In a world of rapidly rising standards and economic rewards for knowledge, are some American parents actually hostile to education? In my travels I’m seeing evidence that the answer is yes. It’s just bits and pieces so far but worth our attention, because in a globalizing economy, with the question of the U.S.’s competitiveness feeling more urgent all the time, such a shift would be puzzling – and very bad news.
I was talking some time ago with a group of school superintendents from Maryland. The dominant mood was frustration – a sense that they weren’t making the progress with our kids that they wanted to. A few of the superintendents surprised me by saying they had received complaints from parents who were angry because their kids were being made to learn algebra. Basic objection: “What do they need algebra for? It’s hard!” Just a few days ago I was talking to a middle-school vice principal, this time in Nebraska. She reported the same thing: parents angry over kids having to learn algebra.
Maybe that strikes you the way it did me – as simply unbelievable. Perhaps it’s the education industry trying to blame others for its own failures. But I don’t think so. These school administrators didn’t seem eager to report their experiences and didn’t do so until we’d been talking about U.S. education for some time. More important, their reports fit with other signs I’ve noticed suggesting that some folks really don’t like schools and education – and are surprisingly willing to let the world know how they feel.
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This recognition that there is a strong dislike of education is neither new nor surprising. To many, being educated is elitest.
In the late 60’s, I was witness to this attitude. I frequented this gas station on State Street — the owner seemed nice and the mechanics quite competent. But my view of the owner changed drastically. In walked a young (perhaps 30-something) newly-hired UW-Madison professor, hands trembling in anger, shoving 6 new crisp one hundred dollar bills into the owner’s open palms; the owner had refused to accept this professor’s credit card, or check or acknowledgement from UW and had refused to release this professor’s car (kept over the weekend) until the prof had paid him in cash. The owner made his disdain known: “I am a small business owner, and unlike you, I have dirt under my fingernails.”
But the 60’s were also a time when too many of my generation on the UW Madison campus were attacking the University’s goals. I was here on campus during the student protests, but not against the Vietnam War. No. For these wayward students, it was not about getting an education, it was about getting a job and making money. The University was not teaching them stuff that would allow them to get a job — that was their protest.
Three years ago, at the Northside school board candidate forum, one speaker, the owner of a carpentry business, openly opined algebra worthless: “I’ve worked for 25 years and never had a need for more than simple arithmetic. Just teach them how to add, and subtract.”
That mantra today continues unabated. For most, education is about getting a job. The cited article promulgates that view. It is the view that education is not about understanding the world and making good decisions, its about, most importantly, becoming a cog in somebody else’s wheel.