March 24, 2000
Is the Chamber of Commerce and the Business/Political leadership right in their assumptions that our public schools can best be run utilizing, the business model for running factories, businesses, or corporations? Is the "Bottom Line" relevant to gaining an education?
In all the rhetoric surrounding the "corporate" plans for running our schools precious little `proofs' have been given or provided that demonstrate that "what is good for business is good for `educating' our children"!
Questions must be made now before a whole generation of children are sacrificed to untested generalizations. We, as parents, educators, or as concerned citizens can little afford to suffer the loss of a single generation of children as "just another bad business decision."
In light of all the business failures that occur regularly in our country the acknowledgement must be made that business men really don't know all the answers. If they did, it wouldn't be necessary for government to bail them out so frequently at taxpayers expense.
When business men fail, the output of their factories (the widgets, bolts, cars & other non-human articles of consumption) ceases. They close their factories and walk away from their errors of judgement and lack of knowledge. The owner-leadership then fades out of sight.
What will happen if our Business/Chamber of Commerce/Political leadership discover that their "business plan" doesn't work when it comes to educating the hundreds of thousands of children involved in their `business educational experiment'? Who(m) among will take the responsibility and be accountable of the thousands of children who will be utterly destroyed by this experiment? Who will take the responsibility?
The question that must be raised is: How sound is a program that eliminates all the professional people that are trained in our schools and Universities in the field of education? Do you really believe that the head of Qualcomm would hire a lawyer to be the head of their highly technical work force and allow him to impose the rules of the Courts to run Qualcomm successfully?
Our public schools are centers of knowledge in which our children must be guided through the process of acquiring the necessary knowledge to function in our world. This includes, among other things, the arts, music, science, math, language skills, literature to name a few. It is impossible to quantify, measure, or determine "how it is that children learn or how the brain works."
It is beyond comprehension that professional educators have allowed the intrusion of essentially, uneducated, untrained, widget makers to take over a system upon which this country depends so much on.
It is time to call a halt to this effort to turn our educational system into a mindless production pipeline for turning out atomistical individuals that will be molded into complaint workers for their factories. Mechanical robots, in a word.
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