Mass education - who is responsible?

Over the past decades, America’s education system has been on an inexorable slide down the international
academic rankings, trailing behind countries like Azerbaijan and Lithuania in mathematics and not making
the OECD league tables in reading. This will ultimately threaten the political and economic position of the
world’s only current superpower, and the seriousness of the situation is reflected in the fact that American
President Barrack Obama addresses the issue in a speech to a student audience. One concrete attempt to
address US educational underachievement is the growing movement of charter schools across the USA.
This essay presents the issues stated in Obama’s speech and also intends to assess the adequacy of charter
schools as a possible solution to the woes of America’s education system.

The overall theme of Obama’s speech is ‘responsibility’. Teachers are responsible for being knowledgeable
and committed; school principals are responsible for providing well managed organisation and functioning
facilities; parents are responsible for caring for and motivating their children; and politicians are
responsible for providing the funding and framework necessary. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for
learning rests with the individual student. “You,” Obama says, “are responsible for turning up well rested
and well prepared every day for every class: show up, pay attention, listen to your parents and work hard.”
He insists that each and every person has something he or she is good at, and school provides the best and
perhaps the only opportunity for finding out what it is. Getting a good job doing interesting work requires
an education: “you can’t drop out of school and then drop into a good job!” Writing an English essay
reveals the writing talent, doing research papers reveals the scientific mind. Failure to focus and complete
an education lets oneself down and ultimately lets the nation down.

Like any good orator, Obama addresses a number of his audience’s objections and obstacles to completing
an education, summed up roughly as, “you don’t know my difficult circumstances" and "I don't need no
education to be rich and famous.” Because of Obama’s humble origins, being raised by a single mother, he
has the personal experience that gives him the right and credibility to claim that such difficult beginnings
can be overcome with a combination of persistent hard work and lucky breaks. He also, however, reminds
his audience that few if any of them will ever be like the people they watch on TV. They won’t click with
every teacher, they won’t enjoy every subject and they won’t understand why they need to learn certain
things until they have learned them. This will not matter as long as they do not give up and quit, even when
they fail repeatedly.

He appeals to his audience to show their generation’s achievement, their legacy, their bequest. Former
generations wrote the US Constitution, built the nation, fought the Great Depression; won the Second
World War; put a man on the Moon and created Google and Facebook. Only by refusing to quit on their
education and on themselves can they avoid failing their country.

Edifying though Obama’s speech may be, it lacks any hint at responsibility for the concepts and
organisation that cripple the American mass education system. As John Taylor Gatto writes, “...government
school children are left in the dark about the existence of influential groups with complex social agendas
aimed at their lives”. The possibility suggests itself that producing the appearance of education while
achieving no real knowledge might in fact be the real intention of mass education. Persons with real
knowledge are, after all, potentially dangerous to the established system and not always the unambiguous
blessing Obama pretends to praise. Since John Dewey, the US school system has systematically focused on
social conditioning, ignored academic achievement, used flawed methods for teaching literacy skills that
were initially introduced by Gilman and Horace Mann, and generally used methods based on the theories
of German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. This is catastrophic. The literacy rate in New England used to be
nearly 100 per cent until the novel “scientific” methods produced cohorts of functional illiterates. The tax
exempt foundations, including Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller, which funded the collectivist redesign of the
US school curriculum and remain in firm control of the universities and teacher training colleges, must
accept their portion of the blame for the deliberate destruction of minds, a process stretching back at least
to the Gary schools in 1914, the publication of Conclusions and Recommendations by Carnegie in 1934, and
accelerating since 1945. The foundations are no doubt pleased, but few - certainly none of the students
Obama addresses - know any of this. Omitting this information while giving the students most of the
responsibility for their own learning amounts to deception. The real problem is rooted in the Leipzig
Connection, and cannot be solved by individuals “getting serious”, Obama’s admonitions notwithstanding.
The cards have been stacked against the students - deliberately so, as Norman Dodd’s Report to the Reece
Congressional Commission from 1954 concludes.

Charter schools constitute an attempt to formalise responsibility and accountability for educational
achievement. Charter schools are public and free of charge, but they are free to use non-union teachers,
unlicensed principals and creativity in the way they push their students to perform. Charter schools have a
contract - a charter - with the local authorities that provide funding, to achieve certain specified targets,
usually defined in terms of average grades, graduation rates, rate of graduates who go on to college, etc.
The schools in turn have ‘charters’ with students, parents, teachers, etc., which specify what defines a
‘responsible attitude to education’ and they hold each party responsible for compliance. Many local areas
where public education was disintegrating now have charter schools with graduation rates and academic
results that are mostly, but not always, better than those of public schools. In California alone more than
300,000 students now attend some 750 charter schools, according to Peter Thorpe, and 5,000 charter
schools now have 1.5 million students in 39 states and Washington DC. He encourages parents and
students who are dissatisfied with their current school to find a charter school that specialises in their
particular need and sign up for the public lotteries that determine who gets to enrol. He emphasises
repeatedly that attendance is free once students have been accepted. We must assume that he’s aware
that charter schools are accused of exclusivity.

As charter schools provide formalisation of the responsibility Obama presents as essential for obtaining an
education, they will no doubt be able to make a contribution to American education. However, America’s
education problems have now reached an order of magnitude that makes it necessary to lift all public
schools to save the country from disaster. Unionised teachers tend to be hostile to any initiative that
departs from John Dewey’s concept of education as socialisation, but the current situation calls for drastic
measures to introduce responsibility and accountability for academic performance at all levels of the
education system in ways similar to those found in the charter school system. As less than half of the
employees of the public education system actually teach, as opposed to administrate and manage, reform
must also do away with mass education as a mass employment scheme.

Failure to reform US education will jeopardise the ability of the USA to retain its political and economic
position in the world in "the American Century.” However, using traditional American individualism to
assign individual blame for deliberately engineered systemic failure is the essence of deception.