School Building: Nobody's here

 The last few weeks the school just gets emptier and emptier. Teachers are out, administrators are dwindling, kids, for the most part are showing up, except when they are quarantined. It feels like we are in the midst of a seismic shift in education, and I fear that little intention is involved. The papers are reading like: "Admin says: Teachers are Lazy," "Teachers say: Kids are Tested Too Much," "Kids say: School isn't Engaging," and the Public says "Why Can't these People Just Do Their Jobs and Take Care of My Kids (better than I do at home)". There is a modicum of editorializing there, to be sure, but it all feels terribly yucky and lacking idealism in a very dangerous way. 

I think that education is having an identity crisis. Why are we educating students? College readiness, career readiness, building a national citizen, training a future conformist, equipping a future revolutionary, building a citizen of the world? I think that truly, each person coming into a school building has a different notion of what the goals are, and this is one major flaw with how this is all going. 

I am of the mind, (since I have this platform I suppose I can just spout my beliefs willy-nilly) that education is for equipping students to be citizens of the world, to be stewards of our economies, environments, cultures, and governments, who can understand that they have the capacity to form the world around them by participating in its institutions and reinventing them. It is truly idealistic, but I feel like education is the place for that. I went to a fancy prep school, and among my peers, I am the least successful, I think. They are truly leading in the fields of biotech, government, press, and academia. I turn on the radio, the TV, open the New Yorker, and I see their names everywhere. I believe, in part, it is because of our high school education which took the tack described above. We were told we would shape the world, so we did, well- they did;) I am just writing a blog that (hopefully) nobody will read. 

The factory school model is broken. The people in charge keep buying "programs" and software to help teach our kids, they keep asking for data, they keep evaluating the teachers, but I think it isn't really working. I think we may be dealing with the proverbial dead horse here..