It is not our education system that is failing us, it is we that are failing our education system. And in failing that system we fail succeeding generations and our country. Thomas Jefferson thought that funding for education was so important that even war did not take precedence over it. I believe that Jefferson was right, and we need to quit blaming teachers for our failure to fund education properly.

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Thomas Jefferson whitehousehistory.org

Failure to Communicate

By Richard Girard

"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance."

Sir Claus Moser, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. London Daily Telegraph; August 21, 1990.

"It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government."

Texas Declaration of Independence, March 2, 1836.

" What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

--The Captain (Strother Martin), Cool Hand Luke, 1968.

It is not the American education system that has failed us.

It is we who have failed the American education system.

In my July 2, 2012 OpEdNews article, " Aiding the Evolution ," I pointed out what I believe is the basis for our failure, and its root cause [words in italics have been added for amplification and clarification]:

"All of the anti-Government conservatives and libertarians consistently forget the profound but obvious truths expressed by two of our greatest Presidents about government.

The first of these was expressed by our fourth President, James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, December 1788, "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

The second of these was part of a speech by our twenty-sixth President, Theodore Roosevelt, given on September 9, 1902, in Asheville North Carolina, "The government is us; we are the government, you and I."

So if our government is a reflection of ourselves and our natures, the embodiment of the very concept of the first three words of our Constitution, "We the People," then by logical extension, wishing to shrink the government to a size that, as arch-conservative Grover Norquist states "can be drown in a bathtub," should disturb every American, because it says that government should be made so small that We the People have no influence over it, and this miniscule, flaccid body could do nothing against the predatory acts of the economically most powerful members of our society even if we could influence it. What does this attitude say of people like Mr. Norquist, and the rest of those within our country who hold similar points of view?

Nothing good, I assure you.

It demonstrates one of two profound defects within our natures. The American people have become so intent on "getting ahead" by any means possible in terms of wealth and power, that they are willing to eliminate all checks and balances our political/economic system might retain to achieve that goal, or, we have become so lazy and addled as a people that we are willing to abrogate our responsibility as citizens of this nation to actively engage in its governance. Or both.

The American system of government is more dependent than any other in the world on the participation of its citizens to work. Yet we have permitted ourselves to become as intensely divided by partisan politics in the last thirty years as any time in America's history, at the instigation of individuals who selfishly seek to increase their own social and political power at our expense, and it is the quality of our government that suffers the most. The primary effect of this sharp partisan division is to reduce citizen participation in our political system, making the loudest voices appear to be the majority when they are not."

Free market capitalism is presented to us, unlike government, as a self-correcting system; any excesses within the system will eventually be corrected by market forces.

This is a false premise and demonstrably wrong. Historically, the tendency of any capitalist system on a large, i.e., national scale, is towards monopoly at worst, or a very small, colluding oligopoly at best. One needs only to read Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), or note the history of the American automobile manufacturers or IBM, as well as the financial crash of 2008, to see the truth of this statement. Competition is crushed, and profit is maximized without any consideration for consumers once a company becomes "the only game in town." This belief in the "magic" of "market forces" to keep free market capitalism honest and competitive is as ridiculous and contrary to human nature that they should rename laissez-faire capitalism "lazy fairy capitalism." The disciples of the Austrian and Chicago Schools of Economics, at least in public, expect their fairy godmother (in the form of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, or to use the modern term, "market forces") to come down, wave her magic wand, and keep everything as it should be in terms of maintaining a functioning, competitive system.

The greatest fault that exists within our economic system currently is a psychological one: a belief that there must be winners and losers. If you believe that there has to be winners and losers for an economic system to function, you are ultimately insuring that economic system will fail at its most basic level at some point in the future for the vast majority of its participants. And the weight of that failure must ultimately pull down the rest of the system with it. We have the examples of Chile under General Pinochet, as well as Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina under their military juntas in the 1970's, to show us how dangerous this system is for the economic well-being of the majority of a nation's people. (Read Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, for more on the history and effects of the application of Milton Friedman's selfishness-based economics to real-life and real people.)

And no place in American society is this more apparent today than in America's education system, public and private. And the problems of America's educational system cannot be solved by a system that is based on selfishness.

As I stated three years ago in my November 10, 2009 OpEdNews article " Social Capitalism ," selfishness is not an emotionally healthy state. Selfixhness is in fact an invariable component of mental illness. To quote from the article:

"Whether you are in the depths of depression or the unbounded heights of a manic episode, it is all about you, and your pain or elation. If you are paranoid, they are out to get you. If you are schizophrenic, the voices in your head are talking only to you; the visions that you are seeing are only for you. Narcissism is about loving you to the exclusion of all others. Being a sociopath is about what you need, and to hell with everyone else. All of the forms of true sexual deviance are about you getting your jollies, not about sharing life's most intimate experience."

As the great psychologist and social commentator, Erich Fromm, stated in his 1947 book, Man for Himself (chapter 4), "Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either."

I will quote further from my 2009 article [words in italics have been added for clarification and amplification]:

If selfishness is an invariable component of mental illness, then what does that have to say about an economic system that is based on selfishness? Can an economic system that distorts the fabric of civil society through its overriding emphasis on selfishness be considered healthy? Can we actually draw the conclusion that the economic selfishness exhibited by our society is a component of a deeper underlying illness within our society? I believe that we can.

Almost sixty years ago, the Rand Corporation created one of the most important models of game theory, "The Prisoner's Dilemma." Their assumption was that if presented with a choice between cooperation and self-interest--where the outcome of the dilemma was, unknown to the participants, weighted toward self-interest--the participants would choose self-interest. When they tested it on their secretaries, they were surprised that the secretaries overwhelmingly chose cooperation over self-interest. The people at Rand ignored the outcome of this iteration of their test, stating that the secretaries lacked the sophistication necessary for a valid test.

John F. Nash, whose life was featured in the film A Beautiful Mind, at the same time proposed the Nash equilibrium. Nash assumed in this hypothesis that individuals acting in their own self-interest would always arrive at the best possible outcome. While brilliant, Nash was also a paranoid-schizophrenic, whose view of the world was tainted by his mental illness and its inherent selfishness. However, Nash and the Rand Corporation's conservative outlook of fear and selfishness appealed to the military and more conservative elements of the government, who used the fear to create America's nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Twice this policy almost ended civilization, in 1962 and 1983. Yet when Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon instigated the policy of détente, or cooperation, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, tensions between the super powers decreased until Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, and repudiated détente. In 1983 a Norwegian weather rocket almost triggered an automated Soviet nuclear attack, and this time it was the Soviet Union's Chairman Gorbachev who began the new era of cooperation and disarmament.

What is true for international affairs is also true for our economic system. The basic result matrix for the Prisoner's Dilemma says that if both parties cooperate they will get 90% of what they want. If one is selfish and the other cooperates, the one who is selfish gets 100% of what he wants and the person who cooperates gets nothing. Finally, if both sides are selfish, the two parties only get 50% of what they want.

When most of us look at the matrix, we see that if we are selfish, we are guaranteed of getting at least 50% of what we want from a particular situation, and we may get as much as 100% of what we want. On the other hand, if we cooperate, the matrix states we only have a 50% chance of getting 90% of what we want, and a 50% chance of getting nothing. This seems like a perfectly sane rationale, and as Marx pointed out, it is, in a purely materialistic sense.

In a purely human and societal sense, it is insane.

In order for it to work, it requires us to treat both ourselves and other people as "things," not human beings. We must alienate ourselves from our own humanity, and that of our fellow humans, in order for this system to succeed. It is a system which makes perfect sense to a criminal or a paranoid-schizophrenic, or anyone who is fearful that they won't get what they believe is their "rightful" share; which, given human nature, is generally more than they are justly entitled to. It is not a workable system in the long term for any society, because without cooperation, there can be no society.

The matrix for the "Prisoner's Dilemma" says that honest cooperation will always get both sides most of what they want, while experience has shown us that selfishness will potentially get us an unexpected and undesired result, such as global thermonuclear war. If the long-term interaction of large groups of humans is viewed as an indeterminate, non-zero sum game (even though parts of the interaction between individuals may be determinate or zero-sum games), then logically, for the group as a whole, honest cooperation is the best choice for group interaction.

This brings us to the recent teacher's strike in Chicago.

We have Mayor Rahm Emanuel, acting like the crypto-corporatist swine that I believe he is, doing everything for the wealthiest One Percent and their corporate surrogates, and nothing for the other citizens of Chicago. His purpose is obvious to anyone who sees what is happening: break the teacher's union, and reduce most of Chicago's public schools to the lowest common denominator, except a small number of corporate run charter schools that are able to cherry pick their students in order to maximize their probability of success.

If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would have been alternating filing legal motions in state and Federal courts against the City Of Chicago and its School Board, marching on the picket lines, and looking for the opportunity to horse whip Rahm Emanuel, for: 1) acting like a member of the pseudo-aristocracy; 2) proving himself a friend of the One Percent, and an enemy of the majority of the American People; 3) being a horse's ass. To use one of my favorite quotes by Marx (Groucho, not Karl) concerning men like Rahm Emanuel, "I'd horse whip you sir, if I owned a horse!"

Okay, perhaps Jefferson wouldn't horse whip Chicago's Mayor. He was a great believer that living well was the best revenge, as evidenced by this quote from a letter to John Dickinson in 1801, just after he and the Democratic-Republicans (predecessors of today's Democratic Party) had driven John Adams and the pseudo-aristocrats of the Federalist Party from power in the election (or as Jefferson called it "the Revolution") of 1800, "What a satisfaction have we in the contemplation of the benevolent effects of our efforts, compared with those of the leaders on the other side, who have discountenanced all advances in science as dangerous innovations, have endeavored to render philosophy and republicanism terms of reproach, to persuade us that man cannot be governed but by the rod, etc." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 10, p. 217; 1904.)

Thomas Jefferson was the foremost proponent of educating the American people en masse, by a system of public education, of all of the Founding Fathers. As Jefferson wrote to David Harding in 1824, "In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 16, p. 30; 1904.) As anyone who has tried to argue with a member of the "Tea Party" will tell you, you cannot reason with the truly ignorant, no matter how good your information might be.

Jefferson realized that a system of compulsory education, teaching children to read, write, do simple arithmetic, plus an introduction to the history of the World as well as that of the United States, together with the critical thinking skills that such a system would engender, was the best guarantee for our nascent nation to maintain its values as a democratic republic, as the following two paragraphs demonstrate:

"Is it a right or a duty in society to take care of their infant members in opposition to the will of the parent? How far does this right and duty extend? --to guard the life of the infant, his property, his instruction, his morals? The Roman father was supreme in all these: we draw a line, but where? --public sentiment does not seem to have traced it precisely... It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation [removal, author's note] and education of the infant against the will of the father... What is proposed... is to remove the objection of expense, by offering education gratis, and to strengthen parental excitement by the disfranchisement of his child while uneducated. Society has certainly a right to disavow him whom they offer, and are permitted to qualify for the duties of a citizen. If we do not force instruction, let us at least strengthen the motives to receive it when offered." (Thomas Jefferson: Note to Elementary School Act, 1817; The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 17, p. 423; 1904.)

"The reading in the first stage, where [the people] will receive their whole education, is proposed... to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782; volume 2, p. 106; 1904.)

Once again, the greatest fault that exists within our current educational and economic system is a psychological one: that there must be winners and losers. This is bad for our nation in the long-term, because it creates the idea in the minds of many Americans that second place is nothing more than first loser, and if you are not Number One, you are worthless, or at least somehow worth less than someone else. This is nothing but an attempt at social engineering, creating a system that insures a small elite class of winners, and a much larger class of losers. Edmund Burke would be so proud. (See Burke's 1756 monograph, A Vindication of Natural Society.)

George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind education program is the most disastrous sham visited on the American People in our nation's history since the privatization of prisons in the 1980's. In attempting to quantify the American educational system objectively without providing the monetary assistance that is required to do the job properly, it dooms our nation's poorer school systems, who do not have a strong financial foundation--due to the local residents' poverty--to invariably fail, permitting their takeover by private entities who will promise the world and deliver...nothing. In fact, the two programs together do more to promote a permanent underclass in this country than any American political or legal enactment since Plessy v. Ferguson established Jim Crow. Thomas Jefferson understood the difficulty faced by the poorer members of American society, and that a general equality of education among the American people was vital for the nation and its survival: "The less wealthy people,... by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, (1821); Memorial Edition; volume 1, p. 73; 1904) All that No Child Left Behind has done is forced teachers to teach to the test, rather than what their students will need to succeed in the real world, and foster wide spread cheating by both our students and our schools .

The reactionary oligarchs who have dominated the Republican party since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, plutocrats including the Walton family (who together have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the rest of the American people combined), the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Joe and Peter Coors, are following a carefully orchestrated plan, whose outlines were put forward in a memorandum by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell in 1971 , which Powell designed to overcome what he saw as the dominance of the "liberal" viewpoint in American society and the media. Justice Powell wrote better than he ever thought he had: later hard core reactionary political movers and shakers like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist have taken Powell's memorandum and turned it into a blueprint for a crypto-fascist overthrow of our Constitution and way of life, not simply "equalizing" things between liberal and conservative, but very nearly destroying the liberal tradition of our country that goes back to Jefferson and Madison.

For far too long, we on the left have been playing Old Maid, while the reactionaries have been playing contract bridge. It is time for us to change the game: five-card stud poker, table stakes. On the table is the future our country, our Constitution, and our democratic republic. And the stakes for the opening hand is the American education system.

President Jefferson, in his Sixth Annual Message to Congress in 1806, wrote of the importance of education to this nation. He considered education to be so important that it should be funded in such a way that even a war could not impede its consistent funding by Congress: "The present consideration of a national establishment for education, particularly, is rendered proper by this circumstance also, that if Congress, approving the proposition, shall yet think it more eligible to found it on a donation of lands, they have it now in their power to endow it with those which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income. The foundation would have the advantage of being independent on war, which may suspend other improvements by requiring for its own purposes the resources destined for them." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 3, p. 424; 1904.)

The reactionary oligarchs who wish to control our nation want the American people ignorant and unthinking. As Lord Brougham pointed out in a speech to the British Parliament on January 28, 1828, "Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave." American educator Alan Bloom, in the Preface to his most important work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), stated it more succinctly, "The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration." A liberal education is not about turning you into a "liberal:" it is about giving you a background of history, and alternative modes of thought and belief that give you a wider choice in your decision making effort than a simple authoritarian "Yes" or "No." In military terms, it is teaching you that there are alternatives to just assaulting your enemy's front: you can bypass him and cut him off from his supplies, you can attack his flank, you can use the indirect attack, i.e., threaten something that is more important than his current position--say his capital--in order to force him to withdraw, etc. The possibilities are endless. It is what is referred to as "thinking outside of the box," or more properly, "critical thinking." German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel may have put it best in his book The Philosophy of Right, (no. 58; 1821; translated 1942), "Education is the art of making man ethical." This is the last thing the oligarchs want: people who will tell them no, for whatever reason; they want subservient drones who obey the orders of their "betters."

However, just as Aristotle once reportedly told Alexander the Great (when the future conqueror was his student, and Aristotle Alexander's tutor), "There is no Royal Road to mathematics;" there is no quick, easy, one size fits all fix for the American educational system. There are some very limited requirements that we can universally impose, like those suggested by Italian education innovator Maria Montessori in Chapter 5 of her breakthrough book, The Montessori Method (1912), "If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks." We may also do everything in our power to avoid setting what is learned in public education or private study in concrete, by cultivating an open mind (Zen Buddhists call it a Zen mind), a questioning and criticism of everything, including our own beliefs and knowledge, open to a host of new knowledge, information, and modes of thought as our information age culture develops it. As Dr. Thomas Szasz wrote in his 1973 book, The Second Sin, the chapter titled "Education," "Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all." This can unfortunately make many people uncomfortable, in that it requires both skill and dedication on the part of teachers, and patience on the part of the rest of us to deal with the truly inquisitive child and youth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Book 1 of Emile, (1762) stated, "We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education." Providing that strength can however seem dangerous, as Thomas Jefferson noted to in a letter to Thomas Cooper in 1822, "The article of discipline is the most difficult in American education. Premature ideas of independence, too little repressed by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination which is the great obstacle to science with us and a principal cause of its decay since the Revolution." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 15, p. 406; 1904.) But a century later, American author Raymond Chandler noted, " It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training." (The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, "Notes on English and American Style;" 1976). I would say that it is worth the risk of some small degree of "insubordination" among our youth and young adults in order to make certain that they are not overly impressed by titles, or social or economic position, but that instead they should always be polite to those with whom they interact, whether that individual is a prince or pauper. This is a "republican" attitude of which Jefferson would approve.

What can we do to correct these problems?

As Raymond Chandler noted above, American education is a cultural flop. It is imperative that this fact be reversed, and that music and the rest of the arts be given a place in the modern public school system, so that rich and poor, every American has the opportunity to discover their inner muse. When I think of the musicians who would not have had the opportunity to play without a music program at their school--Louis Armstrong and Motown's seminal bass player James Jamerson are two who immediately come to mind--I cringe at the future of music in America. And what is true of music is even truer of the other cultural arts. Drama, artwork, creative writing, and other areas of belle arts are in even worse shape. This needs to be corrected now.

One of the greatest problems with the American education system is that it is overly dependent on rote memorization as its method of learning. Education should be a dynamic event, which ebbs and flows in order to maintain the student's interest. Some things cannot help but by their nature rely almost entirely on memorization and repetitive usage: spelling is the best example. But other subjects, such as history and science, should not be taught in such a boring and uninformative manner. In these subjects, the why and the how are every bit as important as the who, the what, the when, and the where, something that is too often forgotten by under-inspired or under-informed teachers. Let us make these subjects live, by showing why they are important to today.

Smaller classroom size, better teachers with better pay to attract the best people we can, more personal instruction that emphasizes different teaching methods for those who learn differently, better more comprehensive social studies textbooks that cover not only the great men and women, but also the average person and their times. Let us have a system of teaching that emphasizes the different uses of the knowledge the student receives, but helps them to excel and, God willing, find knowledge he will not only use for the rest of his life, but an avocation to follow. To quote Felix E. Schelling, in his 1929 book Pedagogically Speaking (Chapter 8), "True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world." If we use education to not only learn to act in a polite and civilized manner, not in a haughty or superior fashion to others; when we realize that we are all equal in having some talent or ability that we can do better than others in our community, and positive knowledge that we can convey to others, whatever it may be; then we will all have a place at a Round Table, where no one is at the head or the foot, they just are; then on that day we will finally be living Thomas Jefferson's immortal words in the Declaration of Independence: " We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal"" And when I say "Men," understand I mean all of humanity: both sexes and every sexual orientation, all races, every creed and color, and social or economic standing, without limit, Amen.

There are those who believe that this is a Utopian vision; but I, like Thomas Jefferson, am a realist. To quote T homas Jefferson from his letter to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours in 1816, "Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 14, p. 491; 1904.)

Amen Brother Jefferson, Amen.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'