Problems in American Education - Part 1: The Good Side

I have to admit that I come from a family of whiners. They were always the kind who saw the glass half empty. It's far fetched, but I used to think of it as an ethnic thing. I grew up in eastern Rhode Island among first and second generation Portuguese immigrants. Although Latins, my perception is that the Portuguese are far from volatile and intense. Rather, they lived the quiet lives of immigrants trying to find a level of success for their families in America through hard work and conservative habits. My upbringing was one in which great value was put on conserving what we had for a better day and taking little risk in regard to taking any kind of bold position. Life was tough and it was always better to be careful.

As an adult and as a professional educator, I have always kept this in mind. Usually what I had to do was fight off that tendency to keep everything too close to my vest and to expect Murphy's law to come into play after every turn in the road. I was conditioned to think that way, and I soon realized that creativity would be stifled if I let that somewhat negative position dictate my approach to my work.

That's why I need to write here that everyone should consider the good things in American education before examining all the flaws that I will pursue in upcoming blogs. My upcoming critiques are labors of love for a system I think is based on great merit; but which has lost its way in maintaining some very precious American ideals. The ideals are still there, however, and I feel very motivated in my attempts to push for their return. Here are some of the things that I really admire in American education and that I believe are still existing somewhere in the confusion:

- the perception that education in a democratic society is based on egalitarian and humane principles dedicated to the proposition that every child deserves an opportunity to succeed in life.

- the understanding that progress in the art and science of educating children is based on the development of new theories, ideas, and practices that incorporate the most recent understanding of the learning process and the belief that change requires constant reevaluation.

- the realization that we are a wealthy country and that we need to share our wealth with our children and all children as part of a covenant of reciprocity we have with the ideals that made us wealthy and successful in the first place.

Those perceptions, understandings, and realizations are, I think, starting points for discussion and represent foundation principles. As you will soon see if you continue to read my series, I feel that we have lost our way on these principles to some degree; but that does not mean that they are gone. Rather, it means that we need to review them and, in some cases, resurrect them. They are my "back to basics" list. I have come to dislike that term in the way it is used in education today and in the recent past, but it does apply in this context.

One of my complaints about life in general is that we sometimes forget to go back to our most basic roots, our common denominators, to determine if we are still in touch with the mission. I think that is what has happened in American education and it is my intention to examine what has happened in this series. Educators and theoreticians, as a whole, sometimes get too close to the situation and miss the forest for the trees. I will make a concerted attempt here to back up and look at the forest. I believe in philosophical application and mission review when attempting to solve institutional problems, and I will apply that belief to what I write here.

I hope you will join me in analyzing the problems.