If you were President Obama’s Secretary of Education, what would you tell him? Ponder that thought for a moment. That’s what Lisa Neal Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief of eLearn Magazine asked me this morning.
I replied,
Mr. President, primary and secondary education in our nation are broken. They are not preparing our citizens to live in the modern world. Primary schools shield children from communities and real life, walling them off from the subjects we want them to master. And as Bill Gates said, “All of the evidence indicates that our high schools are no longer a path to opportunity and success, but a barrier to both.” Our great country has one of the lowest rates of high school graduation in the industrialized world.
Our nation’s schools need to be re-thought, re-designed, and re-engineered from the ground up. We probably need to change them from being our many counties’ schools, held back by the drag of parochialism, into a coherent, more unified arrangement. This takes fire in the belly. I am instructing every member of the Department of Education to read John Taylor Gattos’s Dumbing Us Down and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.
Sir, you might put them on your reading stack, too. If schools are not preparing the citizenry to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives — to be all that they can be — what are they for?
The staff here is already working to undo the damage done by the absurd focus on testing and other bad baggage from the No Child Left Behind mess we inherited from the W regime.
P.S. You can access Gatto and Illich from my seminal documents page.
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I’ll be the first to admit I wouldn’t have a clue. The education system seems to be a huge complicated mess.