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.