Pages

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Public Education turned "Consumerist and Hyper-protective."

In a few more years, at least in the next biennial budget, the course of education in Wisconsin will be forever changed. There is a point where saving public education will be an almost impossible task, especially when you think of the timid way Democrats roll out their own agenda. 

The following opinion was that epiphanic moment for me, when I realized how Republicans have turned a responsibility to educate the next generation, into a product (education) we shop for (choice) to be consumed (by kids) for a profit. We've turned children into a commodity, and parents into a target audience for unbelievable advertising. 

And this odd new public educational system will spur on a religious renaissance, where kids are taught early and often about religion. It's an end run around dwindling Sunday church services, and a little thing called the Constitution.
VOX.Com: "Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there's a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don't even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody.

I got called into my director's office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I "possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story." The story in question wasn't described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people." - Edward Schlosser

No comments:

Post a Comment