Reconsidering education

A friend has written to take me to task for having laid our country’s failing public education system strictly at the feet of conservatives. This correspondent reminds me that liberals should bear their share of the blame.

S/he points out that affluent parents of both political parties are guilty of abandoning public education, pulling their children out into private schools and leaving public schools without “the most vested voice, that of involved, educated parents at the local level.” I agree with this wholeheartedly and have addressed that question here. It’s all part of what Bill Bishop calls The Big Sort.

My friend goes on to point out that, on the subject of subjects such as American History, conservatives have long blamed liberals’ multi-culturalism for the fact that our children now know more about George Washington Carver than they do about George Washington (so to speak). This is an argument that’s been around at least since Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987. I really don’t have any facts or figures with which to counter it but I oppose it on principle. In a way, it was multi-culturalism that caused us to send our children to public school, because we didn’t want to raise our children in an (almost literal) ivory tower. And whatever our failings as a parent, we have raised very tolerant children and I’m proud of them for it.

Again I refer you to The Big Sort.

A third point my friend raised was that of protecting children from violence. It is one of the saddest truths about our schools that they have become scenes of mass murder and that they have become, some of them, as closely guarded as prisons, so much so that it seems to me that the protection is as bad as the danger. (You all know I hate fences.) And then there is the random authoritarian violence of drug-sniffing dogs and searches for weapons. I have no idea what to do about these things.

So while I don’t agree with every point my friend made, I think the major fault s/he caught me out in was indulging in polarized thinking. I have sworn off the easy formulas — if it’s bad it must be Republican, if it’s good it must be Democratic. Turns out that’s as hard as swearing off cigarettes.

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And speaking of misconceptions about education in post-partisan America, Morning Edition visited Jakarta to dispell some misconceptions about Barack Obama’s education there:

At the school Obama attended in the Menteng district of Jakarta, a security guard named Adang says he is a little tired of the reporters who come expecting to find an Islamic boarding school and evidence of Obama’s secret Muslim identity � an image encouraged by some of Obama’s political opponents in the United States.

It’s not true, says Adang, who goes by one name. He points to Obama’s third- and fourth-grade classrooms and says patiently that this is not an Islamic school.

“Yes, we have a mosque,” he says, but at prayer time there are rooms for Christians and Buddhists to pray in, too. Public School No. 1 Menteng is actually among the city’s finest, in one of Jakarta’s most exclusive neighborhoods and home to many of Indonesia’s business and political elite.

Unfortunately, this piece does nothing to dispel the notion that Islamic school = terrorist training ground. Words like “exclusive” and “elite” strike me not so much as proof that the school isn’t Islamic as that we have an inherent prejudice against all that is Arab, and by association, Muslim. Take for example, John McCain’s now infamous recent disclaimer when a woman in his crowd asked him whether Obama is an Arab:

No ma’am, no ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen …

Implying, of course, that one can’t be an Arab or a Muslim and still be a decent family man. Now I know that this was a slip of the tongue, but it was telling.

My answer to that question “Is Obama a Muslim?” has been all along the same as Campbell Brown’s:

So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter?

When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?

Whenever this gets raised, the implication is that there is something wrong with being an Arab-American or a Muslim. And the media is complicit here, too.

We’ve all been too quick to accept the idea that calling someone Muslim is a slur.

Islam is the religion of a great many people who are not Arabs. A great many Arabs are not terrorists.

By the way, here’s the NYTimes profile of the man behind the whispers and e-mails that circulate and circulate. He’s quite a piece of work.

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