Improving American Education Is about Culture, More than It Is about Teachers, Buildings, and Books

13 September 2010

Strides in easily satisfied consumerism have encouraged us to forget that progress in educational reform requires actual work and real sacrifice

When a generationally younger Republican Party friend of mine recently asked about the wisdom of trying to join a school board, as opposed to studying energy issues, I told him to forget about educational reform via the school board route.

Tinkering around the edges of education, as we perennially do in a quasi-structural manner, is not going to go anywhere. The problem is deeper

Fixing education is predominantly a cultural problem. It has to do with:

(i) poverty;

(ii) general hopelessness in inner cities;

(iii) fractured families that lack available role models;

(iv) America’s cultural complacence;

(v) an epidemic sense of personal entitlement;

and

(vi) the widening economic gap between the few well-to-do, on the one hand, and the many middle and working class people, on the other, who do not see realistically achievable upward economic mobility as a realistically achievable reward.

The demise of a comfortable middle class and the lack of upward socio-economic mobility are the two most dominant economic problems facing this country.

It is pretty hard to motivate kids with rough lives to study hard, if it is not at all apparent the effort is going to pay off.

Students are unmotivated and educational standards have been relaxed

Robert J. Samuelson wrote an influential opinion related to this subject last week:

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren't motivated, even capable teachers may fail.

Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.

The goal of expanding "access" -- giving more students more years of schooling -- tends to lower educational standards.

Against these realities, school "reform" rhetoric is blissfully evasive.

Thomas Friedman agrees that education reform is a deeper issue

Coincidentally, Thomas Friedman addressed the cultural issue after I brought it up with my friend. (Isn’t synchronicity fun ─ at least for those of us with non-statistical minds?)

There is a lot to Samuelson’s point — and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism.

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Bodes not well for America’s future

Friedman concluded his essay by noting that China and India are catching up to the United States by:

“a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations.”

That ethic is mostly gone from the American cultural landscape.

Tell the truth and motivate

So ─ no my friend, don’t waste your time at the margin. Skip the school board.

Start a movement to fix the American soul.

PeteFree.com

Improving American Education Is about Culture, More than It Is about Teachers, Buildings, and Books