Education and democracy

In order to have and maintain a viable, healthy democracy you must have an informed and well-educated citizenry. At the present time in the United States we have neither. The media have abandoned any pretense of providing news of importance in favor of endless hours of trivial sensationalism about Michael Jackson, runaway brides, Janet Jackson’s breast, and other such vital matters. If you wish to learn anything substantial about important things like the “war” in Iraq, the Gannon/Guckert scandal, the torture and other scandals that are being covered up, the obscene national debt, the failure of 9/11, etc., you have to go to the internet or to foreign news sources. The state of our major media in the United States is shameful. In answer to a viewer’s question, “Why aren’t Iraq truths printed?” an editor on our only major newspaper summed up his rather evasive answer by commenting, “No paper is showing circulation gains covering the war in Iraq.” He meant to imply that newspapers were covering the war in Iraq at great expense even though Americans don’t want to hear about it. In fact, our newspapers are not printing the truth about Iraq. Their sole goal nowadays is to increase circulation, not to provide a public service even though they are supposedly obliged to do so, not to act as watchdogs over our increasingly dishonest politicians, not to act as a “fourth estate,” to perform the functions in society that up until a short time ago they have always provided. They just want to increase circulation and therefore income. And yes, the media are in fact controlled by a very small number of huge corporations that manage the news.

When it comes to education the situation is just as bad and perhaps worse. The only way you can have a healthy democracy is to have a well-educated citizenry. The only way you can have that is to have first-rate public schools. Our current public schools are far from first-rate. Indeed, they are arguably not even second-rate. Nowhere is this more true than in the State of Idaho. Schools are one of the most basic, important, and necessary institutions in any civilized country, probably fundamentally more important even than police and fire protection. As such they should be prized, well-funded, and secure. Under the Idaho system they must in effect beg for funding year after year. If local people refuse to pass levies the schools suffer. Hypothetically you could have schools one year but not the next. Of course this rarely happens. But what does happen is that the very best you can hope for are mediocre schools one year and poorer schools in other years. This is an absolutely absurd situation. I don’t know who originated this scheme in the first place but it is clearly our Republican controlled legislature that has caused it to persist. Perhaps back in the days of one-room schoolhouses, horse-powered farming, cannon ball warfare, and hand cranked telephones, this might have been acceptable. But this is the 21st century! Children have to be prepared to cope in the modern world of technology and rapid culture change. It is becoming increasing obvious that our schools are nowhere near up to this challenge. The U.S. is falling further and further behind other nations such as Japan, China, India and others. The so-called American Century is about to come to a close. But our (Republican) powers that be refuse year after year to adequately fund our schools. One Republican legislator a few years ago even suggested changing the State Constitution so the state would have no responsibility at all for funding schools. More recently they have engaged in endless legal maneuvers to escape responsibility. In the meanwhile the schools continue to deteriorate and the children suffer the sins of thoughtless and short-sighted adults.

The idea of the fundamental and crucial value of Public Schools and universal education to a healthy democracy in the abstract I think cannot be denied. In practice, of course, it is difficult to achieve such a perfect situation. Obviously there are good and bad schools, depending upon the value local people place upon their particular schools and their willingness to reliably fund and support them. If there are bad administrators and teachers or both, which there sometimes are, they should be held accountable by the citizenry. But never forget that you pay for what you get. If you refuse to pay decent salaries or provide proper facilities you obviously won’t get much. Public Schools are an absolutely fundamental institution in American society and as such they should be assured of adequate and reliable funding every year and not have to resort to begging. It is not only the children and the schools that suffer. If a city has mediocre or worse schools, intelligent, ambitious, and creative people are going to avoid them, thus insuring the city will spiral further and further into decline and decay. There is absolutely no way you can argue that poor schools are good enough or an asset to a community. If you can’t afford schools you can’t afford children.