Flaws in Education: Blame it on the Government

            Education and the Crisis of Capital           

It is clearly evident that there needs to be a change in our public schooling system. Education is important, whom we are educating is the future, and how we educate them is everything. I have read many articles and facts about public education and the flaws our country has with it and I’m sorry to say I do agree with the critics. I went to public school from Kindergarten until I graduated high school in 2010, and this is bad to say but I easily breezed my way through high school (which is what is supposed to prepare you for college).  I used to think school was important, until my teachers seemed to stop caring, which resulted in me to stop caring and trying as hard as I could. Do you see the pattern?

I blame this on the government; they were the ones who stopped caring. If education really is such an important aspect in life, which yes it is, then why has the budget for public education funding decreased majorly in the past few decades? Does our government want us to succeed? Does our government want us to be better? Maybe if the government took public education more seriously teachers and students would too. In the article “Education and the Crisis of Capital” it says “the correspondence principle, or the notion that the “social relations of education” normally correspond to the social relations of production in capitalist society.” Well in this case, our education is about as important and unstable as our market, this is sad. I’m sad to that that I am scared for the future of this country in the educational point of view.

Another crucial flaw in the public education system is what are we learning? Well we are learning and following the same system as we did in 1916, that is almost one hundred years ago and life from then to now is one hundred percent different. Very little of the schooling at the elementary and secondary levels is oriented to developing actual skills, which is needed in every living situation and every career. Very little knowledge is attained through these years of education either. It is possible though but only through private schooling, which most people do not go to due to the extremely high costs. When looking at the public education verses private education, private schooling is much more funded and generates a governing class; this cannot be said about public education.

Standardized testing is what defines public education. Teachers barely have any say or freedom in what to teach because everything in public schooling is evaluated by standardized testing. In the article “Education and the Crisis of Capital” it says, “Likewise, Ellwood Cubberley, an influential education administrator, and superintendent of San Francisco’s public schools, wrote in 1916 in his Public Administration: “Our Schools are, in sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.” To bad this isn’t the case anymore in 2011, our schools are bent and pushed to the side to meet the basic needs of society.