Why Educate? :: Essays Papers

Why Educate? As I ponder what my educational philosophy is, and what I hope it will become, I find it necessary to consider why we educate our children in the first place, and why we finance countless public school systems with local tax dollars and federal funds only to hear over and over that schools are failing, our teachers are inadequate, and our students unprepared for life. The majority of high school graduates can read. They can perform basic arithmetic. They know some literature, history, and civics. They are more computer literate than ever before, yet the U.S. Department of Education's National Commission on Excellence in Education concludes in â€Å"A Nation at Risk:† If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" (NCREL 2002). This â€Å"educational disarmament† is really a failure to produce students that are truly competitive in the world marketplace, a failure to make the same technological advances as other industrialized nations. Joel Spring, in The American School (1997), asserts that beginning with the founding of the common school in the nineteenth century, education has been seen as a way of â€Å"ending poverty, providing equality of opportunity, [and] an increasing national wealth† (6). It is the â€Å"increasing national wealth† that students are tested on now, and found lacking. According to Sebastian de Assis, author of Teachers of the World, Unite! (2000), it was during the Industrial Revolution that â€Å"mathematics, sciences, technical and vocational education became pivotal to the sustenance of the new economic order† in the United States (p. 24). Students have become just another part of the great machinery that is America. Either they contribute and m ake the country, and themselves, richer, or they are failures, who have, in turn, been failed by an educational system that did not teach them how to grow rich or help the nation grow rich. Like de Assis (2000), I find the commoditization of students to be more than a little disturbing.