It has long been said that ignorance is bliss and that what we don’t know won’t hurt us. I’m not sure when or why such nonsense was concocted, but the propagation of these ideas stands at the center of human idiocy and today’s political strategies. What’s more, the modern political-corporate agenda seeks to push stupidity and misinformation as a means of human and societal control. It is a war on reason, and they are setting up base camps in our schools.
Before I was a full-time mother (and part-time blogger), I was a teacher in the public school system. During my education and its subsequent professional years, I worked in every setting imaginable. I deflected racial tensions and flying chairs in a north Philadelphia elementary school and enjoyed the finely tuned middle schools of the Mainline. I taught in daycare, general education, Autistic Support, remedial Reading, and Gifted settings. From English to Math to Drama Club, I’ve worked with kids from ages two to eighteen. I have three degrees and numerous educational merits. The most important thing I ever learned, however, was how our easily and cleanly our public educational system has been hijacked.
In 1994, the No Child Left Behind Act was signed, forcing a uniformity on education that is essentially unreasonable to the basic diversity of the American landscape and strapping schools with financial weights they struggle to bear. Its recent reauthorization was lobbied for more than $22 million, and those pushing for it range from chemical companies to the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, the only ones pushing against it were the parents and teachers.
In the few short years between college and parenthood (my “hiatus”), I have watched public education fall prey to the manipulations of corporations. Like vultures hopping madly around a fresh carcass, corporations have poached the system for weaknesses and points of entry. Ironically, though not accidentally, the most vulnerable place for schools is in the budget. The mandating of standardized testing costs schools thousands of dollars in materials, preparation, and implementation, but with repeated cutbacks to their funding by the very agencies that require the costly tests, schools struggle to make up the difference. Desperate to make ends meet, they turn to the vultures – willingly opening their veins in exchange handouts to help keep schools open and safe.
Like a Hollywood villain capitalizing on his victim’s “misfortune,” the very proponents of the rigid and fundamentally flawed standards reach charitably into their pockets, donating everything from lunchroom edibles to classroom read-ables. These gifts, however, come at a price.
With the increasing and steady influx of corporate “donations” to public education, schools become the new frontier for corporate manipulation. The quality of education our children receive is suffering, and the commercial messages they get are gaining frequency and potency. Cafeteria lines pass under televisions playing advertisements for every gadget imaginable, and programming is sponsored by Disney. Math lessons divide Hershey’s candy bars. Libraries are heavy with books about cartoon characters and boy bands while older texts of more legitimate content rot away. One company, in the late 90’s, even went so far as to trade computers for a lesson about the “benefits of clear cutting forests.”
Slowly the principles of education erode, replaced by commercial messages, hidden agendas, and blatant misinformation. As teachers struggle to maintain testing standards, which completely ignore the impacts of local culture, student diversity, and home-school relationships, they begin to pass up on lessons less likely to produce ScanTron results. History, science, and the arts all take their turns on the chopping block as students practice reading and rereading paragraph long passages from test sample packs. Students with special needs are being told to stay home the day of the test, as there is no make-up date and no scoring adjustments that take their exceptionalities into account. Skilled, trained teachers change their entire approach to education, throwing out beautiful, creative, powerful lesson plans to make way for the pre-fab curriculums enforced by administrations. Students stress and struggle, spending hours in after-school tutoring working on their test-taking strategies, and walk into school shades of white and green on test day.
The standardized tests and the weight put on them have, in fact, changed the entire scope and focus of education in America. The aim is no longer to hone critical thinking and nourish creative minds, to inspire children to see their world through their own open eyes, to encourage educated and active participation in the world, or even to provide them with a set of skills they can take forward into a career. It isn’t about teaching exploration, examination, analysis, construction, and design. Suddenly, the entire objective is to “pass the test,” a test – mind you – that focuses solely on the most basic reading and lower math skills.
The decimation of America’s schools is about more than opening target markets and pumping children full of brand-loyalty and grade D beef. There is a larger, more malicious agenda at play. It is what I refer to as my “worker bee” theory.
If anyone was still teaching science, we would spend time learning about the bees (and why they are going extinct – which is probably why Monsanto has their lobby dollars involved in NCLB). Bees have one purpose in life: to reproduce. To do this, they gather pollen, turn it into honey, and feed that honey to their young. They do not venture out for a leisurely fly. They do not deviate from the explicit directions wiggled fervently to them by their co-workers. They don’t even actually stop to smell the flowers. They fly, collect, produce, and die. By way of extensive political manipulation, corporations are slowly turning our schools into hives and our citizens into narrow-minded, singularly oriented worker bees.
Through the manipulation of our public education system, corporations have found a way not only to begin early programming but to limit the potential of the human mind for the purpose of driving society deeper into the abyss of market servitude.
We simply need to pay closer attention to our schools.
Oh, and for crying out loud, pizza is not a vegetable. I know it has tomato sauce on it, but tomatoes aren’t vegetables either. They are fruits… something else we would know if we were still teaching science.
Jill-Arcangela Mancuso 
God — you are good! Thank you!
Thank you, Marc. And thank you for reading!
I don’t understand how Congress can say Pizza is a vegetable, when it clearly is not. Don’t any of them have children or grandchildren they are concerned about? (God forbid they be concerned about their fellow Americans) I suppose they go to private schools with real vegetables? The whole system is sickening.
Hmmm. It’s 11:14 am, but my comment says it was posted at 4:11pm. Guess I hopped in my Delorean before I posted that comment. lol
Never thought about it that way, teaching not for expanded minds but for regimental ones. Thought provoking.
Reading through the essay, I find myself rolling my head in circles(nodding and shaking your head at once will do that to you) for I seem to agree with as much as I disagree with. My question is, what are your short-term and long-term solutions to this situation?
First of all, thank you for reading. Next, I appreciate both your agreement and disagreement… It is nice to have readers who can be selective in their responses according to their own perspectives. Plowing through the opinions and ideas of others in blind agreement is a dangerous thing. Finally, I am not sure what the solutions to the problems are. The issues is highly dynamic, but brainstorming is always a good start.
While I agree strongly that schools and teachers, particularly those in urban areas, need to be held to performance standards to ensure the success of their students, I do not necessarily think that those standards can be uniform nationwide. Consider the remote areas of places like Hawaii or Alaska, small farming communities in the Midwest, and the urban schools of the East and West Coasts… How could the needs, intelligences (as they are defined culturally), and expectations of education in these communities possibly be identical? Having each state more involved in the designation of federally approved standards might make more sense.
Aside from this, a huge part of any solution would be to fund schools appropriately. While huge corporations are given millions in tax breaks and other sweetheart deals by state governments for setting up offices in their respective states, and even more coming from the federal government, school are continually seeing reductions in state and federal support. Taxing corporations appropriately would raise the needed revenue, essentially taking the money from the same place, without opening schools up to corporate manipulation.
Moreover, the regulations that support charter schools with local school funding is putting increased financial strain on schools. In one community near mine, teachers have been working without pay for months because the $14,000/student cost of charter school funding (compared to $3,00/student in public schools) has put the district in the red. The district has been refused its state funding this year because of its debt to the state (debt accumulated because of the charter school payments it is responsible for), and now with Gov. Corbett’s new budget reductions to education, the district will likely be forced to close. I think revising the way in which charter schools are funded, perhaps a dollar-for-dollar rule with parents paying the balance, would help prevent public schools from being strangled by the cost of charter schools. Ironically, the money schools hemorrhage paying into the charter schools could be put to work improving the public schools, making charters less necessary and less appealing.
I also think – and this is a big one – that we need legislation that protects children from being targeted by marketing campaigns. Similar laws have been passed in other nations, and they work. If companies have products for children, they have to market them to parents. In America, marketing to kids is big business. Marketing research companies earn millions (if not billions) of dollars every year figuring out how to manipulate young minds, how to drive cheap, imported, plastic products deep into the hearts of children, and how to get children to “nag more effectively” (as one researcher I saw interviewed explained it). This is a grotesque and immoral abuse of children, in my opinion. With our society’s economic demands on families (just to keep their homes and fuel their cars) creating situations where both parents often work, reducing the time parents have with children and undermining their ability to truly guard their children from unwanted influences, it becomes nearly impossible for parents to control the influx of commercial messages their children receive. These market manipulations of our children should simply be outlawed, and if it cannot be done on a federal level – legislation should be designed that prohibits corporate logos, labels, etc. from entering schools, even if they are attached to “donations.”
As for schools, part of me feels like their hands are tied, but I also think that teachers and administrators need to fight harder for their students. Teachers especially need to push back against administrators who tend to be more test oriented in their goals. Administrators need to support creativity in their teaching staff and give teachers tools (and license!) to work outside the box, rather than jumping all over them for deviating from their manuals. I have seen a small number of districts who function this way, and the schools are highly successful, score better on the test, and enjoy watching students work at levels that far exceed their peers in other districts. Not coincidentally, I’d imagine, these are also the districts with the most money.
As I said, it is a dynamic issues, and there are certainly no easy answers. I once brainstormed voluntary participation in NCLB, giving schools the option of participation as determined by their boards and parents. Those schools would receive a seal or banner of some kind indicating that they participate. A lawyer friend and I discussed what the ramifications of such a system would be… They were complicated. I’m not sure there is any good way to address the concerns of standards, but I am sure we can get schools funded and out of the aim of corporate marketing programs. Like all good things, it will take time, work, and commitment.
I would love to hear what your ideas are. And, again, thank you so much for reading!