The Miseducation of America

"Demandingly obvious is our insistent need to develop a new curriculum based up on the inescapable fact that the survival of humankind is threatened as never before, and that we must discover how to create practical ways of living humanely together as one family of people in a culturally pluralist world existing precariously on this little Spaceship Earth.

Meanwhile we may expect that during the coming decades millions of America's college, high school, and middle school youth will become alienated from traditional values and patterns of American life. Perhaps they should be alienated from our society's obsession with material things, economic growth, status symbols, power and money, and cults of violence, racism and nationalism. They might then become attuned to newer value systems and life styles essential for the new age: the socially moral requirements of universal human empathy, limitations upon human growth, sweeping transformation of present modes of production and distribution of goods and services, drastic reduction in population, development of world political authority, and the like."

From Life-Centering Education by Edward G. Olsen and Phillip A. Clark, published in 1977

The 'world political authority' recommendation doesn't sit well, but otherwise these guys had it right-on thirty years ago. What happened? Clearly this kind of educational reform was never taken seriously, except perhaps in fringe Montersorri or Waldorf-like private schools. The public education system in America has betrayed the youth and become a limb of Capitalism. It's a system that grinds children through years of schooling to produce stay-inside-the-lines (and the box) worker ants in a huge colony of speculative economics. Instead of educating youth to think critically, this system drives into kids a work ethic and a belief in rewards systems, ranking, competition, and hierarchy. The lure of capital gains, the stale dream of suburbia, and the never-ending pursuit of acquiring more collections of crap commodities are the backbone of this monster.

Seriously folks, let's think imaginatively about some alternatives.