But first, it is important we fully understand
the nature of the strike. It is not, as many media pundits have insisted,
exclusively about teachers’ salaries.
While pay and job security are certainly
two pressing concerns, the teachers are also protesting rigid teacher
evaluation procedures, narrow curriculum in which teachers are essentially
forced to teach to the test, overcrowded classrooms and the overall nationwide
degradation of teachers in recent years. (You can read the Chicago Teachers
Union’s complete list of demands, here.) The teachers are not, as New York Times columnist, Joe Nocera
claims (9/10/2012), striking to maintain the “status quo.”
However, in keeping with their pattern
of anti-union bias, the corporate media have instead glossed over the teachers’
detailed and articulate demands, reducing the strike to little more than a
battle of wits between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union
president, Karen Lewis.
A front-page article in Wednesday’s New York Times (“Teachers’ Leader in Chicago
Strike Shows Her Edge,” 9/12/2012) focuses more on the two figures’ caustic
personality traits than any of the substantive motives behind the strike. It
reads:
She [Lewis] is
biting, pushy, witty, unwavering. He [Emanuel] is biting, pushy, witty, unwavering.
Like him, she appears to hold almost nothing back… She has called Mr. Emanuel a
“bully” and a “liar,” someone whose “billionaire friends” are driving his
educational philosophy. And that was only last week.
Based on the Times’ account, one gets the impression the strike amounts to
little more than the “toxic relationship” between two egocentric public
officials. As it is, that last part of the second sentence quoted (about
Emanuel’s “billionaire friends”) is probably the most accurate of the paragraph.
Keep in mind, this is the same former Obama Chief of Staff who, a few years
ago, publicly derided progressives within his own party as “fucking retarded.”
Our nation’s education system is a travesty.
The traditional goals of education—to
create informed, engaged citizens, and foster in young minds a thirst for
lifelong intellectual inquiry—are rapidly being replaced with utilitarian,
strictly skills oriented curricula. The lofty aims of a traditional liberal
arts education—the idea, as Socrates famously put it, that the “unexamined life
is not worth living”—are now viewed as superfluous, impractical, even elitist.
The only knowledge worth having, this new corporatist educational attitude
insists, is that which can get one a high-paying career.
Schools, in other
words, no longer teach students how to think—they train them for work. And with
the increasing reliance on privately-owned, for-profit charter schools, and
trade-oriented community colleges, this degradation of education is only likely
to continue.
Schools—both high schools and
colleges—now routinely churn out what journalist Chris Hedges calls “systems
managers.” Students are trained in narrow, highly specialized skills (nursing,
business, public relations, journalism), but remain ignorant of great art, literature,
music or philosophy.
These staples of the Humanities allow us to ask the big
questions about life and think critically about society, politics, and the
world around us. Great books like King
Lear and Lord of the Flies along
with thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sinclair Lewis allow us to reflect
upon our own lives and our place in society. They hold up a mirror to the
universal truths of human nature. Students denied such a liberal arts
education, according to Hedges, become “products of a moral void.”
“At its best, schooling can be about how
to make a life,” media critic, Neil Postman, writes in The End of Education, “which is quite different from how to make a
living.”
When I worked as an adjunct instructor
at Central Maine Community College, I received no health care, no benefits and
no job security. I was paid $35 an hour which is low in comparison to most
adjunct rates. I had to sign a new teaching contract every semester—that is,
assuming I was able to get any courses in the first place. During the summers
adjunct faculty members were forced to fight over the few courses that were
offered, with preference always going to those with seniority.
Since adjuncts are essentially contract
workers, they can be fired at any time for any reason. And, since CMCC, like
all community colleges, is first and foremost a for-profit business, student
(read: customer) satisfaction is paramount. Therefore, if a student complains
to the dean that he does not like a professor’s class, the dean is all but
contractually obligated to side with the student. In order to avoid this
scenario, most adjuncts at CMCC simply do not require anything of their students.
As long as the work-load is light, easy and devoid of any intellectual rigor,
students will not complain. Witness then, the complete degradation of education
into entertainment.
For these reasons, as well as a variety
of others, I quit CMCC in January. I love teaching. Education has been for me a
source of liberation. But I refuse to compromise my educational standards. So I know where the Chicago teachers are coming from. I understand their
grievances and their desire for meaningful education reform.
“Education,” Yeats famously proclaimed, “is
not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”
Here’s hoping the Chicago teachers can
light the spark for real educational reform.
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