David Neiwert has an excellent entry on No Child Left Behind, the crown jewel of Bush’s domestic program—and if that doesn’t tell you what kind of shape Bush’s domestic program is in, nothing will.
What little discussion there has been of these remarks has focused, perhaps rightly, on how out of touch they make Bush appear when it comes to the lives of working people. A 55-year-old worker isn’t interested in going back to school to learn a new skill so he can start up another career. He just wants his job back. Bush’s remarks reflect someone who sees workers and jobs as portable commodities, and has no sense whatsoever of the pain inflicted by policies that eviscerate the nation’s manufacturing capacity.
But even more telling, I think, are what these remarks say about Bush’s view of education.
To people like Bush, the value of education lies solely in its ability to provide a steady supply of workers. Education isn’t a matter of improving our lives, making us better citizens capable of thinking for themselves, inspiring us to reach the maximum of our human capacities; it’s a union card, a system designed to churn out as many trained workers as possible.
This view of education, in fact, is pronounced among conservatives in general. And it’s directly reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program.
Consider, if you will, the areas of accomplishment that are tested under NCLB: reading, math, science, and English. All of these areas are those which are viewed by business interests as those most essential to training a viable workforce. All other areas of education — particularly the arts, civics, history, geography, and social studies — are relegated to minor status.
Now, it’s unquestionable that one of the important functions of education is indeed to prepare young citizens for entry into the workforce, and to provide them the tools to be fully capable participants in the economy. But that isn’t its sole purpose, either.
Education is supposed to make better citizens of us by giving us the tools to understand how our world works. It is, above all, supposed to help us to find our own special gifts and enable them, making our society both more creative and inventive and making us more fulfilled individually.
NCLB not only ignores those aspects of education, but by giving work-related skills primacy, it crowds them out, sometimes altogether.
the video clip of bush in the ’94 tx gov debates has him pushing these same 4 areas, saying the state should focus on these as minimums and anything else is a local funding responsibility.
Of course this utilitarian conservative view of education goes back a LONG way. Private schools for the überclass, vocational training for the proles.
Conservatives — such charming people, holding back progress since the dawn of history.