to my call to change the American soul before reforming education

 

This is Part III of my conversation with a Republican Party friend about education reform.  (Parts I and II are here and here.)

 

After reading Part II, my friend asked:

 

I agree with everything you said, but how does someone get elected on such a plan for education?

 

How does one foster within society a willingness to listen long enough to understand the innovations that this approach to education proposes?

 

The pundits and interest groups would rip it apart as "limiting" access to education.  How do you create the buy-in necessary for the public to elect someone who will pursue such educational reforms?

 

First, a correction to your statement ─ the plan does not limit access

 

If you re-read Part II, you will see that it does not at all limit access to education.  It does the reverse.

 

Its key points are (a) expanding freedom of student choice in selecting educational opportunities and (b) directly focusing education on what individual students actually need to learn in order to get to where they want to go. 

 

The plan removes the one-size fits all, mandated focus of the current educational system.

 

An aside on the political skill of seeing “pros” as well as “cons”

 

Since the plan does not limit access to education at all, your anticipated opponents may have already out-foxed you by persuading you to misread and miscommunicate your position.

 

Never allow an adversary to put you into a box that does not fit.

 

The single most controversial aspect to my plan is not that it limits access, but that it gives students the ability to choose educational directions by discovering their abilities and interests.

 

One can legitimately criticize my focus by saving that (a) students are too young to do this choosing effectively and (b) the State would be abandoning some of its previous emphasis on turning out American citizen clones via the current system’s one-size-fits-all emphasis.

 

The answer to objection (a), “kids are too young,” is that:

 

(i) students will have elders and professionals assisting their thinking, based on psychological and empirical evidence and family values,

 

and

 

(ii) the new system will permit students to change their minds and re-direct themselves throughout the process.

 

The answer to criticism (b), “abandoning one-size-fits-all,” is that:

 

(i) it eliminates what has already proven itself to work poorly for the modern economy

 

and

 

(ii) it drops a structure that has obviously failed to create a minimally knowledgeable voting citizenry.

 

The main response to your questions is that focusing on the American “soul” avoids early battles over the specifics of any education plan

 

The reason I called this a “reform the American soul” plan was to avoid having to battle critics of education reform (in the way I describe it), before appropriate groundwork regarding our cultural mindset has been laid.

 

One should never propose a plan before a substantial segment of the public:

 

(a) recognizes that a plan of some kind is necessary

 

and

 

(b) understands enough of the realities of the situation to evaluate the merits of the plan that is going to be proposed.

 

Returning to Part I’s theme ─ the real crisis is not in education, it is in American cultural complacence and outsourcing our economic strength

 

As I mentioned in Parts I and II, the real crisis facing us is America’s complacence (arrogance) and our lack of a personal sacrifice ethic.  These weaknesses prevent us from formulating and carrying out long-term, strategically well thought out, plans of any kind.

 

In short, you will not be presenting an education reform plan at all.

 

I only went into some of the specifics of one so that you would have an idea where we want to go in the long run.  It is difficult to go to a specific destination, unless you define it first.  Furthermore, a critic is unpersuasive, when he or she cannot point to solutions.

 

So, your goal right now is to motivate Americans to see and react intelligently to the economic and foreign policy crises that beset us.  You don’t need to worry about selling a specific plan just yet.

 

You first have to prepare Americans to be ready to consider and implement a plan.

 

The logic to this ordering of priorities is that, once most of us are aware of crises, we will be motivated to think about and experiment in fixing them.  But if we don’t see the problems, or aren’t motivated to fix them, there is no point in proposing a plan to solve anything.

 

So ─ the short answer to your questions is

 

Motivating Americans to recognize and think realistically about our domestic and international situations is your first priority.

 

You have to motivate people to see facts, rather than ideological nonsense.

 

Once Americans recognize the magnitude of the actual threats to our economy and our way of life, you will “show” them solutions by using small-scale experimental projects.

 

In adopting this approach, you will not have to articulate a nation-wide philosophy regarding education.  Not doing so will avoid early barbs from critics.  Those who do complain about your small scale test solutions can be defended against by saying, “This is just an experiment to see what works.”

 

Real (historical) America is pragmatic.  We have gotten off that pragmatic track by letting the ideological fringes dictate America’s current self-destructive direction.  Once Americans awaken to real crisis, these fringe elements will have less impact on the national discussion.

 

“Give me an example of how all this would work, Pete”

 

As I indicated in Part II, Americans need crises to motivate them.

 

We are currently drowning in a number of underappreciated trends.  The political job is to pick one of these ─ one that will ultimately prove to be directly related to our ability to educate our children ─ and open the public’s eyes to its significance.

 

When significance is recognized, personal and societal motivation rise.

 

A recognized crisis will provide us the motivation for designing experimental solutions to it.  Successful experiments, in turn, will provide evidence that supports subsequently-presented larger plans.

 

After we get to where we want to go, History will see that the “American soul” (culture) changed before education did.

 

My guess is that (i) the changing culture stage and (ii) implementing the experimental education solutions stage will, together, require twenty to thirty years.

 

During that time, you and your supporters will stay quiet about your ultimate educational vision.  Revealing an all-encompassing plan before people are ready to see it is self-defeating.  As you wisely said, you don’t want to be marginalized before your proposed solution can get off the ground.  

 

The reluctance to be fully forthcoming is not deception.  A plan along the lines of what I have proposed needs to be tested and proven before it is implemented in large scale, anyway.

 

Just because we know right now that we want America to be free and comfortable, and have some ideas about how to accomplish that, does not imply that we have to reveal all our thinking.  We can wait until  our truth-telling has made large segments of the public ready to hear specifics.

 

“Okay, Pete, pick an underappreciated crisis that we can work with”

 

There are three interrelated problems facing the United States, any one of which has the power to destroy us.  These are outsourcing, plutocracy, and American-branded continuous war.  All ruin the foundations of freedom.  I have addressed plutocracy and continuous war here and here.

 

In regard to outsourcing jobs, some Democrats and Republicans are awakening to the deadly effect that excessive globalization, particularly in manufacturing, has had on America’s economic strength.

 

The flight of manufacturing from the United States is an immense problem for the working and middle classes.

 

It has also had negative direct and indirect implications on our ability to sustain a strong military.  I have written briefly about this issue here.

 

Economy and education are conceptually related

 

Education and economy are related.  The common justification for education reform is usually related to the need to have workers who can do the work of the future.

 

Consequently, the crisis to begin with is the economic one.  Tackling economic issues head on, which neither political party has done, is the way to gain traction in opening people’s eyes to the difficulties Americans face in the long run.

 

The difficulty in doing economic reality training is that it means taking on the self-interest of plutocrats and multinational corporations, who benefit from outsourcing jobs to China and India.

 

That conflict will not be as overwhelming as it seems because Labor and Small and Medium Businesses can be recruited in support of the idea of tax and subsidy policies that benefit American workers and business.  This is an area where government support and mutual planning, as in Germany and Japan, is not the enemy.

 

Once Americans have awakened to the need to deal with the economic system as a whole, rather than with just the simple fact of unemployment in a recession, we can proceed to the second state of culture reform, experimenting with solutions.

 

Beginning the experimentation stage ─ recruiting allies from business

 

In regard to small scale testing of the education reform plan proposed in Part II, recruiting business allies may not be as difficult as it seems.

 

Some large corporations have already criticized American education for being inadequate in producing the workers they need.  Presenting them with ideas for education-related experiments that are designed to meet their criteria for producing satisfactory workers should prompt these businesses’ political and, possibly, financial support.

 

An aside about “vocation”

 

In important respects, the ideas in Part II are vocational in emphasis, provided we expand “vocation” and “vocational” to include emphasis on the complex of work, interests, abilities, and occupational type.

 

The vocational emphasis permits us to escape the one-size-fits-all paradigm.  Instead of Government directing unitary contents of education, the variable requirements for successful work and employment in each vocation will.

 

Conclusion ─ don’t announce a plan until the cultural groundwork has been laid

 

The focus of my thinking is on culture.  Not education.

 

We are not going to make changes in cultural complacence, plutocracy, or American quasi-imperialism via reforming K-12 or college education.

 

Instead, we will begin the necessary societal changes by alerting people to the realities presented by a changing world and our currently self-destructive responses to them.

 

Only after rousing the public to Reality’s facts, and to the difficulties that these facts provably cause us, will we begin suggesting experimental changes in education.  These changes will be designed to provide American business with the workers it needs to compete successfully in the global market, without turning the United States into a third world nation.

 

In sum ─ answering the questions you posed ─ there is no plan for your critics to attack.

 

There won’t be one until after (a) the public has awakened and (b) the experimental testing of our proposed solutions has produced evidence that our ideas work.