Page 1.8: Sections 38-40
38. REALITY SCHOOLS: ECONOMIC HEALTH
A Case for Economic Studies
To say the very least, economics has become one of the most important parts of civilized life in the last 200 years. Simply because it’s so new, and because our educational system is still conservative, we liberal Deweyans are challenged to include economic habits of health wherever they’re demanded in public schools. What follows, then, are some suggestions for such studies at all 3 levels of child development.
Ever since modern capitalism started growing huge corporations in the later 1800s, knowledge about money and economics have become increasingly important to civilized democratic life. For-profit capitalist institutions have affected and touched every aspect of modern life, from the poorest to the richest. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was the first philosopher to put it at the center of modern life, even saying it alone determined not only how people live, but even what people think and believe. For him the phrase ‘economic determinism’ summed up his feelings about the new money-based corporate economy.
So once again, the plan for teaching liberal kinds of economic health will follow that of the first 2 sections. We’ll start with some ideas for students in the first 3 grades to practice and learn, followed by some ideas for students at the constructive second level of development, and then for those students at the more abstract 3rd level of development where economic history becomes the focus of attention for all those students about to enter the workforce after graduation. Such knowledge and skills will empower many more students to live more intelligently in a capitalist society, and help convince them collectively they hold the power to guide and control economic evolution, and to intelligently keep our economic institutions work humanely for the public good. Believe it or not, some people make a million dollars a day, so why shouldn’t our elected representatives have the power to keep circulating their wealth through taxes to better help those who really need help and more education? Such empowered students will also learn how conservative Republicans and big business Democrats will continue working against all those goals, and any goal based on equal economic rights and opportunities. For a growing number of people today, the Republican letters GOP best stands for Guardians of the Privileged. Since the Civil War, only progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt disagreed with that idea.
First Stage Economic Suggestions
For millions of people today, liberal economic ideas and skills aimed at growing the public good are sadly neglected in our public schools. For them important economic goings-on have been over-simplified to daily stock market reports, even though most people don’t even own stock. No doubt, at the higher levels of study, economics has become very complex and confusing with different models and ideas, just like any study at an abstract level. However, like any subject it has some simple basic ideas and so even 1st graders can begin hearing about them.
One such idea might be introduced in an economics workshop: All economies can be divided into 2 basic ideas -- learning about producing goods, like food and clothing, and providing services, like doctors, lawyers, police, firefighters, and politicians. Those ideas can then be used to ask students what economic field they want to learn more about, the goods or services fields. If goods, then they can start growing their economic knowledge with sense-based visits to places where goods are produced, like clothing factories, food factories, energy producers, construction sites, and as many places as exist in their own neighborhoods. A less useful second alternative is to offer videos showing how different kinds of goods are produced around the world. Such videos will also start expanding their knowledge about the world we live in. Such experiences will help students see and feel where their foods, clothing, and energy comes from, and thus begin building their feelings for how interrelated and connected our world is, as well as some challenges in each industry.
Also, for those students wanting to learn more about building their service skills, such sense-based excursions can visit police stations, doctor’s offices, law offices, construction sites, retail stores, even beauty parlor and dog-training businesses. Thus their own neighborhood economy begins opening up to them. Also, those students with cameras can be encouraged to take pictures of all their excursions, so later on in school students can then begin asking more questions about those places, and perhaps also shown how computers and the Internet can be used to answer their questions. Thus reading and writing skills can start growing naturally in the quest for more information and knowledge.
For there, then, it becomes natural for students to be shown in a psychology lab how to intelligently start experimenting with actually building the skills and knowledge for the services or products they want to learn more about. How do intelligent service-providers and product-makers talk and interact with the public; here teachers will provide some very useful role-playing training to those young students. In such ways psychological learning excellence begins growing naturally as they learn how to talk more about their feelings and begin hearing how important it is to know a little more about what problems others are having and how they might be solved. Once students commit themselves emotionally to a learning either one of those 2 skills, a whole host of useful skills like reading and writing and researching become more actively and easily learned.
I remember reading about the famous German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. When he was still a young student he committed himself emotionally to becoming a rocket scientist; he was fascinated by them. As a result, when he was told he needed to know how to think and calculate with mathematical ideas and skills, he then began learning how to speak and think with the language of size and motion – mathematical equations and symbols. Eventually he was brought to the US after World War 2 and then helped send astronauts to the moon in 1969. For us liberals there’s a very important educational moral here: The lack of options for emotional commitment for many conservative public school students soon makes school something to merely go through, rather than a place where their dreams start becoming reality.
Does Everything Have a Price?
At this early stage of economic development students can begin learning another very important practical kind of economic health: most everything has a price, either in money or in time and actions. It talks intelligent actions to make our economic dreams become reality. With that idea too, what they have learned outside of school becomes a part of life inside school. For example, our economic system is a money system, and so they can be given the freedom to design and make their own school money, set up a school bank where they can get loans to start little classroom business of their own, and perhaps trade their goods with other students and learn about the art of negotiation and trying to get the best deal they can. Those interested in building products can focus on that work; perhaps 2 or 3 students want to sell homemade cookies in class, and so the teacher can begin showing their cookie team how some government officials provide a necessary public service to help make sure foods are healthful and good for people. Also helping build their math skills are questions like how can we figure the price of our cookies or pies? How much did it cost to make them, and how much should we charge other students. Who knows? Some students may like that kind of learning so much they’ll learn little else in school, but isn’t that the way much of the adult world works? How many adults today know anything about Shakespeare or quantum mechanics? Almost none of them.
The economic challenge for liberal schools and teachers then also becomes teaching students about intelligent democratic character habits while they’re learning more about the products and services they like. Should they ever produce anything that might harm someone else? Such teaching thus becomes both an organic art and a science. When is the right time and method for teaching cookie and cake makers how to make healthy products, charge a fair price, and also help other students learn what they want to learn. It’s an on-going challenge to start teaching young folks what liberal economic health means, and how money can be used to make life more satisfying for everyone with healthful products and services!
Encouraging young students to start experimenting with a school bank focused on building student skills will also help them start learning some useful math skills and knowledge, like adding and subtracting numbers, and how to calculate interest percentages. Those interested in banking services can also begin learning how lending money and credit works, and even how they can help students start their own classroom businesses, like selling their old comic books, models, CDs, clothes, and whatever else they no longer use. Don’t’ adults have yard sales from time to time? Isn't that what people are doing in the real world?
Also, with such economic work they can begin feeling how important creative thinking and advertising is in the business world, to help stimulate sales. How many students would like to start an advertising service, and learn more about that useful skill? Why not give students, say, an hour or 2 a day to experimentally play with their economic fantasies, and also time for telling other students what they’re trying to do and asking for any help they can give? That way, the class itself becomes a problem-solving group. In fact, end-of-year summary statements by all students would be a great way to keep learning about writing and public speaking.
Some young artistic students can also start learning more about their craft with advertising suggestions. What product or service doesn’t need good advertising? If such educational ideas sound way too extravagant and improbable to some people, it’s probably because they don’t fit their conservative educational book-centered model, but does that mean more liberal kinds of schools won’t work? In truth, the more we teach such economic skills and knowledge, the easier it’ll be for students to get out into the business world and start contributing to the economy even before they graduate! Such studies also make it easier to start practicing both physical and psychological kinds of health.
Is there a better way for students to learn about how a good bank should work for the community good, other than actually building such a school bank and working in it? After all, around the country today more people are seeing how public non-profit banks serving the people might be the best way to protect themselves from greedy vulture capitalists seeking merely their own wealth. As we’ve seen, North Dakota already has such a bank and it’s been working marvelously for the public good for decades already. So, the more young students begin working in such a bank, the easier it’ll become to build more public banks serving the public rather than greedy Wall Street bankers. In short, why shouldn't students begin feelings how our macro-economy can work better by actively practicing liberal microeconomic skills in our own public schools?
Such skills are all sense-based, actively involving all their senses, and so are more natural ways to learning important economic skills and feelings. If some student wants to buy, say, some flower pots to intelligently grow flowers for some senior citizens, then why shouldn't they go to the pottery workshop, learn how to make those pots, and even get paid in school money so they can, perhaps, pay off a school bank loan? And if there isn’t a pottery shop available, why shouldn’t they be free to build one? Would we have the great numbers of homeless people today if more children were taught how to operate such businesses? Why should we keep our young folks ignorant and naive about such economic knowledge and learning opportunities in our own public schools? We need more humane business-oriented people, not more obedient kill-oriented soldiers!
Making Honest Money
About a century ago John Dewey saw the organic connection between economics and politics, just as he saw the connection between body and mind. He noted we live in a money economy, but he also went on to say the more people are given the knowledge power to more intelligently mold the economy with intelligent taxes and regulations, the better life becomes for everyone. Thus, knowing more about different economic systems and ideas is crucial for using democratic power intelligently. Should we continue voting for conservatives or liberals?
So naturally, we liberals want to teach public school students more about economic health with active projects. In that process they’ll begin learning another one of life’s very important habits of health: making honest money is much healthier than making dishonest money by breaking laws. Life becomes much less stressful and dangerous with honest money-making. With more practical economic skills and knowledge students can start building that idea into their muscles, and also their feelings against, say, joining a gang and selling illegal drugs, or extorting money from businesspeople for 'protection'. And not only that, but also learning how to intelligently report such people to the police, and help make their communities more respectful and enjoyable. To help teach such habits even young students can be encouraged to build a school court and jail system, helping teach disrespectful students such excessive and unhealthy actions need to be improved. In most conservative schools today disrespectful students are simply expelled. For them, however, it's a vacation, not a more intelligent education. The more such things like a school court, jail, and intelligent counseling services become real, the more options students will have for learning useful service skills. If such schools aren’t built, then the more expensive public taxes will be needed later on to control such disrespectful and dangerous people.
To say the very least, the creative and intelligent art of making honest money is a very important part of economic health, so why shouldn't students begin learning such skills even early in their public schools? Before they even go to school, children see their parents go out to work almost daily, how they spend money, and make economic choices, and so for us Deweyan liberals, students should be free to experimentally learn more about honest and helpful services, like doctor, lawyer, and construction skills! They want to be grown-up, so why not allow them to play those roles and learn more about those skills? How else can students best learn where their talents really lie, and how to earn honest money? If nothing else, such studies will help break down the artificial conservative barriers now existing between the home and school; clothing, metal, wood, and repair shops can also be built by students as they continue into their constructive 2nd stage of learning development. With such shops they can begin learning valuable economic and democratic skills, like making their uniforms for student police officers, student medics, student lawyers, and student doctors. Is there a more intelligent way for students to begin feeling what honest money-making is like? Such work helps build healthier and more constructive outlets for their own natural sense-based, constructive, and intellectual abilities. How many young folks would like to be free enough to experiment with, say, running their own video-game, comic book, coin collecting, model-building, or beauty shop businesses on school grounds, selling and trading with other students? Shouldn’t every school have a beauty shop; isn’t that another useful social service?
How many creative and talented students might even create better cosmetic and beauty products while still in school, and thus start earning honest money even before they graduate? From her love of candy an aunt of mine set up a little candy-making factory in her garage, then built a neat little home-business helping make economic ends meet, not to mention adding more robust dimensions to her waistline! For us liberal Deweyans, the alternative conservative education model now in place is simply too artificial and disrespectful for naturally active and curious students. Aren’t the best tests to pass in real life character tests of honesty and helpfulness, and they are active tests occurring every day.
The sooner children start learning such economic kinds of healthy skills, and the math and reading skills needed to keep them growing, the sooner they'll learn the difference between honest and dishonest money, as well as liberal and conservative economic ideas. And, the sooner such knowledge and health start growing, the sooner juvenile and adult crime can begin becoming less of a burden to everyone else, making life more satisfying as well. Why not start using our precious taxes to make our own neighborhood public schools much more health-oriented, satisfying, life-like, refreshing, and enjoyable? Why not allow students to start making their own neighborhood tourist attractions, rather than gun-zones people fear, and where illegal drugs are one of the main businesses? Just imagine how many people would come to see, say, the world largest aluminum ball, or highest fast food container-mountain, or largest walking shoe path, and how enjoyable building such attractions would be. Those may be unpractical projects, but you see my point, right? Is there a law against making schools life more humorous and enjoyable? And is there any better antidote to our oppressively serious and boring conservative test-oriented schools than active and enjoyable learning projects like that?
In truth, such schools must be built by people themselves; they are not something automatically evolving as the result of some natural laws of progress and evolution. Such ideas of Natural Law belong to the 1800s, not the 2000s. To us liberals such ideas are fantasy, not reality. For example, one of the hottest economic ideas these days centers on creating socialized, publicly owned non-profit banks in our states! Presently only North Dakota has one, and it's producing some of the best economic results for everyone in the state! Many other countries have them as well. Imagine that, a socially owned non-profit bank in a supposedly capitalistic country! No doubt, the very idea gives conservative capitalists nightmares! But, like liberal schools, such banks too will not evolve without real effort and work; that’s the point! When students at the 2nd constructive stage of development are not encouraged to learn more intelligent building skills, they in effect become less able to keep improving all the feudalistic institutions we still have in this country. And what's more, such banks can be created more easily when public school students learn to create one in their own school, helping loan school money to students for economic projects.
Am I merely fantasizing? In reality all ideas are a kind of fantasy, imagining how life is or should be. But as we’ll see, such banks are becoming a more popular idea. In fact, Iceland, New Zealand, and many other countries like Italy have such socialized banks already, and many other US states besides North Dakota too might soon begin experimenting with them for the public good, not increasing private fortunes. In any case, with such public schools one very important idea is becoming much more widespread in today's world: classic laissez-faire capitalism run by private, for-profit corporations and banks is certainly not the only economic model or option. That idea in itself is at the foundation of all economic actions.
Second Stage Economic Suggestions
Then, as younger students’ progress through the grades into their 2nd stage of constructive development, economic skills can continue growing with more complex kinds of activities, requiring better constructive skills. Thus those students interested in such important service skills will find this stage even more useful. For example, how can students get needed money and building materials for, say, building soap-box racers or larger businesses? How can they sell tickets to raise funds for an annual soap-box race? So, at this stage of development students can begin reaching out in different ways into the community itself, looking for donors in both the private corporate world as well as the public government world. In such ways their knowledge of both worlds continues growing and expanding, as well as their network of contacts in both. They’ll also get better at talking more intelligently with such people, and pitching their constructive ideas, another skill useful throughout life. Would a corporate donor like to have their logo put on a soap-box racer, or some cookie boxes? Even good university engineering students can do that while, say, building robot projects?
Building a baby-sitting service is also a business option for students 8-14. Not only will it help low-income folks in the community reduce their childcare bills, but it will also give those medical and psyche majors a chance to learn more about intelligent child development and care. Who knows, such a service can also lead naturally into building another useful social service – a school daycare center; it’ll help low income families make their low wages last longer. Such a center would also be a great way to teach undereducated young folks more intelligent ways of raising their own kids, thus increasing psychological health. It seems to me such intelligent constructive options would lead to a win-win situation for both students and neighborhood parents.
In such liberal student-oriented schools focused on teaching such practical kinds of business health, students will become more informed about economic issues in the real world, like taxes and regulation, as well as building better feelings for community needs. Such feelings can become the psychic foundation for more abstract economic studies later during the abstract 3rd stage of development in high school.
What’s more, as they continue interacting with elected representatives during this constructive 2nd stage of development, they’ll also see useful ways the government can help small businesses, as well as learn more about our own huge feudalistic profit-oriented corporations now dominating our economy and politics as well. What are our elected representatives doing with the public's money, and how can they be directed more towards helping small businesses to grow? Are private for-profit banks really the best system for creating a safe and solid middleclass, or might public-owned banks be better at helping people start a business and keep our roads and transportation systems more user-friendly? Such questions become much more meaningful at this 2nd stage of constructive development; they also help prime student curiosity to know more about our economic history as they pass into their abstract 3rd of development.
At this constructive 2nd stage of development it becomes easier for students to learn more about how our water, air, and energy systems work, and what their actual results are. Are, say, publicly owned energy and water systems better able to care for the public good, or are for-profit water and energy systems really the best for all concerned? Such questions lead naturally to actually building science labs where water and air can be actually tested for their health-promoting results. How safe is our water, air, and food? Also of economic importance is knowing how safe their streets are, how police are acting in their neighborhoods, and how to build even safer systems to create better public spaces for everyone. Building better public parks and recreation areas also becomes an option at this 2nd level of development. Also, teaching young police people and firefighters how to build more intelligent skills is much easier, thus making it easier to more intelligently assist local police and fire systems in their important social roles. With such skills and knowledge students will again become better at feeling how important their own school psychology labs are to the surrounding community, and their helping future workers to act more sympathetic, fairer, and less prejudicial towards others.
Also, what are the economics of more intelligently serving the poorest homeless people find decent-paying jobs, decent housing, reduce any drug addiction problems, and making their communities more satisfying and beautiful places to live? Such services are important in every community, not just those in the US. What are the economics of keeping artistic students supplied with materials to keep intelligently beautifying our school grounds and public spaces, and keep creating a more comfortable and colorful space to live? Who wants to contribute to such worthy constructive projects? Why shouldn’t even young students also be free to raise funds for, say, a student art museum, where young artists can sell their work and help make their neighborhoods even more educational, beautiful, and safer?
In short, when we keep diverting students from learning such important economic skills and knowledge, we, in effect, keep making life itself less than educational and rewarding. Can’t both students and the public learn more about US history itself through such active and constructive student-based community art projects? Such projects would merge both history and art into artistic history, an art-form practiced in the real world! And they would also give students some worthwhile role models to think about and imitate. The more we keep memories of excellence alive, the less isolated we remain from excellence itself. For example, no one knows how educational and inspiring our art-poor drab-looking subways would look like until artistic students are liberated to beautify them; is there a better use for corporate education funds than that? Certainly not, at least not for us Deweyan liberals.
No doubt, some conservative may say such activities aren't really the best kinds of knowledge to know; they allow students to become overspecialized and thus ignorant of so much that’s worthy of knowing. Well, we say welcome to the real world; that’s the way it is for most everyone! In fact, any positive and constructive project in the adult world has economic parts to it, and so learning more about that reality helps public school students see the world as it’s working, not as mere textbooks describe it. If so, then why shouldn't even young students be allowed to learn more about that reality by, say, putting on their own Olympics every year for each grade? In that process they would not only learn more about raising money, but also help young athletes build more intelligent physical habits while building safe and healthy student-oriented schools! Sure some students will become specialists in the skills, and some will even opt out and prefer to remain passive spectators, but even spectators can play an economic role by purchasing tickets to such events. And, as we’ve seen so many times before, such events are inspirational to young folks of all ages! How many young girls started playing tennis after seeing older women playing? Do we really want to keep training young men to play dangerous games like football when other more healthful constructive activities like Olympic sports produce more healthful personal and social results?
Finally, another constructive idea seems reasonable at this time. A clothing workshop would be another useful constructive option for 2nd level students. Even many young students feel dissatisfied with their own body-shapes, so why not empower them to start intelligently experimenting with designing and producing clothes they feel more comfortable in? Such shops would not only increase their practical math and organizing skills, but also their instincts for clothing styles. Such instincts are useful in the real world all through life, aren’t they? I know they have been in my life. No doubt, clothing manufacturers might object, but what’s more important, ignoring such business-oriented skills, or developing them? Besides, wouldn’t those manufacturers benefit from having better-trained workers? Such actively constructive and intelligent skills help build economic power as well as character habits, so why shouldn’t students be free to start learning more about them? In fact, the art of intelligently designing clothing for different body shapes is a very useful art in the economic world, as well as a great low-stress way to have some fun at school. Such students could also put on student fashion shows, offering their work to the public and also learn more about making honest money! In liberal schools, such skills are encouraged rather than ignored.
Third Stage of Development: A Little Economic History
Probably no better way is there to study abstract economic ideas than seeing how they worked in history, and what kinds of actions they justified. Earlier constructive projects and useful economic activities help set the psychic stage, so to speak, for this 3rd abstract level of economic study, and learning more about economic history and some of its more important ideas, like deficits, supply side economics, laissez-faire economics, and progressively liberal economic ideas. Also important at this stage of growth is learning how to use computer technology for answering any economic questions students might have. So, to begin seeing these kinds of economic ideas, we’ll read a brief summary of US economic history; it helps build the background for liberal ideas and actions important to this day. No doubt, some conservative parents may feel such active and experimental liberal studies don’t teach students to really respect US economic ideas, like the profit-motive, and corporate importance. However, in an always moving world it’s important to keep improving our institutions, especially our public schools, and thus keep improving those systems as intelligently as possible, as well as providing students with real options in our money-based economy.
To us liberal Deweyans, what religious power was to the feudalistic Middle Ages, economic money and wealth power is to our modern world. Such money-power continues supporting feudalistic undemocratic institutions the way religious institutions have done. Hugely wealthy corporations continue controlling jobs, wages, and taxes, largely through political donations to politicians. Thus, the less young folks know about some basic economic history, and how the obsessive quest for profits continues creating social stress and frustration on a daily basis, the more vulnerable people remain to those with economic-political power.
Laissez-Faire Economic Model
The ideas written about here really deserve books of their own, but a few brief highlights from US economic history may help lay the groundwork for more in depth studies later. For example, the growth of our present feudalistic economic systems became more powerful after the Civil War, as a few industries in oil, steel, and railroading became practical monopolies. The huge personal fortunes they helped build helped for a few people increased their personal power to control more of our political system as well, from Washington, D. C. to state capitols and local regions around the country. Steel producer Andrew Carnegie was the great exception to this general rule. In 1900 he sold his steel business to wealthy financier J. P. Morgan for around $300 million, retreated to his native Scotland, bought a castle, and proceeded to give almost all of it away to build a more educated public. In fact, my first philosophy class was held in Carnegie Hall at the University of Denver.
Also important in US economic history from the very beginning was a continuing series of economic depressions and recessions, occurred about 20 years apart all through the 1800s, 1900s, and even more often in recent times. And, all during that time a small wealthy upper economic class continued using the government to keep increasing their wealth, thus creating what may be fairly called a corporate socialist system. What’s more, conservative businessmen typically felt those who own the country should govern the country. In fact, such events in US history began growing even before the Constitution was written in 1789, and soon after that a Bank of the United States was built to help pay off state war debts, and also help corporations grow; it was the brainchild of George Washington’s conservative Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. After Andrew Jackson let its charter expire, it eventually was re-established in 1913 as the Federal Reserve Bank system. Even these few facts can help us liberals ask why, throughout our public schools, are economic skills and studies still almost completely ignored? We liberals say it’s time to start ending that situation in our public schools. The more students know about the economic forces affecting their everyday lives, and their voting power to help guide how our economic system works, the better prepared they’ll be to deal with life in the real world, and to better regulate that system for the public good.
For almost all of US history our economic system has been unregulated by the government; the name for that system was laissez-faire economics. As a result, many schemes, or bubbles, helped create an on-going series of recessions and depressions throughout US history. They helped make it easier for the wealthy to often take more of the public’s money and increase their own personal fortunes. In the 1800s, for example, the government gave away huge tracks of land to railroad companies who often then proceeded to charge farmers whatever they wanted for the land and also to ship their goods to market. Eventually, farming bankruptcies helped form the nation’s Progressive Movement in the late 1800s.
Then, in the 1920s, few government economic regulations on buying and selling stocks helped create a stock market bubble. During the conservative Republican administrations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover a conservative corporate mantra was celebrated: the government had no right to regulate economic actions. That laissez-faire idea went back to Adam Smith in the late 1700s. As a result, in the 20s people could buy huge amounts of freshly printed stocks and were regularly told their value would keep going up and thus make them rich. Naturally, millions of people gave stock brokers their money. However, when that bubble burst 1929 it re-defined the poetic phrase ‘would never go down.’ And more recently, a de-regulated banking industry helped create a housing bubble in the early 2,000s. People were told their home values would keep going up, so for just a little down payment they could move right in, even if they had little or no source of income to keep making mortgage payments! For obvious reasons such risky loans were called sub-prime.
Such economic schemes were the result of nonexistent government regulations, making it easier for greedy bankers to keep separating people from their money. What’s more, in 2008, the public continued getting stuck with the bill for the government bailing out banks and insurance companies who had sold those risky ‘toxic’ mortgages! So, even as millions of people were losing their homes and savings, a few huge banks have grown even bigger and more powerful at the public’s expense; recently our public debt skyrocketed to about $15 Trillion with the help of 2 unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Conservative Republicans like George W. Bush choose to put the costs on the public’s credit card – our public debt.
Recently, it’s gotten even more bizarre with Republican ideas. Lately, conservative big business Republicans in Congress are trying to add even more economic salt to those painful and stressful public wounds! For years now they’ve been telling people our public debt is much too large so we must now cut government spending, even food stamps for the poor and unemployment payments! And, all the while, the corporate-oriented Federal Reserve Bank system has continued giving billions of dollars to many corporations to ease their toxic sub-prime debt load. As a result, a small number of huge banks continue controlling several trillion dollars of economic power while conservative Republicans keep working to cut government spending to the poor! From both sources, then, public stress has increased tremendously. If it wasn’t such a moral disgrace, it would be absurdly comical! Is it any wonder, then, conservatives don’t want any kind of economic skills and ideas taught in our public schools? As with conservatives just about everywhere, the less people know about economic goings-on, the easier it is to keep making profits and controlling more of life’s institutions, even our public schools. As we saw earlier, the World Bank has been making loans to country on the condition their schools becomes more conservative.
Again, such feudalistic economic power began skyrocketing in the late 1800s. As a result, some conservative CEOs have become more active at controlling economic information itself, even at the university level. In them only the conservative laissez-faire economic model was taught. It’s a French phrase meaning the government should leave the economic sector alone. Of course corporations continued getting government help to grow bigger, but it made people believe the government their taxes were paying for shouldn’t be used to help people with useful social programs.
Another phrase for that economic model was Social Darwinism; in it only the economically fittest survive and the rest are allowed to fade away. At that time corporate moguls like Leland Stanford, Commodore Vanderbilt, and John Rockefeller's University of Chicago were financed to continue teaching students how the laissez-faire economic model was completely natural and best for everyone. For all practical purposes, conservatives believed economic feudalism was a natural way of allowing only the fittest to survive and the rest to live in poverty and filthy disease infested slums. The more the government helped them, the more poverty and poor people there would be. Thus Karl Marx’s socialist ideas of workers owning the factories and sharing its profits equally became the natural enemy to US corporate leaders. Any kind of alternative democratic socialist economic model should simply be ignored in all our schools; liberal Dewey was fired from Rockefeller’s university in 1904. Corporate socialism was fine, but popular socialism was an evil idea. Of course Socialists like Eugene Debs weren’t even allowed to teach at the university level; for conservatives that economic model was the enemy, even though socialized tax money was being used to build our military-industrial system since the late 1800s!
Folks like California lawyer, railroad tycoon, and politician Leland Stanford (1824-1893) founded Stanford University in 1891, after 6 years of planning. But before that he found it easy to control the state’s political system with his great wealth. Stanford was said to buy enough votes in the California legislature to elect him to the US senate, and he certainly wasn’t the only one. There, rich folks could directly form and shape legislation to both protect and increase their fortunes with the government’s help. Today, of course, that system has evolved since people started electing their senators by popular vote in 1913. Nowadays rich folks merely hire corporate lobbyists to persuade politicians who’re always hungry for more campaign money. In such ways our feudalistic corporate socialism remains in place while ideas like popular socialism aimed at increasing the public good is still a no-no. In fact, today huge amounts of public taxes continue being used to support our small class of wealthy folks in the defense industry and farming. Over $600 Billion a year of the public money goes to making more weapons of war and for feeding, clothing, and paying soldiers to work at some 1,000 military bases overseas, while poor school kids go hungry, our prisons become more inhumane, and homelessness increases. How does such a system continue functioning? People largely ignorant of such economic realities don’t take the time to elect more liberal politicians, and thus keep allowing such a system to stay in place, and making it very difficult to build more liberal public schools.
With their generous donations many conservative wealthy folks today continue hiring and promoting professors who are at least sympathetic to their laissez-faire economic model. During the Great Depression, for example, critique of that capitalist model came from non-academics like the English Civil Servant John Maynard Keynes. As the Depression dragged on in the 1930s he suggesting we stop telling ourselves a laissez-faire economic model was best; it simply didn’t work in a monopolistic world. He then suggest the government become a more active player in the economic sector, and start hiring those millions out of work to build a more user-friendly country, with, say, better roads and parks. That way more people could better afford to keep buying goods and services, keep the economy growing, and prevent people from being thrown out of their houses.
Another result of feudalistic corporate power in the 1890s was the creation of what’s called the conservative Lochner Supreme Court, where humane labor and union laws were regularly overturned and ignored. No doubt, the high point of its mean conservative rulings justified racial segregation with their infamous 1896 ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson. In effect, they said separate but equal facilities for Africans and whites were constitutional. Conservative corporate lawyers on the court helped produce many other rulings as well. In the early 1900s, for example, they said laws against labor unions were fair, while laws making factories safer and more humane were illegal. The corporate-friendly Lochner Court simply did its duty.
Is it any wonder today many powerful corporate leaders are against teaching students that kind of economic history, even at the college level? The less students know about it, the easier their work is for controlling both the political and economic systems for their own benefit. Today, for example, investment fund managers regularly keep raising fees to customers who give them their retirement money, thus reducing retirement funds themselves; it’s all perfectly legal and proper, and is made easier because almost no one knows anything about the economic system and how to invest wisely. Such economic ignorance also helps people believe wealthy folks really create the good-paying jobs everyone wants, so to keep their taxes low is good for everyone. We’ll see more of the supply side economic model a litter later on.
All during the 1900s university economic departments themselves became more conservative in order to keep endowment funds flowing in from wealthy alumni, as well as paying conservative professors with high-paying consulting fees and research grants. Dewey’s Columbia University at Morningside Heights in New York was one place where more liberal views were tolerated, and many of its professors went on to work during the Great Depression in the Roosevelt administration, to create helpful New Deal policies for the poor and unemployed. With their help a progressive model of economics and politics continued evolving. In it the government had a much bigger role to play in better regulating economic actions, and in helping the public get through many of life’s unstable economic events. Retirement, for example, was made more secure with Social Security was passed, as well as disability money and unemployment funds. Thus even at the university level of education students continued being taught the conservative laissez-faire economic model. In that model students were told the economy has certain self-correcting systems built into it, and so the government should stay out of the regulating business, especially with taxes on corporate profits and personal incomes. True, taxes for the wealthy went up to 90% during and after World War 2, but since then they’ve been lowered even below what average taxpayers pay on much lower incomes!
Needless to say, economics at the public school level was all but ignored, even in white schools. It’s not difficult to see why. Even with this brief sketch so far, US economic history and the singular quest for ever more profits and political power is not a very endearing story about the United States. Conservatives want to teach students how great the US is, and how it’s a bastion of freedom and liberty, but economic history itself would smash all such ideas, to say the least. In fact, that history is one of mainly continuing greed, violence, public strife, and subsistence living, as we’re seeing today with striking low-paid fast-food workers. While workers are still barely getting by, corporate profits are in the billions!
Even more dangerous for conservatives, economic history also shows us improvements are possible. For example, in 1913 enough people organized to pass a Constitutional amendment for voters to elect senators directly, thus ending the buying of such power in state legislatures and increasing liberal voting power. Also, in 1916 enough progressive people organized to pass an income tax amendment to the Constitution. About 10 years earlier the Lochner Court’s corporate lawyer majority declared such a tax unconstitutional, even though there was an income tax law passed during the Civil War. Even so, after World War 1, during most of the 1920s, business was so good Republican President Calvin Coolidge proudly proclaimed the business of America is business. Considering economic history after him, however, perhaps a more realistic saying would be this: ever-increasing personal and corporate profits are sacred to the greedy feudalistic business community.
Shortly after Coolidge’s statement was made, the US was plunged into the 1930’s Great Depression, a years-long time of great economic chaos and stress for millions. Still, it was profitable for those US corporations who helped Adolph Hitler rebuild Germany’s war machine. Then, after World War 2 the US became the world’s greatest economic power. The Vietnam War also helped funnel more of the public’s money into the military-industrial class, enabling them in the early 1970s to become even more politically powerful. Earlier we saw how a famous memo penned by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell helped form a plan and direction for that power, made even easier when conservative Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Perhaps the most important economic result for conservatives was lowering the one tax tool necessary for preserving some kind of economic class equality and social health; he helped lower tax rates on the wealthy from about 70% to around 35%, funneled millions of public tax money for increased military spending, and used billions to bail-out newly de-regulated greedy Savings & Loan companies. And of course tax loopholes since then have enabled many US corporations earning over a billion dollars a year to pay little or no taxes! All such results become all but inevitable when economic history is ignored in our conservative public schools.
Popular ignorance about that history, and the ever-growing quest for more money-power, makes it fairly easy to create such tax policies; they are one of the most important ways our wealthy upper class keeps using the government to keep increasing its wealth. Exactly what about these ideas are too difficult for even high school students to understand? In essence, fewer taxes mean more feudalistic corporate power, often used to keep weakening useful regulations and democratic power. People ignorant about that economic reality never knew, much less questioned, how weak the conservative argument was for lowering taxes on the wealthy. Even though the economy worked well in the ‘50s and ‘60s with a much higher tax rate on them, even when income taxes were as high as 90%, conservatives once again merely concentrated their wealth on lobbying Washington lawmakers for the tax rate changes. No need to even debate the issue when campaign donations work just as well?
Socialized tax dollars were also given to the military-industrial complex to help ease a recession in 1980-81. President Reagan called for the peoples’ tax dollars to be so spent, and justified the action by telling people we must keep paying our military to defeat the worldwide communist threat. The public bought the idea; for decades already they had been told communists and socialists were out to take over the world, take away their freedom and liberty, and so they must be defeated wherever possible. So, few in the corporate-owned TV and press even bothered to ask why build more atomic and conventional weapons when any kind of attack meant certain atomic destruction for the attacker? Such questions might actually cause people to think more clearly about what was going on in their own country. Thus, people kept ignoring conservative economic actions. A still grossly undereducated public about economic ideas helped pacify the public into giving more of its tax money to build more useless weapons and armaments; many continue rusting to this day.
Also, beginning in the 1980s, corporate CEOs too did their part to break up union labor strength by simply shipping more good-paying jobs to cheaper workers overseas, and pocketing the profits. Since then wage increases have been little or nothing. As wealth kept concentrating in the upper class, women began joining the work force to make up for lost income while prices continued rising. Fewer labor unions meant workers would be forced to accept whatever wages they were offered, or else work someplace else. And, the less economic power workers had for political purposes, the easier it became to keep control of the government, increase profits and management salaries and bonuses, and of course help elect more conservative politicians and judges to continue our feudalistic wealth-consolidating capitalist economic system.
With more abstract economic studies in high school, it becomes easier for more young folks to learn about important economic ideas, like supply side economics, deficit spending, and economic recessions and depressions. A few words about those important ideas follow.
What Is Supply-Side Economics
To help justify tax decreases on the wealthy, and increased military spending, conservative economists in the 1980s created a new economic model. It was called Supply Side Economics. With its help people were told having a small wealthy upper class was good for the economy. Upper class money would be used to create more jobs and thus make everyone happy; critics soon called it trickle-down economics, or worse, voodoo economics. Once again, a greatly undereducated, compliant, and passive public ignored their small wealthy upper class continue growing more powerful as their jobs and incomes kept shrinking.
That conservative economic model, like laissez-faire before it, also included reducing government regulations and spending to help the poor and needy. Those ideas became an important part of the conservative Reagan administration. “Welfare queens driving Cadillac’s”, for example, became a favorite conservative phrase during the 1980s. No doubt, some people broke the law, registered for welfare money with more than one name, and were getting more money than they deserved. Also, there was no limit to how long some people could stay on welfare, and so such weaknesses should be corrected. But even today, conservatives keep trying to distract attention away from closing tax loopholes and billions of dollars in subsidies for the rich by talking mainly about how those folks create jobs with their wealth, and how bad deficit-spending is for economic health. Many such conservatives today want food stamp spending cut back some $40 billion over the next 10 years while the military continues getting around $600 billion a year! To many of them it’s much better to cut social kinds of spending than it is to reduce military spending at all! Because economic knowledge is still almost non-existent in our public schools and general population, many people will simply accept such ideas and vote for people who support them. Many conservatives believe poor folks are simply taking more money away from the wealthy, and thus helping create unemployment.
So, how good is the supply side economic model? As usual, it depends on the economic class you’re in. As with any idea, the results of that model help determine how good and reliable it is. With it, however, the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown wider than at any time since the early 1900s, not to mention unemployment has, since 2007, increased tremendously, especially among young folks just graduated from high school. In some places it’s around 50%! Their lack of economic skills makes them very vulnerable in the real world. What’s more, with that model in the hands of conservative politicians, the wealthy upper class now controls much of the economy’s income, while their pay and bonuses keep increasing and consolidating their wealth and power. Today, about 40 million people now live below the poverty line, thus reducing even further their real options, choices, freedoms, and liberties in life. So, with their supply side economic model, it seems life has gotten better only for the wealthy.
Also, as we’ve seen, another result of that conservative supply side model has made it easier for corporate money to control even more of Supreme Court which now houses 5 rather conservative Justices. In early 2010 they showed where their loyalties lie. In the infamous Citizens United ruling they added even more political power to our wealthy corporate class. They said manmade corporations are really people and thus have the same rights as people to give money to the candidates of their choice! In effect, it frees billions of corporate dollars for political purposes. To some critics, however, the logic was questionable. Isn’t saying corporations are people like saying any manmade institution is a person? Needless to say, to many liberal today that is indeed stretching the meaning of humanness a bit too far. Would that make state-owned socialist organizations around the world able to donate to US candidates as well? In the next section we’ll see some more results of that Citizen’s United decision on our political structure.
Deficit Spending and the Role of Government
Public debt and deficit spending are 2 more important economic ideas, and have been since the 1930s when John Keynes said the government should even increase its own debt to create jobs and hire unemployed workers. In other words, print money to pay workers. To conservatives at the time such an idea was economic blasphemy. Giving the poor jobs would simply help create more poor people, and thus have more mouths to feed and children to educate. As we’ve seen, since the 1700s a small government laissez-faire economic model had been embraced, thus making it easier to wealthy folks to become even wealthier, so helping the poor would only increase their taxes and lower their wealth. To many conservative even today, such a feudalistic social system is best.
Thus, with the idea of deficit spending by the government, the all-important conservative-liberal fight over the size and role of government has become the defining and fundamental issue since the mid-1900s. During the 1930s Depression conservatives kept insisting Democrats and FDR should limit their deficit spending to put people back to work, which is what economist John Keynes said should be done during a depression. After all, how can people have money to spend and revive the economy when they’re unemployed and out of work? To Keynes, that question was the proverbial no-brainer. What’s more, it didn’t matter what jobs the government created, as long as they created some jobs. That way people would have more money to spend, and would thus help the economy keep growing.
Since the ‘80s and Republican deficit spending, however, conservatives have changed their tune to warning about too much debt and deficit spending. After all, Reagan’s deficits created by unfunded military spending, caused some Republicans to say Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. And if that was the case, then haven’t Supply Siders themselves become Keynesians? In fact, during the Iraq War in the 2,000s, arch-conservative Republican Vice President Cheney said flatly: Deficits don’t matter. The result became the greatest public debt in US and world history, some $15 trillion, give or take a buck or 2, and has also become the main justification for conservatives reducing government spending on the poor. So even high school students can become better at debating what a healthy government role is in the economy.
The Great Recession of 2,007-09
The deep recession of 2007-09 has been another very unsettling and stressful economic event for millions of people, thus increasing the need for more economic information in our public schools. What happened, and why did it happen?
Again, high school students can begin seeing how useful certain economic regulations are for economic health. Certain deregulation of the economic system began unfolding in the late 1990s, in the Democratic Clinton administration. Mr. Clinton is a big business Democrat, so he accepted the corporate goals of increasing international free trade with the NAFTA agreement in 1993, and then a few years later helped end some important economic regulations. Perhaps the most important one was the so-called Glass-Steagall law. It had helped regulate and stabilize the financial sector for decades after the Great Depression, and so became an object of hatred form greedy conservatives always wanted more money. Repealing the law soon enabled huge Wall Street banks to start running one giant investment gambling casino where selling bundles of subprime mortgages to other banks and governments creating yet another housing bubble, a major cause of the ‘07-‘09 recession! All things must end, even selling junk mortgages, and in that process even many huge banks became vulnerable to bankruptcy, and thus possibly causing another world wide Great Depression! No doubt, some liberals today wonder if was it just a coincidence the housing bubble collapsed at the start of a democratic administration? After all, the Great Depression started at the beginning of Hoover’s Republican administration, and they knew the political results of that situation.
Under pressure from a Republican congress, Mr. Clinton helped repeal Glass-Steagall, and allowed commercial and investment banks to merge, thus creating an even more dangerous monopolistic and unregulated financial system. In other words, feudalistic economic power increased! Of course conservative banking CEOs celebrated; it gave them even more freedom to create more selling schemes aimed at separating more people and governments from their money. Selling subprime mortgages was one of them, and debt-reduction packages were another; what government doesn’t want lower debt payments? In reality, however, even the people selling such great-sounding deals didn't know how they worked. It wasn’t necessary. About the only thing they cared for was getting their huge sales bonuses, amounting at times to millions. People were told such investments were sound and reliable. The bubble began bursting in 2007.
For years before that, selling sub-prime housing loans became a way of life for many banks, like Bank of America. For a small down payment people were told they could move into the home of their dreams, and those homes would keep getting more valuable! And other schemes promised towns and cities they could reduce their debts if they would just buy financial products the banks were selling.
For a while housing prices kept going up and so economically naïve people wanted to cash in on the situation. However, when the bubble finally did begin collapsing in 2007, and home prices plummeted along with jobs, millions were left on the hook, so to speak, to pay off mortgages now worth more than the houses themselves! Economists aptly created the phrase “houses under water.” Too bad they weren’t selling aqua lungs at the time. What more, no one even on Wall Street knew how much junk mortgage debt anyone had on their books, including themselves! Who cared when billions of dollars kept rolling in? However, billions of dollars were also rolling out to insurance companies buying some safety from all those subprime mortgages. In some companies hundreds of millions of dollars were needed every day just to pay out to insurance companies!
Being unregulated, government watchdogs too were kept in the dark and clueless about how much risky debt banks were piling up, until the whole mess started collapsing, that is. All his Wall career, conservative Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was a staunch defender of the laissez-faire economic model; government should stay out of the economic sector, and let the market control who lives and who files for bankruptcy! Until, that is, he began seeing the whole economic system start collapsing around him! The major Wall Street brokerage firm of Bear-Stearns, for example, filed for bankruptcy in March, 2008, and, naturally, Wall Street stock brokers began seeing their prices tumble. Huge banks simply wouldn’t loan Bear Stearns any more money to pay its insurance costs.
Just a few months later Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy case in US history, and the following month, in September, the stock market lost over 1,000 points in value. (csmonitor. com) So, being a pragmatist like every smart person is, Mr. Paulson began ignoring all his conservative economic assumptions about a free-market and eventually told a small group of congress people he needed $700 billion the next day or the entire US and world economy would collapse into another Great Depression! Other than that, everything was fine on Wall Street. Probably never before in US history was economic drama any higher than at that moment.
Needless to say, some conservative congress people began ranting and raving about government socialism, but eventually Mr. Paulson would get the money he wanted to prevent another Great Depression. All the while, financial CEOs were making many tens of millions of dollars in bonuses and salary! Even 5 years later it's just staggering for ordinary people like myself to realize what some greedy people will do to keep feeding their money addiction! With Mr. Paulson’s help corporate socialism would rapidly replace any laissez-faire fantasies anyone had about how the economy really works.
Classical economic theory, Mr. Paulson's laissez-faire model, said all those banks and insurance companies should have gone out of business; they made risky loans and so lost their right to stay in business. The market must be free to destroy those who ignore its principles. Mr. Paulson soon saw that result would be disastrous not only for his Republican party but for the world as well; Wall Street is the world’s financial hub.
Eventually Mr. Paulson would get his money and start doling it out to those huge banks with huge amounts of toxic debt. Such a bailout would ensure the banks could keep lending money and doing business. However, those banks have decided to keep their bailout money and instead cause the greatest recession since the Great Depression. In fact, they’ve used some of the money to keep growing larger by buying out smaller banks. Thus a few super-large banks now control over half the money in the US economic system, while millions have lost their homes, and more than 3 million people are still out of work. What’s more, a few wealthy banks continue sitting on over $1 Trillion, not to mention presenting a $15 Trillion debt bill to the American taxpayer! (Help! My word processor may be running out of exclamation ink!!) All such conservative economic actions have thus combined to produce a great number of stressful and dangerous economic results, like huge unemployment numbers, millions of home foreclosures, increased homelessness, and even more wealth for the wealthy! Thus our under-regulated corporate socialized system is revealed in all its glory.
Had enough? For the strong at heart there’s more. Other economic results are even more staggering! We have the largest income gap between rich and poor folks since the 1920s; the wealthiest 1% own more than 35% of all US financial wealth; about 400 wealthy people own more than 150 million poor folks; in the past 6 years middle class wealth has declined about 40%; and all new recent income raises have gone to the wealthiest 1%! (See Ravi Batra’s The New Golden Age.)
There's also more about the conservative 'fixing' of our economic system with government help, to keep profits flowing to our still huge and powerful corporations and wealthy folks. Corporate tax rates, for example, are the lowest they're been since the early 1970s. Thanks to a number of special laws, about 25% of our corporations pay no federal income tax, even though profits are at record levels! As a result, workers must work harder to make up for lower wages, and pay more taxes to lower the deficit! It has reminded some of tax-free religious organization during the feudalistic Middle Ages. Exactly what the difference is I’m not really sure.
Also, the government’s lowering certain taxes paid primarily by the wealthiest, like stock and bond dividend taxes, as well as what are called 'capital gains' taxes, help increase upper class economic power. As a result, rich corporate CEOs earning millions of dollars a year on investments often pay less in taxes than their workers! That’s a fair democratic tax system isn’t it? And to put perhaps the most bitter-tasting icing on this economic fiasco, many wealthy folks too simply avoid paying even those taxes by shipping their millions into foreign banks, like in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands. So again, more taxes from the middle class are needed and fewer services to the lower class are given, to help reduce government debt. Such off-shore tax loopholes are now a common part of our economic system, all legalized by faithful politicians often looking for much better paying lobbying jobs when they leave congress. The educational moral: general economic ignorance of this history keeps allowing it to continue on! Such ignorance makes it almost impossible to elect more progressive liberal Democrats to office!
A recent article by the noted liberal author and reporter Amy Goodman was entitled Poverty Wages in the Land of Plenty, (Truthdig.com, 12-4-13). In it she cites some more exact statistics. She mentions how merely 6 Walton family members, of the Wal-Mart corporation, have a combined wealth of between $115-140 billion which is more than 40% of the poorest people combined! In 2012, for example, their family-owned Wal-Mart business earned around $120 billion, and yet are not paying most of their workers enough to even live on! Students in liberal high schools will start learning such facts, so they’ll be better prepared to challenge such a feudalistic economic corporate system after they graduate, and make it more democratic and public minded.
Conservatives in Washington, D. C. love to attack government programs designed to offset such results, like increasing taxes on the wealthy, and yet their own policies are helping create the need for more government help! Evidently such conservatives feel the more feudalistic a society is, the better it is. To us liberals, however, such a mind-set has no place in our more modern democratic world where, too much has been given, much is expected!
Even 200 years after the US was founded, our economy remains more concentrated and feudalistic than ever before, run from the top down with little care for workers or the public good. For many conservatives, personal and corporate profits have become the modern version of god. In fact, in economics, politics, and education our society is still basically run by a small minority of wealthy folks and corporate CEOs who want nothing more than to keep increasing their social wealth-power, including, by the way, passing education laws like No Child Left Behind, signed into law by Republican George W. Bush. Wal-Mart’s super-rich Walton family, for example, continues resisting any kind of worker unionization. With such facts available to high school students it becomes much easier to ask, how much money is enough?
When liberal economic health isn’t taught in our public schools, and how the government has a vital role to play in economic regulation and tax policy then only a few ask themselves how can our socialized government help reduce those dangers and make life better for everyone? How can we not allow a few people to amass huge fortunes, and keep controlling our political institutions for their own benefit? How can we demand more information from those who would be elected to congress? Fundamental economic questions like those will become much more important as more people keep learning more about how our economic system actually works, and how it can be improved. Informed and educated liberal democratic-minded people are the most intelligent way to keep improving the system we’ve been given.
Economic studies in our public schools will help young students become better able to talk about and seriously debate both conservative and liberal economic ideas. Obviously, to us Deweyan liberals such knowledge should rest on knowing more about US economic history. With such knowledge young adults will begin seeing what our economic history has been, what ideas are important to know, what’s being talked about these days, and also how to become better involved in building a more democratic economy aimed at the public good. In liberal schools elections become all-important. As we’ve been seeing throughout these pages, the movement towards a more concentrated and feudalistic economic system continues growing to this day, and thus menacing more people outside our upper class and those greedy for more power in it. In fact, to many corporate CEOs today competition is one of the dirtiest economic ideas of all, just like it was to many Catholics in the 1500s! Strong Catholic habits created the will power to keep their religious monopoly in place in spite of Protestant and Muslim challenges! In fact, much of Thomas Aquinas’s theological writings in the 1200s were aimed at defeating competitive Muslim religious challenges to his religion and its social monopoly. Time, however, has proved all monopolies grow weaker. One day even modern totalitarian political monopolies will weaken.
Some Final Thoughts
Even such a brief sketch of US economic history tells us Deweyan liberals, economic skills and knowledge can no longer be ignored in liberal public schools. As we’ve seen many times before, such ignorance merely leaves people almost completely unprepared to enter our modern world. Unless workers know how to organize and focus their collective power, and demand more equal power in their feudalistic corporations, in the form of better wages and more decision-making board power, life for millions will continue on at basically a primitive subsistence feudalistic level. Daily life will remain hand-to-mouth living. Without better economic skills and knowledge, it’s simply almost impossible to form and work for more decent economic goals, like building a just tax system, stopping people from sending taxable money to off-shore accounts, sending jobs to cheaper labor markets, building monopolistic corporations, and allow corporations to be treated like people. They are human made works of art, and thus have no human rights of their own. Only 5 conservative judges say they have.
No doubt, to many conservatives those liberal ideas may sound like pure propaganda, but conservative propaganda about economic and educational ideas have been in effect for many centuries now, and look at all the obnoxious social results their schools have helped produce: wasteful prison populations, high youth unemployment, not to mention crime and drug habits. Isn’t it time we tried experimenting with more liberal ideas of both personal and social health? What have we got to lose, except overcrowded prisons, perpetual warfare, millions of unemployed workers, and our present feudalistic society? Such weaknesses might be best improved with Dewey’s main liberal educational goal: to build public schools helping prepare students for life in the real world, where students have the freedom to explore that world and start teaching themselves skills and knowledge useful in it! What better way is there to help make their dreams come true other than with the help of intelligent habits and skills!?
The more students don't know about the economic world, and how valuable creativity and good work habits are, the less comfortable and productive young folks will be in that world. How many young folks feel working at, say, some fast-food company is beneath them, rather than being the doorway to a better, creative, and more profitable life? Sure, it may take some protests and work to make it happen, but then again, what just cause doesn’t require work and effort to build? How many young folks don’t realize the business world is where creativity is celebrated on a daily basis! Even at low wage-paying McDonalds some sandwich inventions were profitable, and some weren’t. Shouldn’t students even be free to make spinach cookies taste better and thus become more profitable?
Admittedly, this is merely a brief sketch of US economic history as 2014 is about to begin. But the harsh feudalistic results of our profit-obsessed economic system is becoming much clearer to millions of people thanks to the great educative powers of our still small and independent press, our socialized and publicly owned Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and to some degree even our corporate TV news media, as shallow as that medium continues to be. Have you watched Sunday News shows lately? Their questions are often like someone throwing flat stones on some water; they just skip along the surface. News anchors ask a politician one question, the politician offers some abstract generalized ideas, then the anchor asks another question, followed by more abstract generalizations. Almost never are they asked to explain what they mean and defend their answers with real evidence. It’s yet another example of how many of those corporate news shows don’t want people learning anything useful about our economic and political systems.
At this point it should be clear how conservatives have continued using their economic power to build and maintain a feudalistic economy useful mainly to them, and also why that system needs to be changed by we the people. In truth, such systems keep creating genuine social disasters, like homelessness, poor people, a much weaker middle class, and a much more powerful upper class. But it should also be clear what liberal goals are worth working for, like more union power, putting more workers on corporate Boards of Directors, putting more students on educational boards of directors, and also liberating our elected politicians from corporate control with publicly funded elections.
No doubt, the most absurd and immoral part of this whole economic fiasco is this. Believe it or not, many conservative politicians, backed by wealthy folks, often accuse liberals of trying to unfairly take money from the wealthy and give it to poor folks! Amazing! It’s as if they haven’t been taking money from the people for decades now. Conservatives often picture the Democrats as ‘tax and spend liberals,’ and often generalize their ideas and say Democrats want to raise everyone’s taxes! It’s gross propaganda, but when economically undereducated people hear it enough they often believe it, and so continue voting for Republicans! Such conservative rhetoric is a great way to continue making people think liberal Democrats are really coming after their wealth, when in reality they're focused on taxing only the obscenely wealthy, called the top 1%!
To liberals like myself, such conservative economic ideas and rhetoric are truly the epitome of arrogance, selfishness, and pure propaganda! And money will keep it happening until enough voters elect people loyal to working for the public good more than for private fortunes. Many times politicians are rewarded by the wealthy upper class when they leave Congress with better paying jobs, sometimes college teaching jobs, and of course very well-paying consulting jobs. So, if you're now feeling there really is an economic class war going on in the US, you are definitely not alone. Millions of voters around the country, both young and old, are becoming more organized and better educated to start dismantling such a stifling feudalistic economic-political system; such liberals want politicians who aren’t afraid to start breaking up monopolistic corporations, making them more competitive, their boards of directors more democratic by including workers on them, and returning wise regulations like Glass-Steagall and others, helping create public state banks to better serve the public good, rather than produce private profit, and perhaps most important of all, amending the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling enabling corporations to be treated like people and use their billions to keep controlling the political system. We liberals now know such conservative judicial and congressional actions are a sign of desperation and fear, not of true caring for all honest and law-abiding people. And the best way to ensure such a liberal democratic system stays in place is with the creation of liberal public schools. They are the best insurance against an on-going greedy conservative agenda. How old do children have to be before they begin feeling what such liberal economic health feels like?
39. REALITY SCHOOLS -- DEMOCRATIC HEALTH
Finally, the 4th important liberal educational challenge is teaching more excellent and forceful democratic habits in our public schools. Democracy’s health itself depends largely on meeting that challenge. Such habits will empower the next generation to better guide and control those economic forces merely working for their own welfare and good, rather than the public welfare and good. After all, our Constitution itself says the government should “promote the general welfare,” and without the people there could be no government.
For us Deweyan liberals, teaching democratic habits are the best way of building a more equal society of rights and opportunities for everyone. With such equality of rights it becomes easier to reduce money’s great power to control more people and institutions in our nation, and at the same time keep building more democratic power-sharing institutions throughout society, in homes, schools, churches, corporations, and the government. Such habits taught all through the public school years will not only liberate our still-enslaved students to feel what democratic freedom is like, but will also ensure their continuation well beyond the life of any one person.
Such challenges are still with us more than 200 years after the nation was founded. As we’ve seen in these pages so many times before, conservatives have continued working throughout world and US history to keep their economic and political power concentrated within a small feudal segment of society, especially in the world’s largest economy and in what many conservatives like to call our ‘exceptional’ nation.
Our feudalist political and economic systems have been described by liberals all through US history, and even after World War 2 when the Cold War was just beginning. Over 50 years ago the Alabama governor was Jim ‘Kissin’ Folsom; the rather flamboyant governor liked to kiss women in public. In a Christmas message one year he said:
“Under … democracy, there emerges … economic barriers among the people. And … a controlling minority group, … through advantages, … obtains great portions of wealth. Wealth means power and influence. … often that influence becomes an evil thing; … it is used for a few, and not for the good of all. … for that reason we must have laws to establish control over power and authority … over forces … based on self-gain and exploitation. … And it is necessary that we have laws to establish a measure of assistance and help for those who are not able to grub out a meager, respectable living.”
Before the civil rights movement in the late ‘50s and ‘60s such liberal democratic values and ideas were alive in the deeply segregated Deep South. Since then, however, Democrats forced an end to racial segregation, and sexual freedom too has grown to the point of legalizing abortion and same-sex marriages; in that process many southern states became much more conservative.
Even for those few reasons, we liberal Deweyans say the more our weakest minority, young students, are freed to start feeling what democratic equal rights are like, and how all law-abiding people should be at least respected, the sooner the world’s oldest democracy will become the world’s strongest democracy. As we’ve seen in the last section, recent economic realities keep showing us Governor Folsom’s ideas ring true today. Our current political system remains largely controlled and guided by our wealthy upper class, numbering only about 3 million people. Economist Gar Alperovitz recently said some 400 wealthy individuals now have as much wealth as around 180 million poor folks. Such a feudalistic economic situation in fact makes liberal democratic like equal rights and opportunities little more than words.
So, the liberal educational focus remains on building healthy feelings, ideas, and habits of democratic equal rights, learning to practice majority rule in schools and even smaller work groups, and also learning how to intelligently challenge, with debate and persuasion, that majority when it’s not agreed with. We liberals say such habits can and should be practiced all through one’s public school career! As we’ve seen in the last section, feudalistic profit-obsessed laissez-faire economic models can no longer be allowed to monopolize our political system, promote the public good, and satisfy basic human needs for everyone – the general welfare! And in such schools all students will begin building their intelligent political decision-making power to, say, build an intelligent and fair school tax system equalizing students’ freedoms and options to keep improving their school and their neighborhood! In fact, beginning with the ancient Greek lawmaker Solon, such democratic political power was designed to give all citizens a more equal share in making important social decisions.
So, like the previous 3 sections, I'll start with some suggestions for the 3 main stages of student development, including a little more political history for more abstract high school studies. No doubt, entire books could be, and have been, written about such democratic habits, but until people put down such books and begin working to liberalize our public schools in their own neighborhoods, most everyone will remain vulnerable to those with more wealth-power.
Based on the last 3 US national elections of 2008, 2010, and 2012, there may at last be a new and more powerful kind of democratic energy alive and growing in our country. And, merely a recent Virginia election for governor, where a Democrat won over a radical conservative, may have finally convinced conservative Republicans the time for their help in building a better working government and economy has come. Such elections, normally on the public airwaves for merely a few minutes, are actually the crucially important political events in our nation. They help people feel the real democratic power they have in their own voting actions. If so, then without a doubt, the next 2 national elections in 2014 and 2016 might well signify another very important turning point in US political history, moving us further away from conservative feudalistic systems to more democratic ones.
In short, these are indeed exciting political times and more liberal parents, students, and teachers can keep that movement alive and growing by helping build public schools where democratic health is celebrated, rather than ignored. For the first time in decades we liberals and independents may now have enough power to start making some major changes and improvements in our still feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems!
Thus, again, the question becomes what actions might young students practice to grow such important feelings and ideas? How can our public schools begin training and educating the next generation to keep democratizing the largely feudal political systems still at work in our nation? To more and more people these days, concentrated decision-making political power is becoming more and more dangerous; the recent revelations about the government collection of electronic data both at home and around the world is merely one example of how fragile our Constitutional rights are. The noted Roman historian Plutarch reminds us, as the Roman upper class continued concentrating its economic power, Roman political institutions became servants of them, rather than the other way around.
The First Sense-Based Stage of Democratic Health
So, what might some sense-based experiences at this level of development be useful for building healthy democratic habits? Even at the first stage of democratic political health students should be free to visit the places where politicians work, study, and debate. They should be encouraged to make a list of questions they would like to ask those representatives, like what do they do daily, who do they talk to, what laws are they working on passing, and questions like that. They should be taken to the places where they work and which were built with public tax money, to see what kind of things can be accomplished with that money. They should also be encouraged to make personal and electronic connections with those representatives, so they can invite representatives to school and tell them about their current projects, and so become a larger part of school life and improvement. After all, constructive student projects will cost money and they control large sums of it. In such ways healthy political student feelings and ideas will begin growing even at this 1st stage of development.
Based on such sense-based knowledge, young students can also start voting to elect their own representatives and form a simple student government. Those students who want to learn more about such careers will volunteer to run for office and perhaps also give little weekly reports about their work as well as ask students what problems they’re having both in and outside of school, and possibly ways of solving them. In such ways feelings for a healthy political community begin growing, as well as feelings about what healthy politics is all about. For example, those representatives can help students vote to decide what plants to grow in the room, on school grounds, and even in neighborhood parks. Sample plants can be passed around the room to learn which ones smell, look, and feel best? Such democratic freedom will not only help students listen to debates about different plants, but also about how to grow them intelligently.
After voting on the best plants to experiment with themselves, they can also vote on creating smaller teams to work in for growing specific plants, like a roses or a tulips team. Even within such teams they can vote to decide how the work should unfold, like what fertilizer to use, what kinds of pots are best, where to plant, and many other questions posed by either students or teachers? They can also be taken to neighborhood plant nurseries to sensually learn more about different plants grown easily in their areas, and growing techniques. Such neighborhood contact will continue building important community connections growing more useful in their constructive 2nd stage of development, helping them build their own school plant and even food nurseries. What public school students shouldn’t help build their own green house where intelligent experimentation in an on-going event and skills like good writing and math habits don’t grow naturally?
With such sense-based team activities it’ll also be easier to students to start forming the questions they’d like to have more information about. Such practical and useful questions are essential for any kind of healthy mental development at any level of growth. For example, where else can we take our flowers to brighten up someone’s life? How can we best teach them how to care for their plants? How often should we contact those people to see any problems they’re having with their plants? All such useful and practical knowledge can start growing with enjoyable role-playing at the 1st stage of development. What young student wouldn’t like to play an elderly person who has problems with not knowing how much to water their plants?
For those students interested in building their singing or acting skills, healthy democratic voting skills can also keep growing: who has the best voices; what would they like to sing; how can we provide the music for them, and a host of other questions. With all such sense-based learning student can begin feeling what real democratic diversity and learning enjoyment is like. In such schools voicing their opinions are a normal part of every day, talking about ways to keep improving their own communities, finding out where to get accurate information about their ideas, voting on how to actually improve their neighborhoods, and even how to intelligently raise the money for constructive projects. Those kinds of liberating and intelligent democratic choices and habits are what we liberal Deweyans say are political health! The more students learn how to intelligently guide their own growth, and intelligently overcome obstacles in that process, the less they’ll need government help later on. After all, our own cities are small versions of larger nations, so why shouldn’t our schools become smaller versions of our cities?
No doubt, once such schools begin experimenting with the kinds of health described here, they’ll come up with many more sense-based political experiences for students to learn more about. That’s the great beauty of intelligent experimentation; no one can predict exactly what the results will be. But in any case, liberal schools will thus slowly begin allowing even 1st grade students to start building their own intelligent democratic powers of free choice, focusing on the constructive and helpful, not the destructive, hurtful, or irrelevant. Such intelligent experimentation will also encourage students to start imagining at the results of their ideas, and then use them as a guide for intelligently choosing which ideas they want to test, and see how accurate their imaginations were. That’s the real enjoyment and drama of experimental learning. In such ways even 1st stage student can begin growing their sense and instincts for on-going work and improvement projects; not all goals can be reached today or even tomorrow. And best of all, learning itself remains as naturalistic in school as it is in real life. And, in such schools, students will also begin growing a sense of personal freedom and responsibility for their actions; they won’t need a teacher’s permission to use the bathroom, or even ask to see and talk to the principal about what they’re doing and talking about? They’ll learn to make an appointment, have a list of questions ready, and be on time for that appointment.
In such naturalistic, student-centered, and democratic schools, students will thus begin growing a sense of freedom for choosing what to study, and how such skills and knowledge are best used helpfully and constructively. If, say, a 1st grader wants to learn more about how to better train a pet animal for some shut-in senior, then it’s the teacher’s job to show them how to do that intelligently, rather than merely talk about the idea. In that way students will soon become more intelligent themselves and begin feeling how all their actions are important. At this 1st stage of development, young children are active sense-based learners, and so the skills and knowledge they learn now builds a foundation for all that’s to come. At any rate, what’s important is starting to grow peaceful and helpful skills with the help of intelligent decision-making, and also making plans for making their helpful decisions come true. In general, then, the ultimate educational goal is to keep student curiosity alive and growing in positive and constructive ways, and learning how their decisions can become more intelligent and respectful as they get older.
Students can even be given a choice on what books they would like to hear and be redd to them first, second, third, and so on. That way there’ll be the all-important emotional commitment to hearing what they want to hear about, and thus learn more about what they want to know more about. Who knows? After that, some may even want to start writing their own stories, and thus start learning more about writing and how to do it intelligently. From such desires have grown some of the best reporters we’ve ever had. In such ways they may also begin feeling how books are an important source of useful knowledge, rather than being the only reason they’re in school.
Also, being free to decide what they want to hear about is another way healthy democratic habits of choice and respect for diversity can grow stronger. Different teams of students will normally want to hear stories about different kinds of things. After all, in the real world good listening and talking skills are very useful throughout life; how else can students begin learning how to talk sincerely, with some humor, and with some confidence and joy as well? Why shouldn't students spend an hour each day voting to hear more about what their fellow student teams are hearing and learning about? The different topics can be written on the board and then voted on. Such intelligent and healthful democratic activities will start building a respectful feeling for what others have to say, as well as a feeling for what intelligent talk sounds like.
Such democratic activities are the essence of respect for social diversity and equality, without which life remains merely a collection of often antagonistic tribes living together – our present world. Such democratic skills help make school something more than having all students keep quiet, read the same books, and answer the same questions day after day after day, even though many don’t need to know such facts? Is making young students learn what they don’t want to learn the source of the old saying: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink!? Such is often the result in our own conservative public schools where healthy democratic habits are largely ignored, and yet parents continue believing that’s the best educational model. Adults are free to learn what they want, so why shouldn’t students be just as free? It’s yet another proverbial double standard passed on in feudal conservative institutions. By what right do conservative educators and politicians tell everyone in a democratic society all students must learn the same body of academic facts, and thereby make de facto slaves of the next generation for 12 years? Feeling such questions cannot be answered reasonably are at the core of democratic health. And to see how hypocritical conservatives really are, they more than anyone else love to use abstract ideas like freedom and liberty. We liberal say it is time we started holding conservatives to their principles of liberty and freedom within our own public schools.
The Second Constructive Stage of Democratic Health
Healthy democratic habits can continue growing throughout these constructive years of school too. They are equally important for building all the democratic feelings upon which abstract political knowledge will become more meaningful in the 3rd stage of growth – the final 2 or 3 years of high school. After all, whether they have children or not people pay property taxes for our schools, and so have a right to benefit with constructive projects from them. And, how many computer-anchored adults would love to have such carpentry and pottery shops open at night for their own constructive, creative, and stress-relieving projects? Or would they rather keep watching people eat bugs on Reality Shows?
So, what kinds of constructive projects can students use in this 2nd stage of development to keep building their healthy democratic political habits? The key to answering that question rests with the general intent of all liberal schools, namely to make school life reflect life in the outer world as much as possible. With that idea comes ideas like voting to keep improving their school government, building a student police force for those students who want to make law enforcement their life’s work, school courts for those students who’ve chosen legal careers, like lawyers and judges, a medical system for students wanting to learn more about body-mind health, perhaps also building a system of better educating those students who, for one reason or another, have chosen to disrespect others or the law, and of course voting on the school laws their representatives suggest.
At this level of development their elected student representatives can have 2 constructive roles to play. One is suggesting new school laws and construction projects; the first helps protect students from others, and the second helps build any new workshops. After explaining to students why such laws and shops are needed, students can then vote on them. The 2nd important role for student representatives is then to reach out into the surrounding government, business, and private communities to find support for those projects. Thus important communication lines between schools and the community remain open and strong. With those roles students interested in a government career will gain valuable firsthand knowledge and experience. In turn, the government and business community can help supply materials needed to keep constructive projects growing, and also creating more ideas about what should be done to make life more satisfying. For example, fixing pot holes can be one constructive project at this level of education, even including teams of girls to learn more about the process of getting the needed materials and also do the needed work. Student representatives can help make intelligent plans, and then ask students to vote for them. Also, student representatives can coordinate repair projects at school as well, under the intelligent supervision of a maintenance department or volunteer parents. Students can even be asked to vote on manning such a department; would students like to make all such work voluntary, or should a drawing-lots system be used?
The building of student police and legal systems is also important constructive work helping build democratic health. After all, their school taxes will pay for such work. Ignoring such habits merely makes citizens more vulnerable for paying into expensive pensions later in life, and thus endangering their own safety. As we’ve seeing today, many states passed such pension deals and now retired workers are seeing such funds evaporate before their eyes. The more we keep people out of such decision-making loops, the more dangerous life becomes for both workers and taxpayers. At this 2nd stage of development students can continue guiding and directing how their school tax money is being spent, and even the need for good tax laws in general. In that way students can also begin feeling how they can control what their taxes are spent on with their democratic votes. Our present republican government system almost completely separates taxpayers from saying and guiding how their taxes should be spent. Considering the recent results of how that system is working out, the need for improvement remains strong.
As students grow older and increase their reading and writing skills, they’ll also have the option of voting to build a school newspaper, to help those students who want to become reporters and writers. In that way they’ll continue feeling how important information and a free press is in a democracy, and how important information about what our government is doing is the key to building a safer and more enjoyable life for everyone. How free and open do we want our government to be? Should they be forbidden from publishing anything our government does, and if not, then where’s the line to be drawn.
With such constructive activities students will also begin feeling how important it is to elect the judges their taxes support and pay. Without that freedom, the entire judicial system remains feudalistic and undemocratic, as is the case with our own Supreme Court! Our conservative Framers wanted such a feudalistic judicial system, and so they built it into our Constitution.
Who should decide what information to print and what to keep secret? Is there any reason to keep any government information secret, and if so, then what is it? In more democratic schools such ideas can be talked about and debated even at this 2nd stage of growth. Should we build a tennis court, a soccer field, a new science lab, a greenhouse to grow more vegetables for the cafeteria, or a pottery shop? Do we need more exercise equipment or not, and if so what kinds? All such questions are more chances for students to see how important it is to look at future results for making decisions about constructive projects here and now, and see how that art is the heart of democratic intelligence itself. Motives may be somewhat important, but actual results are far more important. What does it profit a society to, say, allow the government to collect information about innocent people, either at home or around the world? Can it all be justified with the idea of national security, even while violating constitutional guarantees against freedom of search and seizure? Are so-called whistle-blowers traitors or patriots? Should those who provide information about questionable government actions be protected by law?
Such questions are difficult to answer clearly and concisely; technology keeps creating new powers and abilities. But students can start feeling how important such questions are even in their own schools, where newspapers and information are at work on a daily basis. Without democratic power for deciding what information students should know, the largely feudalistic political system we have in the real world will continue on. In it tax money is controlled not by the taxpayers, but largely by the huge corporations we have today. Students can begin feeling how important and complex such questions are, and then later on begin reading more about how, say, our feudalistic military-industrial system keeps taking hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year to build more weapons and bombs. Is that the kind of economy we want, especially when most other nations have gotten rid of such a system?
Building a healthy student police system would also help students feel what kinds of respectful and helpful habits they need to learn. While learning more about what they want to learn, they can also be asked to vote on how student police officers should be trained? What do intelligent police people act like? Voting to answer such questions would thus continue building enforcement health. Considering how important such habits are in the real world, tomorrow’s officers can start learning those habits today in more liberal schools. Such intelligent law-enforcement skills can be built in more liberal schools, so there isn’t a separation between police and their community, as so often happens. For example, wouldn’t knowing which students have access to dangerous guns and assault weapons be a great step forward for making our schools safer places to learn in? It certainly seems that way to me, given the on-going and increased school violence and killing around the nation.
Also, student police officers can then help students build intelligent problem-soling habits themselves.
We’ve already seen such ideas on anger management in the section on psychological health. After all, why shouldn’t both unjust and unfair laws, as well as unjust and unfair parents, be confronted intelligently as soon as possible; such intelligent democratic skills of respect help reduce frustration and the dangerous results growing from them, like criminal actions for example. Also, intelligent civil confrontation and disobedience is another sign of democratic health useful throughout life. With such constructive habits Mohandas Gandhi helped end over 200 years of controlling and stifling British rule in India, and gain India’s independence. And Martin Luther King Jr. helped end centuries of unfair laws against Africans with similar actions.
Also, students can be asked to think and vote on building their own school jail system. How should they treat students in such a system? Like a life-long criminal, or someone needing to learn more useful and intelligent employment skills? Without such questions in our public schools, we will continue paying for our present inhumane jails wherever they may exist. Students could vote on whether to let such students, say, re-paint the school, or build a carpentry shop where others can learn to make intelligent repairs for projects both on and off school grounds. As intelligent people have noticed since Plato’s day, the time to teach the next generation intelligent and useful work habits is as early as possible. The more our schools neglect that idea, and keep forcing students to read more books, the more expensive jails will be needed, and the more taxpayer money will be diverted from building better schools.
Around the world today punishment is often the preferred way to treat undereducated people, rather than asking them what they want to learn about, and then helping them to make their dreams come true. My guess is such jail systems will not be needed in liberal public schools, simply because students will have the freedom to start learning what they’re interested in, as well as learn more intelligent ways of dealing with those who might be abusing and harassing them. Thus, they’ll have fewer reasons to start disrespect others and our laws. Still, there will be abusive, dictatorial, and controlling parents helping produce frustration and anger in their children, and so learning more about psychological health will be useful. But again, the sooner those parents are identified, the sooner they too can be educated to act more intelligently and helpfully with their children. Here the connections between liberal schools and helpful government child agencies can work together to build more loving habits in parents and children, and thus fewer destructive and disrespectful feelings in children. More educated-oriented jails would be a big step in that direction.
No doubt, to many people such educational ideas will sound so different from the ideas they’ve seen at work in their public schools. That’s because they are so different from conservative education ideas! But, such liberal ideas rest on the best learning psychology conservatives themselves have been practicing for thousands of years already. For thousands of years they’ve known actions are the best way to train young students to accept conservative habits and feudal social systems. With such schools such feudal systems have existed for all that time, and still exist even today. Both democratic and totalitarian governments work better with obedient and passive people.
In more liberal public schools constructive and intelligent community service projects become important for all young students. Actually, before the Wall Street-caused Great Recession of 2007-09, such programs were growing in many schools. For example, California’s Long Beach School District was requiring some community service-learning work for high school graduation. Even though it was only a small 40 hour requirement, it was a great baby-step start for the program. We Deweyan liberals say such work can and should begin even in the lower elementary grades, especially in the 2nd constructive stage of growth, during the 8-14 year old age group. As Behavioral psychology teaches us, it’s best to start building any new habit or institution on a small scale, and then keep expanding such changes as students grow older and more capable of more abstract thinking and learning.
In any case, it remains very important for parents, students, and teachers to know, they in fact already have the right to start experimenting with building such schools in their own neighborhoods. What’s missing most places is the collective power to make that right a reality. It starts happening once a critical point is reached in the numbers of parents demanding such power. To us liberal Deweyans, what’s made the present system last so long are the passive and accepting conservative habits students learned in their schools; nothing more and nothing less! More students are becoming activists too. Almost daily, however, I see reports from around the country how more and more people are finally saying enough; we want more educational freedom for ourselves and our children. Some students in California, for example, refused to continue taking standardized tests as part of their education. Those interested in learning about more ideas for reconstructing and improving our schools, can read John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow. Many of the ideas mentioned here are from there.
One thing seems certain: Not encouraging students to constructively build more intelligent political habits, and thus take a more active and intelligent control of their own schools merely keeps students vulnerable to democratic injustice, bullying, petty theft, and disrespect. The liberal antidote simply encourages students at this 2nd stage of development to continue learning how to build respectful habits even for fair and just bicycle safety laws. What should such laws look like? The more students think about those questions, the healthier their democratic habits become, and the more democratic our nation becomes as well. Should we build a bicycle and pedestrian practice course on school grounds, so young student can begin feeling how important such actions are for everyone’s safety? And if so, where can we get the money and materials for such projects?
How can we expect students to practice such intelligently constructive democratic habits when they’re not allowed to vote on them in their public schools? Should we keep making school grounds places where the grass is watered and cut, or should we start making them places more useful for all students? Would exercise or greenhouse areas be a much better way to use our public school grounds? By denying students the right to learn more about such democratic health, we perpetuate our own weaknesses and excesses. Thus, improving them is like expecting an animal to act a certain way without the proper training; it’s almost impossible. Children at this level may not be instinctively bad, but they also aren’t instinctively good and intelligent either. Like every young animal they’re basically ignorant, and so need useful education and training. In fact, being free to vote on and then build such areas would help children learn how reliable math and science ideas can be used in the real world. To us liberals such ideas are really just common sense thinking, once, of course, our assumptions about learning are common sense based too?
Many educational psychologists say children need to have limits, and know what’s allowed and what’s not, as well as the probable results of going beyond those limits? Building such practical and useful limits is almost completely ignored in our conservative public schools. Why shouldn’t students start learning about building a healthier jail system, where students are free to learn what they want, rather than merely giving them ‘time-out’ in school? This 2nd stage of development is a good time to start learning how to build intelligent political habits. The sooner young students begin feeling how important such democratic health is for everyone’s safety, the sooner they’ll also feel no one is exempt from respecting just and fair laws; just and fair laws should apply equally to everyone, from jaywalkers to serial killers to Supreme Court Justices. For example, a few years ago one married Supreme Court nominee was reminded of his disrespectful behavior with a former female law clerk; she said she was a victim of disrespectful sexual harassment by the nominee, like his pleadingly referring to pubic hairs on a Coke can as a way to seduce her. Such an embarrassment from him eventually came around to him in front of a national TV audience! No doubt, it caused a collective laugh in the whole liberal community, but there’s a deeper lesson for everyone in a truly healthy democratic society. No one is completely exempt from disrespecting both just laws and innocent people. In California over 60% of prisoners return to prison within a few years! For many undereducated people prison has become home. For those running our prisons that’s good news; for them it means job security, and for for-profit prisons it means more money too; what business doesn’t want return customers?
We liberal Deweyans say democratic habits help young children start building feelings of equal justice for all? With such habits it becomes easier to report bullying and harassment of any kind, by any student, to student police officers. It’s good for student safety and confidence as well. Also, if we don't celebrate making peacefully intelligent choices and actions, then war remains an on-going option. With such rewards our business community could be more involved. What business doesn’t need more good advertising: These awards for peacefully intelligent actions are brought to you buy the following corporations?
In this 2nd stage of political development, public school students can start learning what democratic fairness and equality feel like. For centuries undereducated Africans in the US allowed themselves to be treated like Aristotle suggested, like mere living tools and sub-human work animals, as were many women and other minorities. The Chinese workers who built Leland Stanford’s railroads worked on a bowl of rice a day while allowing themselves to be paid pennies a day for their labor! For decades Asians in general were routinely treated as second class citizens, and unjust laws restricted them from even owning land or buildings. Liberal democratic schools help students build habits of fairness and equality, and thus make it much tougher for others to take advantage of them. History tells us until such habits are built, such results will continue working. Such shallow and weak democratic feelings have been perpetuated by our conservative public schools, by merely telling students what to learn and study. We liberals say, in many ways that conservative system is inhumane; educational freedom is reduced to either learning academic book facts or leaving school. And in vocational schools it’s either learning how to run a machine or else leave school.
Nowadays, people still keep giving their tax policy power to their representatives, and such a feudal system of money will continue until enough people demand more democratic power for themselves. So, in our public schools we ask why not let students decide how much to tax themselves, and also what those taxes should be spent for!? No doubt, many conservatives might even be terrified of building such a school system; after all, it attacks the very foundation of our feudalistic political system. But for us liberals such habits are the best way to make democratic equality something more than just 2 words. Why shouldn’t students even at this early stage of development also feel the democratic power to build a public school bank, where school improvement is the aim and goal, rather than merely more and more profits for the bank? In such schools, building more useful services would be much easier, like, say, building a public cleaning service. Wouldn’t it begin teaching students one of life’s important lessons: if we want more services, like cleaning or humane banking services, then taxes need to be collected? Why shouldn’t we hear some 3rd grader working as a janitor yell at a 5th grader to keep the bathroom cleaner, or else his taxes will go up and he might even be cleaning it himself? The more students choose where they want their taxes spent, the more they can feel what it’s like to guide their own school’s growth and development. Do they want their taxes spent on more student police, or on more recreational equipment, on workshops or on library books? How many student police officers and security fences do we need to make our schools safe from unstable and dangerous people?
The Third Stage of Democratic Health—Political History
Finally, at the abstract level of political health, our whole political history of Western civilization becomes a subject for study as students get ready to become full citizens with voting rights. Sadly, however, for us liberals, both our economic and political history are not very pretty pictures. For thousands of years, and to this day, conservatives have worked to keep their political power by denying liberals, as much as possible, the power to keep experimenting with building a more satisfying public good for all. The following is just a brief sketch of some political events liberal high school students might find interesting and enlightening about the world they will enter.
Some Ancient and Medieval Political History
As Aristotle saw in the ancient world, a stable and large economic middle class helps build a stable government. No doubt, when it’s in place people are more hesitant to send their sons off to die in some foreign war, and also inclined to political moderation. In effect, then, he saw the important relation between economics and politics. If the wealthy are too wealthy, they tend to control the political system for their own benefit, and if the lowest class become too powerful, they tend to control it for their own good. The challenge, then, is to make democracy work for the public good, not the good of any one social class. It’s a challenge continuing to this day.
Even before Aristotle, however, democratic power had been growing since the early 500s BCE, with Solon’s Athenian political reforms. However, after it blossomed in the 400s BCE, it became dominated by imperialists like Pericles, who built an Athenian empire of other city states and used their wealth for Athens’ beautification. The Parthenon is merely one example of that policy. Also, in that process, he kept challenging Sparta and her allies, thus creating feelings of fear and separation eventually provoking a Greek civil world war from which Athens and Sparta never fully recovered. Today, we call such actions foreign affairs, and the same dangers still exist here in the US. Military bases around the world keep draining needed funds for domestic improvement, and help breed hatred overseas. How much longer will the US be able to afford spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on its military, while people go hungry and often homeless in the US? Some 60 years after World War 2 we still have an over bloated military stifling the building of a better nation here at home, even though our enemies have been reduced to a mere trifle of what they were in the 1950s. If nothing else, such facts and conditions show us political history continues being a very useful study at this 3rd stage of educational development.
Then, during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), feudalism was the standard political system in Western civilization. It was a class-based system of loyalty from the peasant class up to the ruling class, often dominated and controlled by the religious system described earlier. Certain amounts of peasant crops were taken each year for their feudal lords; those lords, in turn, owed the politically more power nobility and aristocracy knights to fight their religious and secular wars, and of course the aristocracy owed the royal family support against other nations eager for more territory. England and France and other countries warred for centuries.
Within that political system even as late as the 1400s kings too bowed to Church leaders. A series of Crusades during these centuries show how politically powerful the Church was at this time, encouraging a series of wars against the Muslim world. Above all else, the Church’s feudalistic monopoly of political power was to be preserved, and after 1500 expanded to all American primitive tribes. The 1600s, however, marked another major turning point in Western political history.
In the early 1600s, the main challenge was separating religious and secular government from each other. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the main spokesman for the royal family and its absolute political power over all other forms. In his view even religious truth was controlled and set by the sovereign; whatever they said was true. The monarch’s main role was to protect the nation from outside forces, as well as protect citizens from other citizens. In the 1500s England’s Henry 8 declared himself head of a new Protestant Church of England, confiscated Catholic lands and buildings, and Hobbes became a spokesman for justifying such feudalistic political power. Only absolute political power could make aggressive and warring men more peaceful than self-destructive and combative; such was the model of human nature Hobbes built. However, a few short years later, after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, John Locke (1632-1704) ushered in a much more modern political model, one based on representative government and a Bill of Rights for all citizens against conservative abuse. It became the model for the US Bill of Rights about 100 years later.
Some Modern Political History
No doubt, nothing marked the difference between medieval and modern political worlds more than political democracy, even though it began on a very limited scale. Though the Industrial Revolution created a very wealthy and power political upper class in Western civilization, and even though its US version continues dominating the political scene, democratic power has continued growing and becoming a major political force opposing conservative dominance.
After 1600, with the growth of modern science and the decline of religious power, democratic power began growing again, thanks in part to Locke’s politically democratic writings. For him elected representatives should have the most political power, which the royal family became merely a figurehead office. To this day democratic power continues growing stronger around the world as the voting base has kept expanding and more people demanded the right to vote. The amazing Swiss, for example, already have a system of direct democracy, where, if enough people want a law passed, legislators are required to pass it if its results seem reasonable. And of course throughout the still largely conservative Muslim political world these days, millions more are beginning to work for their individual democratic freedom and equal rights! No doubt, such actions warm the hearts and deserve the support of all liberals. For most of the 20th century concentrated forms of political power, on the right and left, have continued warring against each other, and destroying millions of lives in the process.
In any case, however, we liberal democrats love to see long-dominated Egyptian, Pakistani, and Afghani women on the streets intelligently protesting against all those conservatives who would deny them their equal human and political rights and freedoms. After all, the Koran itself celebrates such ideas and Mohammed himself married a Jewess. What’s more, before she was killed in 2007, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto kept reminding her Muslin sisters about 70% of them were still denied equal education rights. For centuries conservatives around the world have known knowledge and democratic equality are their natural enemies, and have worked to restrict both kinds of growth. Clearly, then, in many ways the undemocratic feudalistic Middle Ages is ending in more and more places around the world, in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the US. Even in China, North Korea, and Iran people may soon be building much more powerful democratic movements as well; let’s hope they’ll produce more peaceful rather than violent results.
Since the 1600s the liberal political movement has worked to keep increasing the number of people who can vote. It’s been the main weapon for weakening concentrated conservative political power. In the US, for example, at first only a small number of white land owners had any voting rights, and so most people had little political power for themselves. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay boldly declared: Only those who own the country should govern it. And as white folks continued taking more and more land from Native peoples, the phrase Manifest Destiny convinced many people after 1830 they had a right and duty to build a Christian nation from ocean to ocean as well as take around half of Mexico’s land before the Civil War.
Not surprisingly, then, from the very beginning of the US, the government has worked to deny democratic voting rights to women, poor people, Natives, and of course slaves. Only after years of demanding the right to vote, in 1920 women were finally allowed to vote in national elections, and until only recently were Africans given the same political power. Almost all during the 1800s all such minorities were kept uneducated and economically weak. As in ancient Athens and its empire, conservatives like Plato and Socrates has ridiculed and despised democratic ideas. And even today conservatives still work as much as they can, and wherever they can, against expanding democratic equality and voting rights. Such historical facts are yet another vivid example of how strong conservative anti-democratic habits can become, and how much political power they still have. Conservatives know full well, the stronger democratic voting freedom becomes, the more endangered their conservative feudalistic political control becomes. Just recently in the Wall Street Journal, an article talked about how taxes will go up on wealthy folks around the world, as if corporate taxes moving from 20% to 25% means the end of the world.
Minimizing and controlling democratic power is alive and well to this day. In the US the feudal court system created over 200 years ago still works against allowing people to share political power equally with those who have great wealth and influence. The Citizens United decision in 2010 began allowing corporations to use their great wealth to help elect whoever they wanted. What’s more, because our Constitution is so difficult to amend, conservative power continues stifling majority rule in many ways, mainly by allowing corporate wealth to play a bigger political role! Also, at the state level, conservative politician power to draw their own district voting lines has made it more difficult for more liberal people to get elected. How long those conditions will remain in place is anyone’s guess.
In such ways, the old conservative feudal political world of concentrated monopolistic power lives on even in the US – the world’s oldest democratic republic. Of course, democratic growth has brought more freedoms and liberties in many ways, on both personal and social levels, but to this day, the democratic challenge remains: to keep political power-sharing habits growing and more intelligent! Should honest taxpayers continue seeing their money used for maintaining around 1,000 military bases overseas, while people and children go hungry and without medical help here at home? No doubt, we’ll continue hearing conservative politicians telling many still undereducated people the government is the problem, not the solution; if we only allowed the wealthy to keep getting wealthier, we’d all become wealthier too. No doubt, such conservative economic and political ideas reflect the conservative wing of our upper economic class, and its desire for less government regulation and more money-making power. However, to us Deweyan liberals, such ideas are becoming more laughable every day! Recent US political and economic history both tell us such results have yet to happen, even though the rich have been getting much richer for the past 40 years! In fact, since it began in 1789, the US government has been helping the wealthy become even wealthier.
As we saw earlier, conservative President Reagan told the American people the government is the problem, not the solution. As we saw in the last section, however, the recent Great Recession of 2007-09 was helped by deregulating some key banking laws, helping create an unstable housing bubble resting on millions of toxic sub-prime home loans. In the late 1990s conservatives convinced big business Democrats like Bill Clinton to deregulate certain parts of the banking system, thus setting the stage for that housing bubble to grow. Eventually such banks were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Together with paying for 2 unfunded and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, public debt has soared to nearly $15 Trillion!, even emboldening conservative to keep yelling the economic sky is falling and we must cut back on food for the poor and many other useful social services. So-called austerity politics has become the policy in many Western countries.
Merely those economic facts alone tell us liberals the conservative control of government is the problem, not the solution! Even moderate young folks are becoming more convinced of that idea; they’re seeing rents and student loans skyrocket, wages and jobs shrink, and healthcare costs remain high for many. Thus, for many of those young folks, reducing conservative political power remains the main challenge, even though conservatives continue painting themselves as political saviors and wise people. Recent election results won by Democrats, however, tell us more and more voters aren’t buying such conservative rhetoric and propaganda. Many different news sources are telling such voters the rich are controlling more and more of the nation’s income and wealth, and thus making life more difficult and stressful for millions of people. Political and economic history, too, tell much the same story. In the early 1800s, for example, the quest for more profits provoked the British to force China to allow the heroin they bought in India to be sold in China! Why not Google The Opium Wars to see how vicious greed can become when liberal voting rights are kept small and confined?
More Hopeful Statistics for Liberals
A recent article by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post (4-16-2013) cited more disturbing numbers for conservatives. According to it, the Republican Party has become separated from mainstream American voters by 70% to 23%! In other words, 70% of those polled said the Republicans are now out of touch with their basic values and desires. Is it any wonder, in Republican controlled states they’ve quickly created enough safe voting districts to gain control of the House of Representatives in 2010, and thus produce the least productive congress in US history! It’s yet more evidence conservatives are working merely to prevent democratic programs from growing at all, programs aimed at increasing the public good.
What’s more, in more specific groups of voters, like independents, the political dis-connect between them and the Republicans is even worse! Moderate middle-of-the-road voters register a 75%-20% split for Democrats. And, by a 51% to 46% split, people say the Democrats are more in touch with their more liberal values, like same-sex marriage, taxing the wealthy more, liberalizing our immigration laws, better regulating our huge banks, reducing our military, and passing better gun control laws. On immigration too, the numbers are 64% to 32% in favor of a more liberal democratic policy. Clearly those numbers spell trouble for conservative Republicans, so how is it they still have so much political power in our system?
Basically conservatives use 4 major political tools to slow a more liberal democratic program: the Senate filibuster, drawing voting districts to favor Republicans, re-election financing, and media control.
Until only recently, filibuster was a political Senate tool whereby a minority could effectively kill bills and appointments from going forward; even liberal judges were prevented from being appointed! With it, conservatives have killed more Democratic bills and appointment than were killed in the entire history of the US! Lately, however, that filibuster power has been changed. Now only a majority vote can confirm appointments of judges, but not pass laws. In effect, it’s an undemocratic and rule to ensure feudalistic power remains controlled by a very small political minority of voters, rather than a more just and fair democratic majority. A recent gun control law was defeated 54-46; it simply required gun sellers to conduct a background check on customers. It didn’t get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, even though most people favor such checks.
Secondly, there’s re-districting. As described above, Republican state legislators have designed voting districts to more easily keep electing their conservative politicians to the US House, thus making it almost impossible to pass money bills promoting more jobs for the unemployed and thus increasing the public good. How can people even think about voting when they have no job or money? Many have been using their retirement savings in so-called IRA accounts, but steep penalties for that action helps shrink their funds and increase Wall Street profits. Merely increasing the taxes on the already obscenely wealthiest Americans, or cutting defense spending, could easily put more unemployed people to work on our old highways, bridges, and schools. However, in their quest to keep the Democrats from making the economy more productive and useful, conservative politicians regularly refuse such ideas. They can’t seem to look beyond preserving their own political power by increasing social stress and frustration. Although austerity economics is proving disastrous for people around the world, conservatives in the US continue saying cutting government spending is the best way to improve our economic health. In law school students learn how to delay any kind of legal proceeding, and so if they get elected the same delaying and stalling skills are often used. Meantime, popular frustration with conservative Republicans continues mounting around the nation, as the above poll numbers tell us. Public approval of congress has recently reached new lows.
Thirdly, Citizens United. In 2010, a conservative Supreme Court gave wealthy corporations the power to finance more conservative politicians with their vast wealth. Five conservative Justices simply decreed corporations are people and thus have the same political rights! Thus, highly paid lobbyists regularly visit politicians, suggest and even write laws they should vote for, and direct campaign funds to those who agree. And if politicians don't go along with their ideas, then they just might find re-election money scarcer next time. Clearly, such a feudalistic and narrow judicial and economic system is perverting and weakening a more liberal democratic agenda, and thus helping conservatives cling to their political power. Even though the people got the right to elect their senators in 1913, it’s basically remained a club for the wealthy; most of them are millionaires, and with Citizens United it will probably stay that way in many states.
And finally, there's the large conservative and moderate corporate mass media – the main educational tool and source of political information for millions of Americans. In fact, that situation was noticed in the 1920s, and it became even more obvious in TV news in the 1950s as it helped create fear of communism. On a daily basis TV news reached out into more than 50 million homes around the country. By contrast, only a million or so people were reading newspapers. Little wonder, then, even fifty years ago media journalists like the much respected Edward R. Murrow felt corporate profits kept TV news shows from better educating the public about important events going on in the economic and political world! Thus, they helped prevent people from making more intelligent political decisions at voting time. Anti-communist hysteria, for example, celebrated on TV and in newspapers all during the 1950s convinced most Americans the Vietnam War was necessary for our own national security and safety, even though it was over 10,000 miles away and posed absolutely no threat to US security and safety. The situation might be considered high comedy if the actual results of that war weren’t so pathetically heartbreaking and violently absurd. Before the days when useful public TV stations were created, like the Public Broadcasting System and the Internet, Murrow wrote:
We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the (political) affairs of the nation. ...
Let us dream ... that on a given Sunday night (an hour will be) given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education, and a week or two later ... to a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East. ...
... unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television ... is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us (from intelligent political debate), then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture (of life) ...
(Civil War general) Stonewall Jackson ... is reported to have said, ‘When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.’ The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival. (Lend Me Your Ears, 2004 ed., 776-78; additions are my own)
Murrow was himself fired by CBS for daring to speak out and verbally criticize his own employers. To allow such ideas, as well as his liberal criticisms of radical conservatives like Senator Joe McCarthy, would simply have lost too many corporate sponsors who were making money from Cold War defense spending at the time. Nothing new, really. For thousands of years feudalistic conservative leaders have been creating an endless list of enemies to fight, and wars to keep their populations limited and their incomes flowing.
More recent political and economic events are once again breathing new air into Morrow’s word ‘survival’? The word refers to democracy itself, and the power to convert popular will and desire into real political results! For decades now, these 4 conservative political tools have often stifled and manipulated that will. Of course during the Vietnam War conservatives like Vice-President Spiro Agnew lashed out at the media for being much too critical of President Nixon, for continuing the Vietnam War, for example. Not all newspapers are conservative, or all TV stations either. In fact, the brutal and vicious Vietnam War was the first to be brought into American homes with TV. But, not many news reporters dared do more than merely show footage of it. To voice an opinion against it was considered not only inappropriate, but un-American as well.
For us liberal democrats, accurate and reliable information is essential for promoting intelligent debating and voting decisions; accurate and reliable information rests at democracy’s very heart, and so they too will be practiced on a regular basis in liberal schools, homes, and churches everywhere.
With the corporate take-over of much of our TV news and information shows, the so-called ‘dumbing-down’ of the American public continues even today. Much of our corporate owned TV news shows continue convincing people the Democrats and Republicans are locked in a never-ending debate that gets nowhere and does nothing. Even Sunday news show hosts continue mainly asking politicians about what they think of some issue, like increasing taxes on the wealthy, and after responding in vague and general ideas, then goes on to ask another question. Rarely do hosts ask what exactly do they mean, and to clarify the abstract words they speak with. What evidence do they have for their opinions about higher taxes on the wealth hurting the economy? Without that kind of questioning and debate, even such important political shows remain merely a stream of abstract and general ideas; as Edward de Vere might say: … full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing. Even when opponents offer some objective evidence against their ideas, hosts allow them to simply deny its reality and go on to criticizing their opponents.
What’s more, to save on production costs and increase their profits, so-called reality shows have become more popular on network TV. Millions of people seem to enjoy watching people eat bugs, run around different parts of world, watch contestants answer trivial questions with trivial answers, and gawk at a large number of police shows sponsored by car, cosmetic, and drug companies. Psychologists have known this for decades already: High interest shows and emotion-based advertising promote higher profits!
As we’ve seen before, advertisers’ job is to make people feel they need the product being shown by the attractive woman or handsome man; such images promote emotional identification. Young folks too want to be attractive and handsome, but meantime viewers remain disconnected from what corporations are doing around the world merely for profits! For example, ultra-conservative David Koch has helped sponsor a series of science programs about Australia's 4 billion year geologic history, while ignoring how Australia’s fossil fuels burnt today are slowly helping wreck our entire planet’s biosphere, where we all live! Mr. Koch’s father Fred became a wealthy multimillionaire in the 1930s from Russian oil, and then helped found the ultra-conservative, rabidly anti-communist, John Birch Society in 1958, eventually even accusing Republican President Eisenhower of being a communist! If there isn’t a category of Absurd Political Comedy somewhere in all those awards shows, there certainly should be! Apparently no idea is too ridiculous for some politicians.
More recently, however, Birch’s radical ideas have become much more mainstream conservative. In what way? Well, these days they just want to disband the entire Federal Reserve Bank System! And Koch’s 2 billionaire sons reportedly tried to buy 8 major daily newspapers recently, to help spread their conservative ideas, including the once liberal and highly respected Los Angeles Times. The deal has since fallen through for the time being, with the help of the press, but the trend of conservative media control will, no doubt, continue on. Delivering consumers to corporate products, and moderating public opinion remain important network media goals. Much freer to reflect life is the viewer supported cable network shows.
Modern Political Issues
In liberal high schools, students will be freer to both learn and debate such ideas about the world they’re entering. Debate remains crucially important for political health in any government system. For example, should taxpayers continue allowing their money to support, say, a huge wasteful military-industrial system where $500 toilet seats, $700 hammers, and multi-billion dollar aircraft are paid for even when not wanted, while millions are homeless and unemployed and student debt is at all-time record highs? And if not, then how can we liberals become better organized to deny the government that power? As we’ve seen earlier, over 600 billion taxpayer dollars goes every year into that military system, and yet how the money is spent remains almost completely unknown to taxpayers, much less high school students!
In liberal public schools, students will begin feeling what a healthy democracy is like, and how to more easily find out what tax money is being spent for, and who is getting it! They’re also be freer to organize and demand a stronger voice in saying how their taxes are spent! That power may take the US to the next democratic level of political evolution. Our present feudalistic political system is still designed to keep people out of the public spending loop, so to speak, and thus keep people separated from the fruits of their labor, much as been happening for thousands of years around the world, all in the name of national security, of course. Meantime, personal fortunes keep growing astronomically large and be used to control political actions.
In liberal public schools students will be freer to keep asking their fellow students if such huge sums of money are needed to protect us from a few deranged would-be bombers, who are often convinced by religious leaders dying for religious purposes is the highest form of death. Such questions will help remind everyone feudalistic systems of government continue operating to this day. For those who want to read a very informative article about pentagon waste, fraud, and economic abuse of taxpayers, please see the Mother Jones issue of January-February, 2014. Building more democratic habits in our public schools, homes, and churches will no doubt be important baby-steps helping improve our present closed and wealth-dominated feudalistic political system.
Improving That System
Liberal public schools are a very important part of that process. In them students are taught democratic respect and equal rights should be given to all peaceful and constructive law-abiding people, not just certain social tribes. In fact, liberal public schools can start teaching intelligent democratic habits and skills even in the primary grades, thus building their values and feelings! They are, in fact, the means for fulfilling and sustaining democracy’s great ideals of equality or opportunity and equal rights for all. Why should, say, wealthy students have more freedom to go to college than students from lower economic classes? That system is feudalistic, not democratic. No doubt, voter turnout even in major elections reflects how weak democratic habits still are in our schools. And, through 17 years of my own schooling not one class was devoted to even talking about liberal democratic schools, where students have the freedom and respect to study what they want, or even learn how to use student power democratically to keep making their neighborhoods and cities more satisfying for everyone. For example, the important student anti-war protests in the 1960s and ‘70s were mainly on the college level, and involved mainly a minority of students that could be drafted and sent to die in Vietnam, while believing they were defending the US from communist attack! Mostly, public school students were taught to obey and believe what they were told. As a result, military brutality, as well as racial and sexual discrimination too, remained rife in society and the world. In effect, public school student voices were kept out of the political loop, so to speak. Even after they were drafted into a feudalistic military world they had no Constitutional rights of free speech or equal rights. Such conservative public schools treated students as if they had no right to even think about what peace, democratic health, respect for others, and equal rights are all about. On the other hand, liberal public schools are intentionally designed to politically empower students, not keep them isolated and politically powerless.
Thus, for us Deweyan liberals, the sooner such democratic ideals become a part of public school life, the sooner those ideals will become something more than mere ink on constitutional paper or ancient history. We liberals in the US are already on the way to building such a democratic political system, but without liberal public schools to keep teaching such skills to the next generation, democracy itself can quickly wither and die. Merely a brief glance at how our public schools continue ignoring such skills and knowledge should be enough evidence for anyone.
Our conservative religious systems too keep working against the growth of democratic ideals. For example, many are still telling millions of people today not to feel kindness about sharing their marriage rights equally with same-sex couples! They’re told only their personal habits are eternal and unchangingly True, right, and good, and democratic equal rights are not god’s word.
As powerful and forceful as these conservative systems are, all is certainly not lost; far from it. The result is to keep making adult life more interesting and challenging. Lately, liberals are becoming better at challenging conservative power, especially since the Great Recession of 2007-09. More people are seeing it as yet another episode on our on-going political soap-opera. The liberal Progressive movement gained national power in the early 1900s, in the 1930s, in the 1960s, and more recently. Each time important new improvements were made. For example, one important media event opposing corporate network control occurred in the 1960s, with the creation of a socialistic tax-supported Public Broadcasting System! It was freer to do more in-depth reporting. Liberals like Bill Moyers, and shows like The News Hour, continue educating millions of people today. Despite conservative calls to end it, PBS continues educating the public on a more thorough and in-depth level than most network news shows. Such public shows and their reporting of reliable events here and now keep many conservatives edgy at least, and worried at most. Such shows keep exposing conservative actions, actions which they would prefer to remain out of public view and behind closed doors, so to speak, to keep profits flowing. Such behind-the-scenes actions best maintain a kind of social status quo, rather than democratic diversity! In that respect, however, they are working against nature’s 4 billion year record of diversity itself, as Mr. Koch’s own series demonstrates!
Also, since the 1960s, a very powerful electronic Internet teaching tool has been created in what’s called cyberspace. So far it remains beyond corporate control, but no doubt they would like more control over it. Millions of people around the world are reporting the sometimes disastrous results to corporate actions, like the death of poorly paid clothing workers in dangerous buildings overseas; many work for pennies-a-day while retail corporations sell their products for hundreds of dollars in the States.
Needless to say, that new electronic medium is proving to be a crucially important democratic educational tool, available to most anyone. With it dangerous corporate actions around the world are becoming more easily known and responded to. In fact, without its help, this book would be far less informative and widespread than it is. With that Internet system even students can go to websites and get accurate information on just about any subject, especially the important economic and political actions merely mentioned in network news programs. Thanks to the Internet and the many new liberal electronic news magazines, like Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now, Link TV, The Guardian, and Truthdig. com, millions of liberals, moderates, and independents are now becoming much better educated about conservative economic and political forces shaping our world on a daily basis. In turn, such information is better preparing liberals to oppose such actions. It’s also helping people know more about who to vote for, how to stay connected to their elected representatives, and where to join and stage important attention-getting protests, often reported on network news shows.
Even with such new liberal tools, however, without more liberal public schools, homes, and churches, the conservative agenda remains relatively easy to keep in place. Conservative education laws like No Child Left Behind are merely one example. Our public neighborhood schools remain an essentially important tool for building stronger democratic habits like voting, protesting, staying in contact with our representatives, and holding them accountable for increasing the public good and democratic equal rights. In such schools students learn politics is much more than voting once every 2 years; it’s a continuing and on-going habit throughout life. After all, wealthy conservatives have been practicing their educational habits for thousands of years, and so know how they work. Still, more people are realizing great wealth often isolates people psychically from the social sources of their wealth. It’s one reason Ayn Rand’s novels are so popular for conservatives; in them poor people and the lower classes are almost non-existent; psychically they don’t exist. Thus, it’s easy to see them as a menace to their own conservative power given to them by nature.
In more liberal public schools, however, such an aristocratic psychic separation becomes more difficult, with community service projects, for example. In any case, such schools are not something evolving automatically or by some innate natural law of progress, as even some old Marxists might still believe. For we liberal Deweyans who feel at home in an always-changing nature, there is no final state of political evolution. There is only the continuing, on-going, eternal challenge to keep making life more enjoyable and satisfying for everyone.
In such liberal schools, students will also learn more about how to keep making our own system more democratic and enjoyable. For example, students can begin feeling how many universities are still feudalistic in nature. As we’ve seen before, many Boards of Trustees were merely appointed by people with political power, and thus are often more dedicated to preserving the educational status quo and the flow of endowment funds than anything else. Students in liberal schools will thus more easily accept the challenge to build more democratic universities and colleges, where students and teachers have equal decision-making power on those Boards. In more liberal public schools students will learn not merely to keep accepting rulings and declarations from unelected people, but rather keep working to make them share their decision-making power more equally. Such students know there should be more to our universities than merely building a multi-billion dollar investment endowment. More democratic decision-making on those Boards of Trustees will keep equalizing educational freedom for everyone, not just for a privileged few. Many such Boards arbitrarily keep raising student tuition costs, fees, faculty and administrative salaries, much of which students pay for. In a more liberal democratic system, however, there are more important goals than merely educating the wealthy and increasing student debt for everyone else, much of which will go, once again, to the already powerful financial sector, better known as Wall Street.
No doubt, not all high school students will focus on learning all about our political system, with its weaknesses and possible solutions. But if students start learning about just one of them, it might increase their actions for building a better system. Some students may decide to work in voter registration, and some in overturning Citizens United, but either way the liberal democratic movement continues growing. In liberal public schools such work will be at least as important as football or basketball games. And the more parents become organized and begin demanding such school studies and activities to taught, the easier it becomes to keep making our nation itself more democratic and satisfying for everyone! What better gift can such parents, students, and teachers give to all future students than to create such democratic schools and universities? After all, institutions live on, not people. Before they graduate, such high school studies will make it easier to working and voting for a more democratic system all throughout life. They’ll know better what ideas to support and which to reject, knowledge lacking all too often in the next generation.
The feudalistic political field remains wide and in operation to this day. For example, should our representatives allow our powerful corporations to be largely uncontrolled and unregulated, or should they be better regulated? If so, then in what ways? How much are teachers and administrators getting paid, and what possible economic results might their contracts produce? Nowadays students still go through their public school career and never realize their own schools are a part of the political system; they’re paid for with public taxes and so learning more about them is a good way to continue building important healthy political habits. In such schools students and parents will more easily know what their public servants are doing their tax money. Are they just working to keep the educational status quo in place, or helping make it more liberal? Why should such knowledge, skills, and freedom be kept from any student who wants to learn more about it?
Are local teacher unions respecting public tax monies with their contracts, or are they too out to get as much as they can, as quickly as they can? Such important questions and information are the foundation for all healthy liberal democratic schools, whether public or private, and they’re certainly much more important than merely learning more abstract and irrelevant academic facts and ideas. We liberals say citizens should help empower student governments with real political power rather than merely helping plan proms, pep rallies, school dances, and Arbor Day tree plantings. On the contrary, student and school government should be free and open to any student at any time of the day, and to start learning more about the adult world they will, with luck, one day soon enter.
Also, at this 3rd level of political development, students in liberal public schools will be freer to see the personal and social results of conservative education laws like No Child Left Behind and Common Core Standards! Those conservative laws affect student day-to-day actions, and so are extremely important and relevant. They too are political events affecting millions of students today. Are they really anti-democratic; do they keep forcing both teachers and students to treat mere academic facts as educational gods, to be worshipped and obeyed above all else! Are they merely the result of a still weak democratic social system, where parents, students, and teachers have limited knowledge and thus limited political power to better control their own neighborhood schools? In a healthy democratic society people have a fundamental right to say how their taxes should be spent! Without that right, school becomes similar to paying a doctor or lawyer to say what they think clients should do, without knowing what’s medically or legally best! Again, such a system is feudalistic, not democratic.
We’ve seen a little of the so-called Charter School system earlier, in Section 34, but it has yet to be used to build more liberal democratic schools on a wide basis. No doubt, the more parents and students learn more about a more liberal democratic educational system, the easier it’ll be to start experimenting on their own. Obviously, no one can accurately predict what such schools will look and act like everywhere, but that very fact makes the work dramatic, challenging, adventuresome, and rewarding. In any case, in such liberal public schools, democratic kinds of health will certainly become a much greater reality than they are now. Students, for example, will have more power to continue increasing constructive projects in their own communities, and thus end school-community isolation. In such schools children will begin feeling how active, vibrant, robust, and interesting learning can be when they’re allowed to democratically build their habits of intelligent choice, and experimental learning habits.
Some Final Thoughts
Democratic health itself is people becoming more intelligently involved with their own communities, cities, states, and nation. For example, at the local level, how many slum landlords are keeping people poor with high rents while living in unsanitary buildings, and how can that situation be improved? Who’s dealing dangerous drugs making life much more self-destructive than it should be, and how can they help such dealers become better educated about promoting the public good with more intelligent habits and skills? What students have psychological weaknesses and excessive habits?
The sooner students begin feeling how a healthy democracy works best with concerned, informed, and caring people, the sooner their own lives can become safer and more productive. If we think merely having students read in some civics book about how laws are passed and the Constitution amended, and that’s all they’ll need to know about democratic health and excellence, then we practice the same kind of conservative education model that’s produced dangerous and undemocratic habits for thousands of years. The sooner students learn healthy and intelligent democratic habits, the sooner they’ll begin feeling their own power to help make life more rewarding for everyone. More students will ask, for example, shouldn’t more public money be available for building homeless shelters where people can start learning useful skills and knowledge? Or should we continue allowing fundamentalist religious orgs to get public tax money and keep yelling at the homeless every night to repent and come back to a god they know nothing about? Down through history conservative upper class people have liked such feudal systems; such ideas kept them in power and the lower uneducated classes controlled and dominated. Such political questions about their own neighborhoods will become much more deeply felt in more liberal schools. In truth, with their taxes people gain a right and duty to become equal partners in improving the public good, and will if enough people demand it.
For thousands of years undereducated, passive, and accepting people have continued allowing others to spend and use the fruits of their labor as they saw fit, not as the workers saw fit. In the Middle Ages it was justified with religious ideas of absolute Truth. Has we evolved since those days? Today, millions of taxpayers keep allowing their elected representatives to keep taking hundreds of billions of dollars from them and use them to keep building weapons and bombs, now justified with equally vague and abstract ideas like national security, freedom, and liberty. The ideas have changed, not the systems.
As a result, human history itself has remained largely a series of brutal and vicious wars between equally conservative feudalistic systems. We liberals are now seeing the possibility for growing much more intelligent and healthy political habits, and also for reducing, with a more intelligent tax system, the power of a small class of people to keep controlling the wealth and lives of most everyone else. About 12% of the nation’s wealth is now merely sitting in a few big banks while people are thrown out of their homes for lack of work, and our homeless and prison populations continue growing. Why should people keep giving their tax dollars without having a say in how they’re spent? Improving such a feudal and undemocratic political system remains a challenge for liberals everywhere.
We Deweyan liberals say, the more we students psychically young and naïve about how our political system works, and how it can be improved, the more difficult it becomes to build a democratic nation. So, let’s start empowering our young folks to live more intelligently in the world they’re about to enter. Isn’t it time we brought such intelligent and healthy democratic habits into our own public schools, where children are challenged from an early age to start thinking more about what they want to become, what they want to learn, what’s going on outside of school, and how they can keep improving it?
Teaching such healthful and intelligent democratic skills in our public schools remains another new and modern educational challenge. To some it may sound like too high a mountain to climb, but to others the time has come to start climbing one small step at a time. After all, only people can improve all our still conservative feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems, and build stronger democratic habits in the next generation. No doubt, those are exactly the kind of schools conservatives don’t want, but peoples’ taxes alone entitle them to at least an equal share in deciding how that money is spent. If our political leaders rely on debate and consensus to plan out what’s best for everyone, then why shouldn’t such skills also be practiced by public school students? Why continue denying them the right to learn democratically healthy habits? We have only our own feudalistic institutions to improve. One health insurance CEO at Signa Health Corporation, for example, is reported to make over $10 million a year without ever treating one patient! Clearly, something is drastically wrong with such an economic system. Meanwhile health costs keep rising for everyone, even the poorest. Why shouldn’t the people whose work helped pay that salary also have the power to say how much it should be taxed and used for the public good?
When Thomas Jefferson created the University of Virginia as a secular public school, he helped better unite students with to the real world around them, rather than continue being dominated by religious leaders celebrating their conservative status quo. For secular and Epicurean Jefferson, such a school was the best way democracy could keep growing and getting stronger, by producing a little peaceful and intelligent revolution every few decades. Dewey simply extended those active and intelligent secular ideas to our public schools; he saw democratic health as the result of educating everyone to practice intelligent and healthful democratic habits of choice. Liberals like myself say it’s time to end all such weak and undemocratic school systems; should no students have any individual rights to learn such habits in our public schools? Have they no right to life, liberty, and happiness?
We liberals say people should no longer believe their children will magically acquire, overnight at age 18, strong habits of physical, psychological, economic, political, and healthy character habits without ever practicing them in our public schools! How many hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed in needless wars since Jefferson’s day because such liberal habits of health were weak and ineffective? How can we have a healthy democracy when so little in the way of practicing those habits are encouraged in our own public schools, homes, and churches? Brutal criminal gang activity, greedy economic crime, from Wall Street to Main Street, and drug abuse throughout the nation are objective evidence: our schools, churches, and homes could be helping actively teach more young folks those 4 liberal interrelated kinds of health, helping people become more honest, law-abiding, joyful, and creative! If intelligent habits of liberty, freedom, and intelligent individuality are signs of democratic health, then they must be actively practiced, and the sooner the better.
40. HOW DO WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE?
What Should Our Schools Look Like?
We begin this book’s last section by answering that 2nd question with ideas from both
conservatives and liberals.
Even though conservatives have been preaching the idea of small non-regulating government
since the nation was founded, since 2,000 they have passed major legislation in
Washington working to control more of what students learn and thus what they
think. Many so-called neo-conservatives believe our public school systems
should be even more centralized, regimented, and make students learn more
abstract academic ideas in history, language, math, and science. In essence, it’s a book-centered model, rather than a student-centered model.
Conservatives have also worked to make students take more standardized tests about those abstract
ideas, justifying those ideas with the hope of getting well-paying jobs after college. What’s more, many neo-cons continue ignoring the important relationship between school and many of our unhealthful social problems, like gang violence, youth unemployment, crime, drug abuse, and the rapidly rising costs of a college education. No doubt, many may even admit if we don’t continue building conservative public schools, then we won’t have enough soldiers to keep fighting our enemies both at home and around the
world. Students need to be taught obedience more than anything
else. And the recent Charter School movement has focused on weakening
teach union strength by privatizing more schools and keeping teachers who
continue to teach an essentially conservative program of abstract ideas to
students, many of whom neither want nor need to know such facts, thus ignoring
around 70% of students who don’t go to college.
In opposition to all those ideas stands John Dewey’s liberal model of
education. Even though conservatives have been rigging our public
school systems to support their ideas, and thus giving people the experience of
only one educational model, we liberal Deweyans continue offering a very
different educational model, one based on student needs, rather than book
publisher needs. In such schools children are given a choice about what
practical skills and knowledge they want to learn, while also getting some
valuable training in character development as well as building healthy physical,
psychological, economic, and political skills. In such schools education
becomes much more practical and community-based, rather than keeping students
isolated from their own neighborhoods.
Some Results of Conservative Educational Dominance
Some results in the liberal community have been rather depressing in our current economic chaos and feudalistic present. Not only have many liberals given up on even talking about what
more liberal schools can look like, but have continued focusing on other
democratic challenges. Instead, we more optimistic liberals keep
hearing on our public news stations how bad things are in our public schools,
about our many social problems here at home, and about brutal events happening
around the world, events most people can do little to improve. It’s as if
they’re purposely trying to depress people when public morale is already low and
might go even lower. The overall result is to deflect people from thinking
about how to actually build more liberal public schools. . It’s as
if liberals have completely divorced themselves psychically from any kind of
constructive educational critique.
For example, some people keep telling us our public schools can only get better if the great
economic gap between rich and poor is reduced! Only then will people have
more money to better educate their children to succeed in our conservative
public schools. Although well-intentioned, such talk ignores the basic 3
stages of student development, and how until high school students really don’t
have the mental equipment to use abstract knowledge outside of school, and thus
not learn all they could be learning to live more intelligently in the adult
world. Around the country I keep hearing scattered reports of teachers or
parents refusing to comply with many conservative educational ideas, like
NCLB. No doubt, that’s encouraging news for us liberal Deweyans,
however, supplying the public with genuine educational options, useful in both
poor and rich communities, is the first real and MOST intelligent step towards
building more liberal public schools, and thus reducing the feudalistic
educational, economic, and political systems we still have today!
A recent article by the noted liberal journalist and Public Television reporter Bill
Moyers is a good example of what I mean. I certainly mean no disrespect; I
admire almost all of his work, but merely criticizing our many political and
educational weaknesses, like he does in a recent Truthdig.com article of
12-12-13, is like hiding his head in the educational sand. He doesn’t want
to look around and talk about what liberal parents, students, and teachers can
do here and now to build more liberal student-centered schools. After all,
if someone doesn’t contribute some positive ideas about education, then what
good is mere criticism?
Mr. Moyer’s article does a great job of ignoring educational solutions to our many
social weaknesses, as if public schools have absolutely no power to sharp more
healthful student habits. Martin Luther King Jr. described the vision of a
promised land here on earth, and told us it’s a place where people will be
judged by the character actions, but unless that poetically abstract idea is
embodied in public school character studies, then any such idea will be that
much harder to become reality. Such liberal thinking makes us
Deweyan liberals wonder if our movement is now suffering from a lack of creative
thinking and constructive actions! Such weaknesses are certainly not
the formula for education success in further weakening our feudalistic
institutions and building a stronger democracy.
Mr. Moyer’s quotes some people who continue whining
about the present declining health of democracy in the US. For
example, he quotes liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan:
“We do not have justice, equal and
practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally
accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for
alienated youth, for the urban masses … Ugly inequities continue to mar the face
of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the
struggle.”
And earlier in the article he lists many of the same social facts of
inequality I’ve been droning on about all through these pages. But,
surprisingly, there it ends. Like so many other journalists today, he
merely paints a dark picture of our many challenges, but then leaves it
there. He offers people no real educational choices and options for
building more liberal public schools and their power to liberate student
energies to build more democratic habits in the next generation. For us
liberal Deweyans, neglecting a liberal public school option is neither wise nor
intelligent, especially when Dewey wrote books about such liberal educational
options and choices about a century ago!
Even worse, Mr. Moyers certainly isn’t the only liberal neglecting positive liberal educational models and ideas. Even conservative Libertarians who love talking about freedom and liberty, cut
students out of that loop as well. And we saw earlier in Section 1,
even some liberals are becoming more pessimistic about improving all our
feudalistic conservative social systems with the help of more liberal public
schools, and building a healthier democratic society based on character
excellence, rather than skin color or religion. Hey, we’re all just
people, aren’t we? Again, it’s as if more liberal schools are
completely out of the improvement loop, and are completely
irrelevant. The more parents, students, and teacher reject that
idea, the easier it becomes to start building those kinds of schools.
As I’ve been showing throughout this book, our public schools in every neighborhood are not
only not irrelevant, but are, in fact, essential to any kind of on-going
democratic personal, economic, and political forms of health. In large
part, because education history has been almost completely ignored in our
history books, people continue believing their own public schools aren’t really
an important part of building and maintaining a healthy
democracy. It’s another result of allowing others to select
the books their own children are reading.
No doubt, homes and churches are important education tools too, but until more
liberal schools are built, our democracy remains much more feudalistic than
people might at first think is the case. Where are the history books
drawing parallels between the Middle Ages and today’s world?
So, we continue suffering through a world where
wealth is still controlled by a small upper class, and where a political system
is aimed at making them even wealthier. In truth, however, the more
building liberal public schools is ignored, the easier it becomes for even
liberals to feel as if our so-called democratic republic has already seen its
Golden Age in the early 1900s, and after which conservatives have built an
unchangeable system. It certainly looks as if democratic health has
been eroding on all those social levels, as the rich have gotten richer, learned
how to control more politicians, and keep building a conservative public school
system. But, to us liberals, such events merely define the challenges to
be overcome, not the inevitable fate of all mankind. Such feelings are
encouraged every day in liberal schools, where students have more power to
control more of their lives.
Make no mistake, conservatives have built impressive social systems for increasing their own wealth; the recent looting of public money during 2008-09 is merely one example of that power. What’s
more, our money-obsessed corporate upper class is helping create more enemies
around the world to keep our nation in a state of perpetual warfare, thus
helping increase their profits from public taxes to build more
weapons. Such challenges are real and powerful, but when in the past
5,000 years has there not been thousands of reasons for liberals to feel
pessimistic? Mr. Moyers, for example, quotes the ancient Roman
historian Plutarch (46 – 126 CE) who bemoaned the fact of his wealthy upper
class continuing to control the Roman republic’s political system and keep
making themselves even richer!
What person couldn’t go on about such events all day long, but us Deweyan liberals say it’s
time to start building more liberal democratic, student-centered schools in this
country. They’re the best long-term antidote to all our present
conservative educational, political, and economic feudalistic
systems. So, we come to the crucially important question: how
might such schools be built? Should they be built at the local level by
organized concerned and caring people, or should we continue waiting for enough
national politicians to resist all the economic pressure from status quo
conservatives to start passing more liberal education laws, and helping build
liberal schools? No doubt, the more people become organized to start
building more liberal student-centered schools, the more our national
politicians will jump on board that democratic train, so to speak.
Reform From the Top Down?
No doubt, some rather lazy liberals may feel such schools should be built from the top down, so to
speak. They may feel our federal government must begin building such
schools, and if they don’t, then trying to build them on the local level will be
almost impossible. After all, our entire public school system, with over
50,000 schools and thousands of Charter Schools, are just too many to convert by
local liberal groups, especially in the poor neighborhoods of our great
cities. And not only that, but how can democracy’s foundational ideal of
equal rights and opportunities for all be respected and kept growing when
schools remain controlled by local officials, and often teacher unions remain
satisfied with the conservative educational status quo? No
doubt, many conservative want nothing better than to tell voters in 2014 and
2016 how Democrats are incapable of governing the country and building a healthy
economy, but with the growth of educational freedom and Charter schools, the
educational power at the local level has increased greatly. They have made
it easier for people at the local level to start making their own neighborhood
schools more liberal and enjoyable places for students to learn and
work.
One model for reform at the local level is the early 1900s Progressive Movement itself. If
thousands of local farmers in Texas and other western states didn’t get better
organized and start demanding the government help better control greedy railroad
CEOs, so they could more cheaply ship their crops to market, Teddy Roosevelt
would probably never even have bothered to talk about busting monopolistic
corporations like railroad companies. What’s more, in Washington D.C.
there now exists a very polarized conservative-liberal national law-making
system, where radical conservatives are fighting to block any kind of liberal
growth and change as much and as often as they can. Little wonder,
confidence in our national representatives remains a little higher than 10%, and
might be even lower for helping build the kind of schools described in these
pages! Such facts help us believe the best place to start building more
liberal public schools is at the local level, and the best time is here and
now. At that level, students, teachers, religious leaders, and especially
business people can all be included in that process. At the local
level, maintaining a high level of personal interaction with all segments of
society becomes easiest, and such interaction is best for building any kind of
local improvement.
In short, federal lawmakers may be useful, but not necessary. True, after the French
Revolution and the borders of many nations became more or less fixed, national
politicians began experimenting with more centralized school systems, like
Germany, Russia, Japan and China. Centrally-controlled Chinese schools too
are currently turning out more engineers than any other country; no doubt, part
of it’s because they have a centralized school system. But for us liberal
Deweyans, relying on federal help merely weakens the will to start building such
schools here and now. As history tells us, those nations were often more
interested in regimenting young students, rather than liberating them from
feudalistic systems. Economic class differences are growing both here and
around the world, as are conservative governments. Even going back to
emperor days, China was more interested in regimenting its next generation to
accept all its feudalistic systems, rather than teach liberal democratic habits.
No doubt, before the US Civil War, a more liberal centralized school system
would have helped educate more students about democratic equal rights, and how
all law-abiding people should have them, including Africans. But it just
wasn’t practically possible before the Civil War; the South had too many
conservative representatives in Congress for that to happen, as well as too many
racists at the local level. In the 1980s many conservatives told
people the federal government was too big and even the entire Department of
Education should be eliminated! The idea was alive in Ronald Reagan's
administration with his Secretary of Education Bill Bennett! But NCLB
showed us such ideas were more talk than action.
In fact, real education improvement can happen at the local level IF ENOUGH PEOPLE
WANT IT! Right in their local neighborhoods people already have the
democratic power to start building more liberal student-centered democratic
schools. Once people at the local level get beyond the conservative idea
of mere high test scores and grades being the ultimate education goals, then
building more liberal schools becomes almost downhill from there.
Here’re some more encouraging words about action at the local level. On 4-6-1997, over 5
years before NCLB was signed into law by conservative President George W, Bush,
the Los Angeles Times carried an article by Stanford University education
professor Larry Cuban, questioning the power of centralized education laws to
increase test scores. He wrote:
“This (national) campaign rests on two assumptions. First, public schools’
productivity, as measured by test scores, will spur the larger economy.
Second, poor US (test) results (grow) from a lack of national standards and
tests. Both assumptions are false; corporate and public officials have
pointed to Japan’s and Germany’s schooling as the model. Yet, consider
what has occurred in the l990s. National productivity (in the US) has
risen. The US economy has outperformed both Germany’s and Japan’s.
Unemployment and inflation are lower than in the 1980s. But no awards have
been handed out to public schools.
The bogus connection between (conservative) public schools and economic conditions becomes
glaring when the spotlight shifts from public schools to university
research. Century-old ties between federal and corporate funding of
university scientists have led to the development of commercial products,
medical advances, and defense technology. Such products starkly reveal how
critical university research has been to the larger economy, and how phony it is
to connect students’ test scores to lowered economic productivity (and test
scores).
The (second) flawed assumption -- US
students do less well on international tests because we lack national curriculum
standards and tests (like NCLB) -- shows up most clearly in the recent reporting
of the Third International Math and Science Study for 7th and 8th graders.
Japanese and French students, for example, whose countries have national
ministries and centrally driven standards and tests, scored significantly higher
in math than their US counterparts. Few pundits, however, noted the
contradictions.
Other countries with national
curricula and tests -- England, Norway, Israel, and Spain -- ranked the same as
the US in math. Thirteen year olds from Switzerland, Australia, and
Canada, who come from decentralized systems much like the US, also scored
significantly higher than students from countries with ministry-driven
curricula.
When science scores are examined,
France’s and Spain’s, which have heavily centralized curriculum, fell
significantly below students in the US. Students from New Zealand, Canada,
and Switzerland -- all lacking national curricula and tests -- did just as well
as students from countries with strong national direction for local
schools” (parentheses and emphases are added)
So, even before NCLB was passed there wasn’t any
evidence it would work to even raise test scores, much less better educate
students for living in a democratic capitalist country! There was no
real evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between national standards and
actual test scores. In short, as Dewey clearly saw, educational excellence
depends on whether schools are helping students satisfy their own educational
quest for personal health at the local level, and not on a conservative
book-centered national system of tests, laws, and regulations. So again,
the main challenge for liberal school reformers remains teaching all students
how our 4 basic liberal kinds of health can be used for living well in a
democratic capitalistic society! For Dewey, learning those kinds of
excellence depend on a number of unique and special local conditions here and
now in each local neighborhood! Those local conditions are what make
teaching both a science and an art. It’s a science when based on
individual student needs, and it’s an art because every student is an
individual, with different needs and wants!
Obviously our federal government can help build such a system, like it helped
build a first-rate system of state universities in the 1800s, like Texas A &
M. Today many thousands of native and foreign students study at
them. What's more, federal money also helps finance research
projects at them, like the first self-sustaining atomic reaction built at the
University of Chicago in 1942. But, again, in today’s political world
where wealthy conservatives can control re-election purse strings, liberal
reform at that level is often difficult to occur. As we saw in 2010,
merely one election can change political power from liberal to conservative, and
thus change a national public school reform
effort.
Once again, we see the importance of people at the local level working to build such
schools. No doubt, many parents, students, and teachers are still
undereducated about liberal school options, but the more they keep working
together with the ideas in this book, the sooner such schools will become a
working reality. In them students won’t be intimidated with
promotions and grades to keep learning more academic trivia, or realize such
threats are merely words as they get promoted whether they learn the material or
not. In fact, many school districts don’t have the money to keep retaining
all those students who haven’t learned what they were told to learn.
Many districts now have a standardized test for high school
graduation. It’s currently the state policy in California, and for
the 08-09 school year a little over 43,000 students hadn’t passed both the math
and English tests, while less than 400,000 did pass them. That’s a pretty
good pass-rate, but it still leaves many in a system already over-crowded and
underfunded. Thus social promotion becomes a reality.
The liberal good news remains this: such conservative book-centered schools are certainly not eternal and unchanging; they are merely habitual ways of educating students, and so can be best improved
slowly, one grade at a time, and one year at a time. In other words,
educational improvement can happen, in spite of all the obstacles. Slow
and steady wins the race. Leonardo worked for about 5 years painting
the Mona Lisa and he was one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all
time! Knowing such facts about habit improvement and the great important
of planning, helps make any constructive process more intelligent and easier to achieve.
In a world such as ours, a fact of life many people don’t like to accept is this: only might makes
right! In one form or another, whether it's military of democratic might,
only might can make right. Once the intelligent idea of democratic might
is accepted, then it becomes easier to keep organizing enough people at the
local level to start building more liberal schools. In a healthy
democracy the intelligent might of people-power is the key to keeping
progressive change alive and growing. That fact alone explains why
conservatives have purposely kept poor people ignorant, unorganized, and feeling
helpless in life. Such pessimistic, defeatist, and helpless feelings
are exactly what conservatives in power want people to feel. Upon
such feelings was built all feudalistic societies for the past 5,000 years!
How Can Such Schools Be Built, I Mean Besides Very Carefully?
And so we come to this section’s key question: How
can such schools best be built? No doubt, the first step is the most
important: Organizing enough parents, students, teachers, and especially
retired folks to begin making a plan for 1st grade students, and then begin
testing it on those students. In other words, step by step life’s a
cinch. It’s really not necessary to have a detailed 8 or 12 year plan for
a school system. When students are brought into a new system it’s best to
bring them in one grade at a time. That way there’ll be much less
confusion and stress on teachers and students. And as they go through the
more liberal system, students can also help younger students learn some of the
important ideas they’ve already learned, like intelligent experimental learning,
and useful character habits. Also, building such schools one year at a
time allows parents and students to focus on building a simple plan; they’re
always better than complex plans. Before students even step into a
classroom, teachers and mentors will already have a list of sense-based ideas they want to test.
Also, because these early grades are so important for success in the later years, it’s very
important to have enough teachers and mentors for students, somewhere, perhaps,
in the ratio of 4-5 students for every mentor or teacher. Then,
after a few years students themselves can become mentors to younger students,
especially those wanting to become teachers themselves. In such a plan the
retired community too can play a very active and long-term role. Their
experience, maturity, and humor will help young students learn important basic
skills, and also help keep seniors alert and involved.
With one year plans it also becomes much easier to
build the next year’s plan! Teachers and mentors will have more
ideas about what ideas and activities work best, and be able to keep building on
those. For example, parents may discover 1st grade students in northern
urban schools might like to sense certain winter activities like building snow
forts or having sled races. Then, as those activities become more
intelligent with student-made plans and experiments, they’ll begin learning
intelligent habits useful in their constructive years, like how to build fast
sleds and long lasting snow forts. It can also help prepare students
for, perhaps, building even small places for, say, neighborhood homeless people
to use who don’t like religious people yelling at them day after day to repent
and accept the lord.
What’s more, in much of the world, sled businesses are a good way to make some honest money,
help people get some healthful exercise, and help students become more
knowledgeable about the adult world they’ll soon enter. Won’t workshops be
needed to build such objects? In short, such intelligent flexible
planning one year at a time can make all the difference when building anything;
improving anything is almost always a process of seeing what works here and now,
and what doesn’t, and how to improve the product. So, the less time
is spent in planning what to experiment with, the more difficult it becomes to
actually build liberal schools. And, that brings us back to another
important question: what kinds of planning might happen before 1st grade
students ever step into a liberal classroom?
Again, at these first 3 years of sense-based learning, it becomes very important
to keep the student-mentor ratio as low as possible. Why? Well, in
liberal schools children will be asked to start learning many healthful habits
usually neglected in conservative public schools, like intelligent planning, how
to experiment, excellent character habits, job skills they want to learn, and
start thinking about community improvement projects too. In fact,
all through those first 10 years of school, the retired and professional
communities can remain a great help and asset for building such schools.
They all can help educate the next generation to live and work intelligently in
their communities. Retirees have the free time and the experience to
help young students begin feeling what a healthful and helpful community feels
like, and also help save scarce education funds for other important uses, like
materials and tools for workshops.
Older folks are important for teaching character habits too. Earlier I mentioned a student who tried to change a grade in my grade book, and then offered me money not to say anything about
it. However, when I did tell my Vice-Principal, the result seemed
much less than best. The student was simply expelled for a few days, but
how psychologically excellent was that, or worse, getting paddled?
The student needed ways of intelligently managing the stress and pressure for
grades he was getting at home, rather than merely being sent home to face more
stress and pressure for being expelled! Helping set up a psychology
lab in school would be much more useful for learning more healthful habits for
intelligently confronting parents obsessed with good grades or good looks or any
other parental obsession. Those with some psychology experience can
help students write a role-playing activity, and then practice it, to help
students learn what psychological health can feel like. The school I was
working at simply didn’t have the funds to build a character development shop,
where such students could go to talk with counselors about personal problems,
and practice more healthful habits like talking intelligently to parents who
often act like a little Napoleon or Hitler.
Without starting to learn more intelligent communication skills like that, parents remain dictators and students remain vulnerable to social pressure from anyone. Even in the 1st grade, students
can begin feeling school is a place where their weaknesses can be made stronger,
like simply telling someone they don’t accept their pressure, and if it
continues they’ll get some help in seeing it stops. After all,
even young students have rights like anyone else, don’t they; and if they don’t,
then shouldn’t they? How many elderly mentors would love to play the
role of a demanding parent, and thus help young students build a plan for
talking intelligently with their guardian? Doesn’t that sound like a
much more intelligent way of dealing with unhealthful habits, and start teaching
students about psychological health, rather than merely expelling
them? Expulsion still leaves students psychologically weak and
vulnerable, and worst of all, unable to prevent such stress and frustration from
growing and possibly exploding into violent and destructive actions later on.
Okay, so a planning team of parents, retirees, and older students is in place, and they
begin making a list of all the sense-based activities children might like to
feel during the school year. They can even break the plan down into
months, so seasonal events can be exploited. It might include eating
certain foods, training pet animals, sports, personal beauty, playing with
dolls, or just sitting and talking. Those are the kinds of sense-based
events the school can begin experimenting with in small student teams. How
such teams can be divided up might be by job preferences, or friend preferences,
and then ask students what they might like to see, feel, and know more
about. How many children have the same feelings, and can become a
learning team? After all, in the adult world team work is an important
skill in many ways. Within such common feelings it becomes easier to start
learning more important skills and knowledge about those feelings.
From there, mentors and teachers can begin expanding those likenesses with some imaginative, experimental, and creative questions. Do pet animals get sick; what do they eat; how do they
treat their babies, and so on? Then they can begin answering those
questions intelligently and experimentally. A team of student
chefs, for example, might want to start experimenting with other foods besides
the ones they like, cooking them and perhaps even growing some. A
team of flower lovers can start learning those same kinds of things, as can a
pet animal team, a computer team, or any team more than one student
likes. In that process not only will students begin feeling more in
control of their own lives, but parents too will feel how much of an adventure
it is just building such schools. After all, no one really knows what will
happen after testing starts.
In any case, the on-going challenge in such liberal
schools is to keep students interests and curiosity alive, growing, and
expanding while building intelligent learning skills like creative
experimentation and imaginative thinking, and all the many liberal learning
goals mentioned earlier. The whole atmosphere is to enjoy such
experimental learning, and make it as enjoyable as possible. In such teams
those students who like to talk will be encouraged, but not allowed to keep
dominating the conversation; other students should be encouraged to say how they
feel about what their team is learning, and if it’s fun and enjoyable. No
doubt, such teams will be flexible and flowing, as students from one team will
want to know what other teams are doing. In short, it’s an exploratory
period, but one in which intelligent kinds of exploration begin
growing.
On the first planning team, as many from the business and service community as possible
should be included. That way, children can begin hearing more about what
local firefighters, police officers, cooks, computer programmers, architects,
doctors, lawyers, and any other local professionals can tell them about life
outside of school. It would also be a great way for those people to
take a little break in their usual routines and help answer student questions
about their work. In short, these first 3 years of school are tremendously
important in so many ways; they help lay a healthful foundation for all the more
intelligent work to follow in their constructive and abstract periods.
Unlike quiet conservative schools, student freedom to talk is very important in liberal
schools. Each day, students can be encouraged to stand up and talk
about what their team has been working on, and what new feelings they’re getting
from their work. That way, students themselves will learn everyone’s
feelings are important. After all, our most important human habit,
intelligent and caring talking, began growing about 100,000 years ago, when
human speaking biology evolved to their present state. Such talk
helps liberate subconscious feelings so they become shared feelings, rather than
merely personal. When they’re not allowed to talk and express their
feelings, fears, and hopes, then psychological health itself becomes more
difficult. And when that happens, then intelligent problem-solving
habit-arts are more difficult to learn.
Already by the 1st grade, how many students have problems with their parents or siblings, and if so then
why not help them learn more about psychological health? If young folks
often feel like hurting other children or animals, then shouldn’t they be free
to talk more about those feelings, and how to build more intelligent
feelings? Not being able to freely talk about their feelings helps
make conservative public schools places where students are emotionally
disconnected from themselves, and thus make learning that much more
difficult. And it promotes the feeling schools are places where they’re
ordered around and made to learn what they don’t want to learn. Even
medieval monastery and guild schools weren’t so heartless; they often included ethical studies.
Police mentors can also help
students begin feeling how important our just laws are, and how good ones help
everyone have equal rights and freedoms. It’s another important character
habit liberal schools can encourage during these first 3 years. In
fact, knowing what the law is, and how best to respect it, is a big part of
character excellence itself, and how to live with less stress both in and
outside of school. It also gives students limits to what they should
and shouldn’t do, and what should be allowed and what shouldn’t. The
more students practice those laws in schools, and basic habits of politeness,
the safer and more respectful they’ll be. If such important
character habits aren’t taught at home, school, or in churches, then, as our
prisons keep reminding us, students remain vulnerable to their own weak,
excessive, and unhealthful habits.
Medical professionals too can be asked to visit schools perhaps once a month, to talk with students about healthy diet and exercise habits, and how important they are all through life. Also, seeing
and feeling basic models of human anatomy can begin expanding student ideas
about their own bodies, and also about some of the changes they’ll be going
through in the years ahead. Models of human body parts can be passed
around so students can begin learning more about what’s underneath not only
their own skins, but under nearly everyone’s skin. Some may even
want to build their own clay models, or use whatever building material they
have. Such knowledge increases respect for all human bodies, as we’ve seen
earlier.
Knowledge about what diseased bodies look like, and ideas about how they can be avoided, will also help encourage students to tell their own stories about relatives who may be sick or practicing
unhealthful habits. Is such liberal educational gold really too deep
for even young students to start digging? If it is, then it seems
human progress is a myth and civilized progress is doomed to be rewarding only
for a few, and painful for most everyone else.
Psychologists too can visit occasionally to help increase student feelings about how important their own actions are to their health and happiness, helping create some curiosity about how to intelligently
build such habits. Thus the whole important art of experimental learning
continues opening up. Psychologists can also talk to students about
some of the problems older people have, and what they’re experimenting with to
help improve themselves. Students can also be encouraged to talk
about some of the problems they’re having while building better character
habits, and perhaps get some suggestions for improvement.
As we’ve seen many times before, such excellent healthy habits are important all through life. Somewhere around 50% of all medical problems are really the results of peoples’ own weak, excessive, or
unhealthful eating and exercise HABITS! And when they realize their
own guardian or parents have such habits, then interest in how to intelligently
help improve them can start growing too. What’s a polite way to help
parents eat more healthy foods and build a better exercise habit? Much of
the time important medical services aren’t even available, which means our own
excessive and unhealthful habit-arts are making life more dangerous than it need
be! With such habits people remain their own worst enemy!
Also, encouraging health professionals to occasionally come into local schools
and talk with students makes it easier to seek their services outside of school,
where problems and learning challenges still exist. In any case, students
need to see how knowing more about solving problems makes their lives easier and more rewarding.
The Constructive Years
Planning for these years is just as important as the earlier years, and in some ways is even more
important. These students are becoming more skillful and active, and so
mentor and teacher help in planning safe and challenging projects remains a
major educational challenge. The more students learn about how to
make such projects safe and well-planned before work begins, the safer students
become. During these constructive years students will thus begin
feeling safety is the most important part of the work; to borrow a phrase from
the auto industry, safety is Job #1! With that idea they can
continue feeling how important planning is, and how dangerous acting foolishly
can become. They should see how necessary it might be to assign some
students to a role, at least for the day, talk about what’s expected of them,
like walking safely on the job, working safely, or gathering building materials
for a project. Either way acting as safely as possible is a habit
useful throughout life, and not just in school. In that way they can
begin learning how to safely enjoy their work, and not endanger others.
Such a work plan continues helping students become
stronger and healthier both psychically and physically. For example,
when training pet animals, it becomes important to know what kinds of rewards
are healthful to animals. It not only helps them feel how important
rewards are, but it also helps build a healthy respect for non-human animals;
they can be very helpful for elderly folks who feel useless and
shut-in. And they can help weaken unhealthful and disrespectful
habits some students may already have. In The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn Mark Twain describes psychically twisted men setting cats on fire just for
fun. Fun like that no intelligent, caring, and helpful person should
allow! If nothing else works to educate such people to practice more
respectful habits, then perhaps burning them on an arm or leg would let them
know how it feels -- what goes around....
Also, some students might want to build a school day-care center during this second stage
of development. It could help produce a number of useful personal
and social results for both boys and girls. For one thing it would
help neighborhood poor folks stretch their limited money budgets.
For another thing it would help students see how Behavioral conditioning with
rewards can be used on younger children. Who knows, for older
students who’re going out into the retirement community for their constructive
project, such psychological knowledge would be useful for helping even senior
citizens improve their exercise and diet habits. Who wouldn’t like a
cookie after their workout? And finally, such a school project would be
useful when students start raising their own children.
Think about it. Billions of socialized tax dollars are now wasted every year to jail able-bodied people, over 90% of whom have been excessively punished and thus are psychically disabled.
Also, they often refuse to learn any intelligent and constructive
habit. Learning how best to keep building better habit-arts with
rewards could do much, even within one generation’s time, to begin reducing the
wasteful need for more and more prisons. Such unhealthful actions
can be more easily improved in more student-centered public schools. How
many prison guards would much rather have more rewarding lives as public school
teachers and mentors? If such ideas are helpful, then why
should we remain the slaves of our own less-than-excellent conservative public
schools, like most medieval people did for centuries? Are we to be
the masters of our weak and unhealthful conservative public schools, or remain slaves to them?
In short, the more our schools, homes, and churches help young folks see what constructive and helpful
habits feels like, and how they make life safer, more creative, and more
rewarding, the easier it becomes to raise a more intelligent next
generation. And if neighborhood school work-shops could stay
open longer, then more retired folks could stay more active and creative using
and teaching in them, even if only for starting a new hobby. How
many students and older folks would love to learn constructive pottery
skills? If not, then more unhealthful 'couch-potato' habits seem
inevitable. Such creative and constructive habit-arts best foster what
Pericles said long ago about his democratic ideal -- of acting like lovers to
our cities and their undereducated people.
Students in this 2nd stage of development can start building such intelligently useful
habit-arts. The more they practice them in school, the stronger
they’ll become. After all, around 70% of students don’t go on to
college, and of those that do more than 75% of them never graduate, and yet the
vast majority of them raise children. Psychologically constructive habits
learned at this time will make that challenge more satisfying and
rewarding. Unless unhealthful punishment and excessive reproductive rates
are improved, then weak and unhealthful habits, and serious population problems,
will continue growing and causing everyone unnecessary economic stress, if not
both psychic and physical stress. As drug addicts and many smokers
know, even unhealthful and self-destructive habits are propulsive. We
Deweyan liberals say more useful constructive skills, for building more
beautiful neighborhoods and more intelligent habits, is the best personal and
social antidote for many of our on-going and expensive social problems.
Third Stage Planning
Finally, at this 3rd stage of growth, students will be encouraged to keep reading and learning more about the economic and political world they’re about to enter. Such studies will have been primed, so
to speak, by their previous economic and political practices. At this
stage they can be encouraged to ask more questions about them, as well as also
practice political and economic health as well. After all, democracy is an
active political system; the more people sit back, ignore what’s going on in
their nation and the world, and relax, the easier it becomes for greedy people
everywhere to keep taking advantage of them. Instead of being told
what to read and study, they’ll begin becoming more independent thinkers and
questioners. At this level they’ll be most free to keep learning what most
interests them, either building a product or providing a service. Thus,
the need for adult mentors will probably decline as these students are also
encouraged to help younger students learn the same intelligent habits they started learning years earlier.
At this stage of growth, students will themselves continue deepening their abstract knowledge
about what ideas to make more meaningful, and which ones to make less
meaningful. Not all students will want to become city hall aides, or Wall
Street traders, but doesn’t that reflect life itself? Student
athletes, for example, will continue learning more anatomy, physiology, healthy
eating habits, as well as learning more about how to keep increasing their
skills intelligently and safely. Student doctors and nurses too will
continue learning more about medical ideas both in and outside of school, as
will student lawyers, electricians, carpenters, computer programmers, and so
on. And, for those going on to college, such abstract studies will become
the main activity. In any case, however, for all practical purposes
the differences between school and the neighborhood will continue shrinking to
almost nothing. Student carpenters, for example, may be allowed to
work on neighborhood projects and school projects, as long as they have a plan
and agree on terms. They won’t have complete freedom, but will be expected
to stay in contact with adult teachers and mentors to make sure they’re alright and working safely.
Summarizing
Such is merely a brief glimpse of how liberals can start building more student-centered schools in their own
neighborhoods, schools where students have some control of what they learn, and
also what health means in a money-based democracy. Such
possible educational results make it easier to see why they should be
experimented with wherever enough parents, students, and teachers want to
experiment. Will they work? Well, aren’t such learning
practices going on in millions of homes today? How else are doctor,
lawyer, and carpenters habits learned if not in such ways? If
so, then the potentially useful results to both students and our nation are
simply too important to keep neglecting! For us liberals, body-mind health
is the ultimate educational excellence. To make yet another lame
joke, they’re even more important than coffee and chocolate, at least for many
of us!
The more students learn about such personal kinds of health, the more liberated they become from their own weak, excessive, unhealthful, and stressful habits. And, obviously, the more
intelligent the next generation becomes, the more 'we the people' will become
freer from all the many feudal institutions and restraints still existing in our
world. It's either that, or keep allowing conservative public
schools to keep teaching students more and more useless and abstract ideas,
generally disconnected from life and thus soon forgotten. The more
those kinds of habits are taught, the easier it is for conservatives to keep our
already feudal institutions as politically and economically controlled as they
now are. Two hundred years of US history is certainly enough to
convince me of this fact: For almost all of that time conservatives have
been working to control our political system mainly for their
benefit. Isn’t it time our young folks started seeing all our
wonderfully colorfully advertised corporations as merely modern versions of
feudal fiefdoms, aimed primarily at maintaining an aristocratic class of
obscenely wealthy people!? In many ways, such a conservative class
keeps defending their money-making privileges in much the same way kings
defended their privileges with feudal knights, barons, earls, law courts, and religious ideas.
The more such healthy democratic habit-arts are taught in our homes, churches, and
public schools, the less dangerous become the ‘hells’ of economic recessions,
depressions, wars, poverty, and disease, as well as corporate greed, personal
meanness, and disrespect. The more students learn a healthy person
respects all law-abiding others and our just laws, the less violence and
lawlessness we'll see on our streets and in our daily news shows.
The good news is this: because all such habits are propulsive, once they’re in place
and working, once even primary age students learn them, then the easier it
becomes to keep controlling greedy and dangerous social forces, like predatory
corporations and individuals, as well as enjoy more of life's simpler pleasures,
like the tender touch of a loved one and their encouraging words.
Who knows? The more such healthful habits are taught, the easier it might
be to find a store where a good pair of walking shoes doesn’t cost 2 weeks'
salary! And for those interested in reading about what some people are
doing to protest our constructive public school system, see the article Did This
Little Election Strike a Big Blow to Education Reform?, in the Atlantic magazine
of 10-13-13.
No doubt, our alcohol, tobacco, and drug industries, both legal and illegal, are thankful for
not teaching such excellent personal habits to young students, but does that
mean our public schools should never teach students how to work enjoyably and
intelligently even in school? Isn’t it time liberals in every state
started calling their representatives and demanding the oppressive and overly
conservative No Child Left Behind law, and the Common Core Standards policy, be
repealed immediately, if not sooner? Both laws turn conservatives
who preach liberty and freedom from government into hypocrites! And
what’s more, as our economic history shows over the past 40 years, the knowledge
they claim students must learn is almost completely irrelevant for maintaining
democratic economic health! Even with low student test scores our
economy has, until very recently, remained strong and innovative. Again,
for those not convinced of that fact, see Valerie Strauss’s article Four Lessons
on new PISA scores – Ravitch in the 12-3-13 Washington Post.
No doubt, some students will not choose to learn
all they could, but, then again, who learns all they could? Some
students are underachievers, just like many adults. But everyone wants to
learn something, and whatever lawful habit it is, it’s most important to teach
them how to intelligently and enjoyably learn to use that skill
constructively. After all, how many months out of every year do rich
folks do little more than relax, go on vacation, gamble on the stock and futures
markets, and buy more paintings and sculptures for their collections? Two,
Three, Six?
In a more philosophic model of life, for us Deweyan Humanists, there’s a very important result from
choosing a life of helpful and intelligent experimental learning.
That kind of learning goal is always satisfied; no matter what happens we always
learn something about that goal and how intelligent it was. Thus, with the
goal of experimental learning, we’re always capable of broadening and deepening
life’s meanings, even the meanings of enjoyment and relaxation. So, if we
choose Dewey’s naturalistic path we choose to continue enjoying-improving
nature’s rhythms HERE AND NOW!—everyone’s entire life is lived in the present,
so why not teach ourselves to savor and enjoy this eternal present through which
we all live, for whatever time any of us has? What’s more, that goal
can help liberate adults and children from our present feudal systems, and thus
keep learning how to deal more intelligently with satisfying our own desires and
frustrations. The power for all forms of such excellence is within
our own muscles and actions. We refuse to wait for a better life only
after death, and instead enjoy working to build a more democratic life here and now.
Liberal, moderate, and conservative philosophic models may be practiced in our cities, towns, forests, valleys, mountains, oceans, and even space’s vastness, but only our liberal Deweyan Humanism
celebrates the art of learning how to keep growing and improving life itself
here and now, without promising any kind of reward after death.
Besides, no one knows for sure if there even is a life after death. In
fact, that experimental, sense-based learning habit-art has finally begun giving
us some control over many natural dangers. Thus, experimental learning
helps us feel more confident about living in an always moving, dangerously
stable, and always challenging nature. Choosing Dewey’s educational
ideas can help us consciously FEEL that power in our own actions, and keep
making even our daily actions as intelligent as possible, and to keep building
the person and democratic world we want.
When applied to our public schools, that one experimental learning habit-art is wide enough for everyone, not just to those of some particular sexual, religious, or fraternal “tribe,” but democratically
wide enough for all people. Modern science has recently proven we’re
all descended from the same little tribe of African San ancestors who began
accepting life’s challenge to see what’s out there and make it more
satisfying. Today our great challenge is to continue helping even
young students begin learning and enjoying that same kind of learning
adventure. For us, what’s important are the excellent learning
habits we can teach the next generation, so they will be better prepared for
life in our natural world. In short, we can choose to make the next
generation feel like they’re part of a human tribe, and to continue working to
help others become better and more intelligent at learning itself.
Such liberal schools offer students an infinitely open, creative, and always learning
life and nature, even on a common and ordinary daily basis. Often we may
learn what doesn’t work, but no idea, experimental or otherwise, is always
trustworthy and infallible, except the idea of change. What’s
important is how much we can learn from our mistakes and still keep improving
life. Used that way, our excellent experimental learning habit-art is
educational; it’s constructive actions can help liberate us from staying angry
and tense with our precious energies, from punishing our self with ignorance,
and thus make life more rewarding.
For those who choose our liberal path, building more liberal schools becomes a duty. They beckon students and adults into a daily life brimming with new possibilities, opportunities, and challenges for
making life something it wasn’t before. We can now choose to start
building such schools, one step at a time, into something friendlier, natural,
harmonious, and satisfying; psychically dancing with those feelings keep
deepening life’s feelings themselves. In liberal schools such a
learning habit-art is practiced on a daily basis. In nature’s always
changing and infinite variety, experimental learning offers the opportunity and
challenge to literally create a little newer and more powerful body-mind each
day, and to thus be re-born every day until we reach our natural limits, as all
creatures must. And as those limits keep expanding, then science’s
experimental learning art will continue creating stronger people! Schools
where that habit-art is taught on a daily basis will also teach students to
limit our own numbers, and also build constructive impulses and habits, rather than destructive ones.
To those who choose to build such liberal schools,
the best immortality anyone ever achieves will sprout from the soil of useful
kindness, grow in the good one does for others, and blossom best in the joy and
happiness encouraged with the arts of peaceful democratic equal rights and
healthful experimental science. Who’s ready to make such choices?
38. REALITY SCHOOLS: ECONOMIC HEALTH
A Case for Economic Studies
To say the very least, economics has become one of the most important parts of civilized life in the last 200 years. Simply because it’s so new, and because our educational system is still conservative, we liberal Deweyans are challenged to include economic habits of health wherever they’re demanded in public schools. What follows, then, are some suggestions for such studies at all 3 levels of child development.
Ever since modern capitalism started growing huge corporations in the later 1800s, knowledge about money and economics have become increasingly important to civilized democratic life. For-profit capitalist institutions have affected and touched every aspect of modern life, from the poorest to the richest. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was the first philosopher to put it at the center of modern life, even saying it alone determined not only how people live, but even what people think and believe. For him the phrase ‘economic determinism’ summed up his feelings about the new money-based corporate economy.
So once again, the plan for teaching liberal kinds of economic health will follow that of the first 2 sections. We’ll start with some ideas for students in the first 3 grades to practice and learn, followed by some ideas for students at the constructive second level of development, and then for those students at the more abstract 3rd level of development where economic history becomes the focus of attention for all those students about to enter the workforce after graduation. Such knowledge and skills will empower many more students to live more intelligently in a capitalist society, and help convince them collectively they hold the power to guide and control economic evolution, and to intelligently keep our economic institutions work humanely for the public good. Believe it or not, some people make a million dollars a day, so why shouldn’t our elected representatives have the power to keep circulating their wealth through taxes to better help those who really need help and more education? Such empowered students will also learn how conservative Republicans and big business Democrats will continue working against all those goals, and any goal based on equal economic rights and opportunities. For a growing number of people today, the Republican letters GOP best stands for Guardians of the Privileged. Since the Civil War, only progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt disagreed with that idea.
First Stage Economic Suggestions
For millions of people today, liberal economic ideas and skills aimed at growing the public good are sadly neglected in our public schools. For them important economic goings-on have been over-simplified to daily stock market reports, even though most people don’t even own stock. No doubt, at the higher levels of study, economics has become very complex and confusing with different models and ideas, just like any study at an abstract level. However, like any subject it has some simple basic ideas and so even 1st graders can begin hearing about them.
One such idea might be introduced in an economics workshop: All economies can be divided into 2 basic ideas -- learning about producing goods, like food and clothing, and providing services, like doctors, lawyers, police, firefighters, and politicians. Those ideas can then be used to ask students what economic field they want to learn more about, the goods or services fields. If goods, then they can start growing their economic knowledge with sense-based visits to places where goods are produced, like clothing factories, food factories, energy producers, construction sites, and as many places as exist in their own neighborhoods. A less useful second alternative is to offer videos showing how different kinds of goods are produced around the world. Such videos will also start expanding their knowledge about the world we live in. Such experiences will help students see and feel where their foods, clothing, and energy comes from, and thus begin building their feelings for how interrelated and connected our world is, as well as some challenges in each industry.
Also, for those students wanting to learn more about building their service skills, such sense-based excursions can visit police stations, doctor’s offices, law offices, construction sites, retail stores, even beauty parlor and dog-training businesses. Thus their own neighborhood economy begins opening up to them. Also, those students with cameras can be encouraged to take pictures of all their excursions, so later on in school students can then begin asking more questions about those places, and perhaps also shown how computers and the Internet can be used to answer their questions. Thus reading and writing skills can start growing naturally in the quest for more information and knowledge.
For there, then, it becomes natural for students to be shown in a psychology lab how to intelligently start experimenting with actually building the skills and knowledge for the services or products they want to learn more about. How do intelligent service-providers and product-makers talk and interact with the public; here teachers will provide some very useful role-playing training to those young students. In such ways psychological learning excellence begins growing naturally as they learn how to talk more about their feelings and begin hearing how important it is to know a little more about what problems others are having and how they might be solved. Once students commit themselves emotionally to a learning either one of those 2 skills, a whole host of useful skills like reading and writing and researching become more actively and easily learned.
I remember reading about the famous German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. When he was still a young student he committed himself emotionally to becoming a rocket scientist; he was fascinated by them. As a result, when he was told he needed to know how to think and calculate with mathematical ideas and skills, he then began learning how to speak and think with the language of size and motion – mathematical equations and symbols. Eventually he was brought to the US after World War 2 and then helped send astronauts to the moon in 1969. For us liberals there’s a very important educational moral here: The lack of options for emotional commitment for many conservative public school students soon makes school something to merely go through, rather than a place where their dreams start becoming reality.
Does Everything Have a Price?
At this early stage of economic development students can begin learning another very important practical kind of economic health: most everything has a price, either in money or in time and actions. It talks intelligent actions to make our economic dreams become reality. With that idea too, what they have learned outside of school becomes a part of life inside school. For example, our economic system is a money system, and so they can be given the freedom to design and make their own school money, set up a school bank where they can get loans to start little classroom business of their own, and perhaps trade their goods with other students and learn about the art of negotiation and trying to get the best deal they can. Those interested in building products can focus on that work; perhaps 2 or 3 students want to sell homemade cookies in class, and so the teacher can begin showing their cookie team how some government officials provide a necessary public service to help make sure foods are healthful and good for people. Also helping build their math skills are questions like how can we figure the price of our cookies or pies? How much did it cost to make them, and how much should we charge other students. Who knows? Some students may like that kind of learning so much they’ll learn little else in school, but isn’t that the way much of the adult world works? How many adults today know anything about Shakespeare or quantum mechanics? Almost none of them.
The economic challenge for liberal schools and teachers then also becomes teaching students about intelligent democratic character habits while they’re learning more about the products and services they like. Should they ever produce anything that might harm someone else? Such teaching thus becomes both an organic art and a science. When is the right time and method for teaching cookie and cake makers how to make healthy products, charge a fair price, and also help other students learn what they want to learn. It’s an on-going challenge to start teaching young folks what liberal economic health means, and how money can be used to make life more satisfying for everyone with healthful products and services!
Encouraging young students to start experimenting with a school bank focused on building student skills will also help them start learning some useful math skills and knowledge, like adding and subtracting numbers, and how to calculate interest percentages. Those interested in banking services can also begin learning how lending money and credit works, and even how they can help students start their own classroom businesses, like selling their old comic books, models, CDs, clothes, and whatever else they no longer use. Don’t’ adults have yard sales from time to time? Isn't that what people are doing in the real world?
Also, with such economic work they can begin feeling how important creative thinking and advertising is in the business world, to help stimulate sales. How many students would like to start an advertising service, and learn more about that useful skill? Why not give students, say, an hour or 2 a day to experimentally play with their economic fantasies, and also time for telling other students what they’re trying to do and asking for any help they can give? That way, the class itself becomes a problem-solving group. In fact, end-of-year summary statements by all students would be a great way to keep learning about writing and public speaking.
Some young artistic students can also start learning more about their craft with advertising suggestions. What product or service doesn’t need good advertising? If such educational ideas sound way too extravagant and improbable to some people, it’s probably because they don’t fit their conservative educational book-centered model, but does that mean more liberal kinds of schools won’t work? In truth, the more we teach such economic skills and knowledge, the easier it’ll be for students to get out into the business world and start contributing to the economy even before they graduate! Such studies also make it easier to start practicing both physical and psychological kinds of health.
Is there a better way for students to learn about how a good bank should work for the community good, other than actually building such a school bank and working in it? After all, around the country today more people are seeing how public non-profit banks serving the people might be the best way to protect themselves from greedy vulture capitalists seeking merely their own wealth. As we’ve seen, North Dakota already has such a bank and it’s been working marvelously for the public good for decades already. So, the more young students begin working in such a bank, the easier it’ll become to build more public banks serving the public rather than greedy Wall Street bankers. In short, why shouldn't students begin feelings how our macro-economy can work better by actively practicing liberal microeconomic skills in our own public schools?
Such skills are all sense-based, actively involving all their senses, and so are more natural ways to learning important economic skills and feelings. If some student wants to buy, say, some flower pots to intelligently grow flowers for some senior citizens, then why shouldn't they go to the pottery workshop, learn how to make those pots, and even get paid in school money so they can, perhaps, pay off a school bank loan? And if there isn’t a pottery shop available, why shouldn’t they be free to build one? Would we have the great numbers of homeless people today if more children were taught how to operate such businesses? Why should we keep our young folks ignorant and naive about such economic knowledge and learning opportunities in our own public schools? We need more humane business-oriented people, not more obedient kill-oriented soldiers!
Making Honest Money
About a century ago John Dewey saw the organic connection between economics and politics, just as he saw the connection between body and mind. He noted we live in a money economy, but he also went on to say the more people are given the knowledge power to more intelligently mold the economy with intelligent taxes and regulations, the better life becomes for everyone. Thus, knowing more about different economic systems and ideas is crucial for using democratic power intelligently. Should we continue voting for conservatives or liberals?
So naturally, we liberals want to teach public school students more about economic health with active projects. In that process they’ll begin learning another one of life’s very important habits of health: making honest money is much healthier than making dishonest money by breaking laws. Life becomes much less stressful and dangerous with honest money-making. With more practical economic skills and knowledge students can start building that idea into their muscles, and also their feelings against, say, joining a gang and selling illegal drugs, or extorting money from businesspeople for 'protection'. And not only that, but also learning how to intelligently report such people to the police, and help make their communities more respectful and enjoyable. To help teach such habits even young students can be encouraged to build a school court and jail system, helping teach disrespectful students such excessive and unhealthy actions need to be improved. In most conservative schools today disrespectful students are simply expelled. For them, however, it's a vacation, not a more intelligent education. The more such things like a school court, jail, and intelligent counseling services become real, the more options students will have for learning useful service skills. If such schools aren’t built, then the more expensive public taxes will be needed later on to control such disrespectful and dangerous people.
To say the very least, the creative and intelligent art of making honest money is a very important part of economic health, so why shouldn't students begin learning such skills even early in their public schools? Before they even go to school, children see their parents go out to work almost daily, how they spend money, and make economic choices, and so for us Deweyan liberals, students should be free to experimentally learn more about honest and helpful services, like doctor, lawyer, and construction skills! They want to be grown-up, so why not allow them to play those roles and learn more about those skills? How else can students best learn where their talents really lie, and how to earn honest money? If nothing else, such studies will help break down the artificial conservative barriers now existing between the home and school; clothing, metal, wood, and repair shops can also be built by students as they continue into their constructive 2nd stage of learning development. With such shops they can begin learning valuable economic and democratic skills, like making their uniforms for student police officers, student medics, student lawyers, and student doctors. Is there a more intelligent way for students to begin feeling what honest money-making is like? Such work helps build healthier and more constructive outlets for their own natural sense-based, constructive, and intellectual abilities. How many young folks would like to be free enough to experiment with, say, running their own video-game, comic book, coin collecting, model-building, or beauty shop businesses on school grounds, selling and trading with other students? Shouldn’t every school have a beauty shop; isn’t that another useful social service?
How many creative and talented students might even create better cosmetic and beauty products while still in school, and thus start earning honest money even before they graduate? From her love of candy an aunt of mine set up a little candy-making factory in her garage, then built a neat little home-business helping make economic ends meet, not to mention adding more robust dimensions to her waistline! For us liberal Deweyans, the alternative conservative education model now in place is simply too artificial and disrespectful for naturally active and curious students. Aren’t the best tests to pass in real life character tests of honesty and helpfulness, and they are active tests occurring every day.
The sooner children start learning such economic kinds of healthy skills, and the math and reading skills needed to keep them growing, the sooner they'll learn the difference between honest and dishonest money, as well as liberal and conservative economic ideas. And, the sooner such knowledge and health start growing, the sooner juvenile and adult crime can begin becoming less of a burden to everyone else, making life more satisfying as well. Why not start using our precious taxes to make our own neighborhood public schools much more health-oriented, satisfying, life-like, refreshing, and enjoyable? Why not allow students to start making their own neighborhood tourist attractions, rather than gun-zones people fear, and where illegal drugs are one of the main businesses? Just imagine how many people would come to see, say, the world largest aluminum ball, or highest fast food container-mountain, or largest walking shoe path, and how enjoyable building such attractions would be. Those may be unpractical projects, but you see my point, right? Is there a law against making schools life more humorous and enjoyable? And is there any better antidote to our oppressively serious and boring conservative test-oriented schools than active and enjoyable learning projects like that?
In truth, such schools must be built by people themselves; they are not something automatically evolving as the result of some natural laws of progress and evolution. Such ideas of Natural Law belong to the 1800s, not the 2000s. To us liberals such ideas are fantasy, not reality. For example, one of the hottest economic ideas these days centers on creating socialized, publicly owned non-profit banks in our states! Presently only North Dakota has one, and it's producing some of the best economic results for everyone in the state! Many other countries have them as well. Imagine that, a socially owned non-profit bank in a supposedly capitalistic country! No doubt, the very idea gives conservative capitalists nightmares! But, like liberal schools, such banks too will not evolve without real effort and work; that’s the point! When students at the 2nd constructive stage of development are not encouraged to learn more intelligent building skills, they in effect become less able to keep improving all the feudalistic institutions we still have in this country. And what's more, such banks can be created more easily when public school students learn to create one in their own school, helping loan school money to students for economic projects.
Am I merely fantasizing? In reality all ideas are a kind of fantasy, imagining how life is or should be. But as we’ll see, such banks are becoming a more popular idea. In fact, Iceland, New Zealand, and many other countries like Italy have such socialized banks already, and many other US states besides North Dakota too might soon begin experimenting with them for the public good, not increasing private fortunes. In any case, with such public schools one very important idea is becoming much more widespread in today's world: classic laissez-faire capitalism run by private, for-profit corporations and banks is certainly not the only economic model or option. That idea in itself is at the foundation of all economic actions.
Second Stage Economic Suggestions
Then, as younger students’ progress through the grades into their 2nd stage of constructive development, economic skills can continue growing with more complex kinds of activities, requiring better constructive skills. Thus those students interested in such important service skills will find this stage even more useful. For example, how can students get needed money and building materials for, say, building soap-box racers or larger businesses? How can they sell tickets to raise funds for an annual soap-box race? So, at this stage of development students can begin reaching out in different ways into the community itself, looking for donors in both the private corporate world as well as the public government world. In such ways their knowledge of both worlds continues growing and expanding, as well as their network of contacts in both. They’ll also get better at talking more intelligently with such people, and pitching their constructive ideas, another skill useful throughout life. Would a corporate donor like to have their logo put on a soap-box racer, or some cookie boxes? Even good university engineering students can do that while, say, building robot projects?
Building a baby-sitting service is also a business option for students 8-14. Not only will it help low-income folks in the community reduce their childcare bills, but it will also give those medical and psyche majors a chance to learn more about intelligent child development and care. Who knows, such a service can also lead naturally into building another useful social service – a school daycare center; it’ll help low income families make their low wages last longer. Such a center would also be a great way to teach undereducated young folks more intelligent ways of raising their own kids, thus increasing psychological health. It seems to me such intelligent constructive options would lead to a win-win situation for both students and neighborhood parents.
In such liberal student-oriented schools focused on teaching such practical kinds of business health, students will become more informed about economic issues in the real world, like taxes and regulation, as well as building better feelings for community needs. Such feelings can become the psychic foundation for more abstract economic studies later during the abstract 3rd stage of development in high school.
What’s more, as they continue interacting with elected representatives during this constructive 2nd stage of development, they’ll also see useful ways the government can help small businesses, as well as learn more about our own huge feudalistic profit-oriented corporations now dominating our economy and politics as well. What are our elected representatives doing with the public's money, and how can they be directed more towards helping small businesses to grow? Are private for-profit banks really the best system for creating a safe and solid middleclass, or might public-owned banks be better at helping people start a business and keep our roads and transportation systems more user-friendly? Such questions become much more meaningful at this 2nd stage of constructive development; they also help prime student curiosity to know more about our economic history as they pass into their abstract 3rd of development.
At this constructive 2nd stage of development it becomes easier for students to learn more about how our water, air, and energy systems work, and what their actual results are. Are, say, publicly owned energy and water systems better able to care for the public good, or are for-profit water and energy systems really the best for all concerned? Such questions lead naturally to actually building science labs where water and air can be actually tested for their health-promoting results. How safe is our water, air, and food? Also of economic importance is knowing how safe their streets are, how police are acting in their neighborhoods, and how to build even safer systems to create better public spaces for everyone. Building better public parks and recreation areas also becomes an option at this 2nd level of development. Also, teaching young police people and firefighters how to build more intelligent skills is much easier, thus making it easier to more intelligently assist local police and fire systems in their important social roles. With such skills and knowledge students will again become better at feeling how important their own school psychology labs are to the surrounding community, and their helping future workers to act more sympathetic, fairer, and less prejudicial towards others.
Also, what are the economics of more intelligently serving the poorest homeless people find decent-paying jobs, decent housing, reduce any drug addiction problems, and making their communities more satisfying and beautiful places to live? Such services are important in every community, not just those in the US. What are the economics of keeping artistic students supplied with materials to keep intelligently beautifying our school grounds and public spaces, and keep creating a more comfortable and colorful space to live? Who wants to contribute to such worthy constructive projects? Why shouldn’t even young students also be free to raise funds for, say, a student art museum, where young artists can sell their work and help make their neighborhoods even more educational, beautiful, and safer?
In short, when we keep diverting students from learning such important economic skills and knowledge, we, in effect, keep making life itself less than educational and rewarding. Can’t both students and the public learn more about US history itself through such active and constructive student-based community art projects? Such projects would merge both history and art into artistic history, an art-form practiced in the real world! And they would also give students some worthwhile role models to think about and imitate. The more we keep memories of excellence alive, the less isolated we remain from excellence itself. For example, no one knows how educational and inspiring our art-poor drab-looking subways would look like until artistic students are liberated to beautify them; is there a better use for corporate education funds than that? Certainly not, at least not for us Deweyan liberals.
No doubt, some conservative may say such activities aren't really the best kinds of knowledge to know; they allow students to become overspecialized and thus ignorant of so much that’s worthy of knowing. Well, we say welcome to the real world; that’s the way it is for most everyone! In fact, any positive and constructive project in the adult world has economic parts to it, and so learning more about that reality helps public school students see the world as it’s working, not as mere textbooks describe it. If so, then why shouldn't even young students be allowed to learn more about that reality by, say, putting on their own Olympics every year for each grade? In that process they would not only learn more about raising money, but also help young athletes build more intelligent physical habits while building safe and healthy student-oriented schools! Sure some students will become specialists in the skills, and some will even opt out and prefer to remain passive spectators, but even spectators can play an economic role by purchasing tickets to such events. And, as we’ve seen so many times before, such events are inspirational to young folks of all ages! How many young girls started playing tennis after seeing older women playing? Do we really want to keep training young men to play dangerous games like football when other more healthful constructive activities like Olympic sports produce more healthful personal and social results?
Finally, another constructive idea seems reasonable at this time. A clothing workshop would be another useful constructive option for 2nd level students. Even many young students feel dissatisfied with their own body-shapes, so why not empower them to start intelligently experimenting with designing and producing clothes they feel more comfortable in? Such shops would not only increase their practical math and organizing skills, but also their instincts for clothing styles. Such instincts are useful in the real world all through life, aren’t they? I know they have been in my life. No doubt, clothing manufacturers might object, but what’s more important, ignoring such business-oriented skills, or developing them? Besides, wouldn’t those manufacturers benefit from having better-trained workers? Such actively constructive and intelligent skills help build economic power as well as character habits, so why shouldn’t students be free to start learning more about them? In fact, the art of intelligently designing clothing for different body shapes is a very useful art in the economic world, as well as a great low-stress way to have some fun at school. Such students could also put on student fashion shows, offering their work to the public and also learn more about making honest money! In liberal schools, such skills are encouraged rather than ignored.
Third Stage of Development: A Little Economic History
Probably no better way is there to study abstract economic ideas than seeing how they worked in history, and what kinds of actions they justified. Earlier constructive projects and useful economic activities help set the psychic stage, so to speak, for this 3rd abstract level of economic study, and learning more about economic history and some of its more important ideas, like deficits, supply side economics, laissez-faire economics, and progressively liberal economic ideas. Also important at this stage of growth is learning how to use computer technology for answering any economic questions students might have. So, to begin seeing these kinds of economic ideas, we’ll read a brief summary of US economic history; it helps build the background for liberal ideas and actions important to this day. No doubt, some conservative parents may feel such active and experimental liberal studies don’t teach students to really respect US economic ideas, like the profit-motive, and corporate importance. However, in an always moving world it’s important to keep improving our institutions, especially our public schools, and thus keep improving those systems as intelligently as possible, as well as providing students with real options in our money-based economy.
To us liberal Deweyans, what religious power was to the feudalistic Middle Ages, economic money and wealth power is to our modern world. Such money-power continues supporting feudalistic undemocratic institutions the way religious institutions have done. Hugely wealthy corporations continue controlling jobs, wages, and taxes, largely through political donations to politicians. Thus, the less young folks know about some basic economic history, and how the obsessive quest for profits continues creating social stress and frustration on a daily basis, the more vulnerable people remain to those with economic-political power.
Laissez-Faire Economic Model
The ideas written about here really deserve books of their own, but a few brief highlights from US economic history may help lay the groundwork for more in depth studies later. For example, the growth of our present feudalistic economic systems became more powerful after the Civil War, as a few industries in oil, steel, and railroading became practical monopolies. The huge personal fortunes they helped build helped for a few people increased their personal power to control more of our political system as well, from Washington, D. C. to state capitols and local regions around the country. Steel producer Andrew Carnegie was the great exception to this general rule. In 1900 he sold his steel business to wealthy financier J. P. Morgan for around $300 million, retreated to his native Scotland, bought a castle, and proceeded to give almost all of it away to build a more educated public. In fact, my first philosophy class was held in Carnegie Hall at the University of Denver.
Also important in US economic history from the very beginning was a continuing series of economic depressions and recessions, occurred about 20 years apart all through the 1800s, 1900s, and even more often in recent times. And, all during that time a small wealthy upper economic class continued using the government to keep increasing their wealth, thus creating what may be fairly called a corporate socialist system. What’s more, conservative businessmen typically felt those who own the country should govern the country. In fact, such events in US history began growing even before the Constitution was written in 1789, and soon after that a Bank of the United States was built to help pay off state war debts, and also help corporations grow; it was the brainchild of George Washington’s conservative Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. After Andrew Jackson let its charter expire, it eventually was re-established in 1913 as the Federal Reserve Bank system. Even these few facts can help us liberals ask why, throughout our public schools, are economic skills and studies still almost completely ignored? We liberals say it’s time to start ending that situation in our public schools. The more students know about the economic forces affecting their everyday lives, and their voting power to help guide how our economic system works, the better prepared they’ll be to deal with life in the real world, and to better regulate that system for the public good.
For almost all of US history our economic system has been unregulated by the government; the name for that system was laissez-faire economics. As a result, many schemes, or bubbles, helped create an on-going series of recessions and depressions throughout US history. They helped make it easier for the wealthy to often take more of the public’s money and increase their own personal fortunes. In the 1800s, for example, the government gave away huge tracks of land to railroad companies who often then proceeded to charge farmers whatever they wanted for the land and also to ship their goods to market. Eventually, farming bankruptcies helped form the nation’s Progressive Movement in the late 1800s.
Then, in the 1920s, few government economic regulations on buying and selling stocks helped create a stock market bubble. During the conservative Republican administrations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover a conservative corporate mantra was celebrated: the government had no right to regulate economic actions. That laissez-faire idea went back to Adam Smith in the late 1700s. As a result, in the 20s people could buy huge amounts of freshly printed stocks and were regularly told their value would keep going up and thus make them rich. Naturally, millions of people gave stock brokers their money. However, when that bubble burst 1929 it re-defined the poetic phrase ‘would never go down.’ And more recently, a de-regulated banking industry helped create a housing bubble in the early 2,000s. People were told their home values would keep going up, so for just a little down payment they could move right in, even if they had little or no source of income to keep making mortgage payments! For obvious reasons such risky loans were called sub-prime.
Such economic schemes were the result of nonexistent government regulations, making it easier for greedy bankers to keep separating people from their money. What’s more, in 2008, the public continued getting stuck with the bill for the government bailing out banks and insurance companies who had sold those risky ‘toxic’ mortgages! So, even as millions of people were losing their homes and savings, a few huge banks have grown even bigger and more powerful at the public’s expense; recently our public debt skyrocketed to about $15 Trillion with the help of 2 unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Conservative Republicans like George W. Bush choose to put the costs on the public’s credit card – our public debt.
Recently, it’s gotten even more bizarre with Republican ideas. Lately, conservative big business Republicans in Congress are trying to add even more economic salt to those painful and stressful public wounds! For years now they’ve been telling people our public debt is much too large so we must now cut government spending, even food stamps for the poor and unemployment payments! And, all the while, the corporate-oriented Federal Reserve Bank system has continued giving billions of dollars to many corporations to ease their toxic sub-prime debt load. As a result, a small number of huge banks continue controlling several trillion dollars of economic power while conservative Republicans keep working to cut government spending to the poor! From both sources, then, public stress has increased tremendously. If it wasn’t such a moral disgrace, it would be absurdly comical! Is it any wonder, then, conservatives don’t want any kind of economic skills and ideas taught in our public schools? As with conservatives just about everywhere, the less people know about economic goings-on, the easier it is to keep making profits and controlling more of life’s institutions, even our public schools. As we saw earlier, the World Bank has been making loans to country on the condition their schools becomes more conservative.
Again, such feudalistic economic power began skyrocketing in the late 1800s. As a result, some conservative CEOs have become more active at controlling economic information itself, even at the university level. In them only the conservative laissez-faire economic model was taught. It’s a French phrase meaning the government should leave the economic sector alone. Of course corporations continued getting government help to grow bigger, but it made people believe the government their taxes were paying for shouldn’t be used to help people with useful social programs.
Another phrase for that economic model was Social Darwinism; in it only the economically fittest survive and the rest are allowed to fade away. At that time corporate moguls like Leland Stanford, Commodore Vanderbilt, and John Rockefeller's University of Chicago were financed to continue teaching students how the laissez-faire economic model was completely natural and best for everyone. For all practical purposes, conservatives believed economic feudalism was a natural way of allowing only the fittest to survive and the rest to live in poverty and filthy disease infested slums. The more the government helped them, the more poverty and poor people there would be. Thus Karl Marx’s socialist ideas of workers owning the factories and sharing its profits equally became the natural enemy to US corporate leaders. Any kind of alternative democratic socialist economic model should simply be ignored in all our schools; liberal Dewey was fired from Rockefeller’s university in 1904. Corporate socialism was fine, but popular socialism was an evil idea. Of course Socialists like Eugene Debs weren’t even allowed to teach at the university level; for conservatives that economic model was the enemy, even though socialized tax money was being used to build our military-industrial system since the late 1800s!
Folks like California lawyer, railroad tycoon, and politician Leland Stanford (1824-1893) founded Stanford University in 1891, after 6 years of planning. But before that he found it easy to control the state’s political system with his great wealth. Stanford was said to buy enough votes in the California legislature to elect him to the US senate, and he certainly wasn’t the only one. There, rich folks could directly form and shape legislation to both protect and increase their fortunes with the government’s help. Today, of course, that system has evolved since people started electing their senators by popular vote in 1913. Nowadays rich folks merely hire corporate lobbyists to persuade politicians who’re always hungry for more campaign money. In such ways our feudalistic corporate socialism remains in place while ideas like popular socialism aimed at increasing the public good is still a no-no. In fact, today huge amounts of public taxes continue being used to support our small class of wealthy folks in the defense industry and farming. Over $600 Billion a year of the public money goes to making more weapons of war and for feeding, clothing, and paying soldiers to work at some 1,000 military bases overseas, while poor school kids go hungry, our prisons become more inhumane, and homelessness increases. How does such a system continue functioning? People largely ignorant of such economic realities don’t take the time to elect more liberal politicians, and thus keep allowing such a system to stay in place, and making it very difficult to build more liberal public schools.
With their generous donations many conservative wealthy folks today continue hiring and promoting professors who are at least sympathetic to their laissez-faire economic model. During the Great Depression, for example, critique of that capitalist model came from non-academics like the English Civil Servant John Maynard Keynes. As the Depression dragged on in the 1930s he suggesting we stop telling ourselves a laissez-faire economic model was best; it simply didn’t work in a monopolistic world. He then suggest the government become a more active player in the economic sector, and start hiring those millions out of work to build a more user-friendly country, with, say, better roads and parks. That way more people could better afford to keep buying goods and services, keep the economy growing, and prevent people from being thrown out of their houses.
Another result of feudalistic corporate power in the 1890s was the creation of what’s called the conservative Lochner Supreme Court, where humane labor and union laws were regularly overturned and ignored. No doubt, the high point of its mean conservative rulings justified racial segregation with their infamous 1896 ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson. In effect, they said separate but equal facilities for Africans and whites were constitutional. Conservative corporate lawyers on the court helped produce many other rulings as well. In the early 1900s, for example, they said laws against labor unions were fair, while laws making factories safer and more humane were illegal. The corporate-friendly Lochner Court simply did its duty.
Is it any wonder today many powerful corporate leaders are against teaching students that kind of economic history, even at the college level? The less students know about it, the easier their work is for controlling both the political and economic systems for their own benefit. Today, for example, investment fund managers regularly keep raising fees to customers who give them their retirement money, thus reducing retirement funds themselves; it’s all perfectly legal and proper, and is made easier because almost no one knows anything about the economic system and how to invest wisely. Such economic ignorance also helps people believe wealthy folks really create the good-paying jobs everyone wants, so to keep their taxes low is good for everyone. We’ll see more of the supply side economic model a litter later on.
All during the 1900s university economic departments themselves became more conservative in order to keep endowment funds flowing in from wealthy alumni, as well as paying conservative professors with high-paying consulting fees and research grants. Dewey’s Columbia University at Morningside Heights in New York was one place where more liberal views were tolerated, and many of its professors went on to work during the Great Depression in the Roosevelt administration, to create helpful New Deal policies for the poor and unemployed. With their help a progressive model of economics and politics continued evolving. In it the government had a much bigger role to play in better regulating economic actions, and in helping the public get through many of life’s unstable economic events. Retirement, for example, was made more secure with Social Security was passed, as well as disability money and unemployment funds. Thus even at the university level of education students continued being taught the conservative laissez-faire economic model. In that model students were told the economy has certain self-correcting systems built into it, and so the government should stay out of the regulating business, especially with taxes on corporate profits and personal incomes. True, taxes for the wealthy went up to 90% during and after World War 2, but since then they’ve been lowered even below what average taxpayers pay on much lower incomes!
Needless to say, economics at the public school level was all but ignored, even in white schools. It’s not difficult to see why. Even with this brief sketch so far, US economic history and the singular quest for ever more profits and political power is not a very endearing story about the United States. Conservatives want to teach students how great the US is, and how it’s a bastion of freedom and liberty, but economic history itself would smash all such ideas, to say the least. In fact, that history is one of mainly continuing greed, violence, public strife, and subsistence living, as we’re seeing today with striking low-paid fast-food workers. While workers are still barely getting by, corporate profits are in the billions!
Even more dangerous for conservatives, economic history also shows us improvements are possible. For example, in 1913 enough people organized to pass a Constitutional amendment for voters to elect senators directly, thus ending the buying of such power in state legislatures and increasing liberal voting power. Also, in 1916 enough progressive people organized to pass an income tax amendment to the Constitution. About 10 years earlier the Lochner Court’s corporate lawyer majority declared such a tax unconstitutional, even though there was an income tax law passed during the Civil War. Even so, after World War 1, during most of the 1920s, business was so good Republican President Calvin Coolidge proudly proclaimed the business of America is business. Considering economic history after him, however, perhaps a more realistic saying would be this: ever-increasing personal and corporate profits are sacred to the greedy feudalistic business community.
Shortly after Coolidge’s statement was made, the US was plunged into the 1930’s Great Depression, a years-long time of great economic chaos and stress for millions. Still, it was profitable for those US corporations who helped Adolph Hitler rebuild Germany’s war machine. Then, after World War 2 the US became the world’s greatest economic power. The Vietnam War also helped funnel more of the public’s money into the military-industrial class, enabling them in the early 1970s to become even more politically powerful. Earlier we saw how a famous memo penned by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell helped form a plan and direction for that power, made even easier when conservative Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Perhaps the most important economic result for conservatives was lowering the one tax tool necessary for preserving some kind of economic class equality and social health; he helped lower tax rates on the wealthy from about 70% to around 35%, funneled millions of public tax money for increased military spending, and used billions to bail-out newly de-regulated greedy Savings & Loan companies. And of course tax loopholes since then have enabled many US corporations earning over a billion dollars a year to pay little or no taxes! All such results become all but inevitable when economic history is ignored in our conservative public schools.
Popular ignorance about that history, and the ever-growing quest for more money-power, makes it fairly easy to create such tax policies; they are one of the most important ways our wealthy upper class keeps using the government to keep increasing its wealth. Exactly what about these ideas are too difficult for even high school students to understand? In essence, fewer taxes mean more feudalistic corporate power, often used to keep weakening useful regulations and democratic power. People ignorant about that economic reality never knew, much less questioned, how weak the conservative argument was for lowering taxes on the wealthy. Even though the economy worked well in the ‘50s and ‘60s with a much higher tax rate on them, even when income taxes were as high as 90%, conservatives once again merely concentrated their wealth on lobbying Washington lawmakers for the tax rate changes. No need to even debate the issue when campaign donations work just as well?
Socialized tax dollars were also given to the military-industrial complex to help ease a recession in 1980-81. President Reagan called for the peoples’ tax dollars to be so spent, and justified the action by telling people we must keep paying our military to defeat the worldwide communist threat. The public bought the idea; for decades already they had been told communists and socialists were out to take over the world, take away their freedom and liberty, and so they must be defeated wherever possible. So, few in the corporate-owned TV and press even bothered to ask why build more atomic and conventional weapons when any kind of attack meant certain atomic destruction for the attacker? Such questions might actually cause people to think more clearly about what was going on in their own country. Thus, people kept ignoring conservative economic actions. A still grossly undereducated public about economic ideas helped pacify the public into giving more of its tax money to build more useless weapons and armaments; many continue rusting to this day.
Also, beginning in the 1980s, corporate CEOs too did their part to break up union labor strength by simply shipping more good-paying jobs to cheaper workers overseas, and pocketing the profits. Since then wage increases have been little or nothing. As wealth kept concentrating in the upper class, women began joining the work force to make up for lost income while prices continued rising. Fewer labor unions meant workers would be forced to accept whatever wages they were offered, or else work someplace else. And, the less economic power workers had for political purposes, the easier it became to keep control of the government, increase profits and management salaries and bonuses, and of course help elect more conservative politicians and judges to continue our feudalistic wealth-consolidating capitalist economic system.
With more abstract economic studies in high school, it becomes easier for more young folks to learn about important economic ideas, like supply side economics, deficit spending, and economic recessions and depressions. A few words about those important ideas follow.
What Is Supply-Side Economics
To help justify tax decreases on the wealthy, and increased military spending, conservative economists in the 1980s created a new economic model. It was called Supply Side Economics. With its help people were told having a small wealthy upper class was good for the economy. Upper class money would be used to create more jobs and thus make everyone happy; critics soon called it trickle-down economics, or worse, voodoo economics. Once again, a greatly undereducated, compliant, and passive public ignored their small wealthy upper class continue growing more powerful as their jobs and incomes kept shrinking.
That conservative economic model, like laissez-faire before it, also included reducing government regulations and spending to help the poor and needy. Those ideas became an important part of the conservative Reagan administration. “Welfare queens driving Cadillac’s”, for example, became a favorite conservative phrase during the 1980s. No doubt, some people broke the law, registered for welfare money with more than one name, and were getting more money than they deserved. Also, there was no limit to how long some people could stay on welfare, and so such weaknesses should be corrected. But even today, conservatives keep trying to distract attention away from closing tax loopholes and billions of dollars in subsidies for the rich by talking mainly about how those folks create jobs with their wealth, and how bad deficit-spending is for economic health. Many such conservatives today want food stamp spending cut back some $40 billion over the next 10 years while the military continues getting around $600 billion a year! To many of them it’s much better to cut social kinds of spending than it is to reduce military spending at all! Because economic knowledge is still almost non-existent in our public schools and general population, many people will simply accept such ideas and vote for people who support them. Many conservatives believe poor folks are simply taking more money away from the wealthy, and thus helping create unemployment.
So, how good is the supply side economic model? As usual, it depends on the economic class you’re in. As with any idea, the results of that model help determine how good and reliable it is. With it, however, the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown wider than at any time since the early 1900s, not to mention unemployment has, since 2007, increased tremendously, especially among young folks just graduated from high school. In some places it’s around 50%! Their lack of economic skills makes them very vulnerable in the real world. What’s more, with that model in the hands of conservative politicians, the wealthy upper class now controls much of the economy’s income, while their pay and bonuses keep increasing and consolidating their wealth and power. Today, about 40 million people now live below the poverty line, thus reducing even further their real options, choices, freedoms, and liberties in life. So, with their supply side economic model, it seems life has gotten better only for the wealthy.
Also, as we’ve seen, another result of that conservative supply side model has made it easier for corporate money to control even more of Supreme Court which now houses 5 rather conservative Justices. In early 2010 they showed where their loyalties lie. In the infamous Citizens United ruling they added even more political power to our wealthy corporate class. They said manmade corporations are really people and thus have the same rights as people to give money to the candidates of their choice! In effect, it frees billions of corporate dollars for political purposes. To some critics, however, the logic was questionable. Isn’t saying corporations are people like saying any manmade institution is a person? Needless to say, to many liberal today that is indeed stretching the meaning of humanness a bit too far. Would that make state-owned socialist organizations around the world able to donate to US candidates as well? In the next section we’ll see some more results of that Citizen’s United decision on our political structure.
Deficit Spending and the Role of Government
Public debt and deficit spending are 2 more important economic ideas, and have been since the 1930s when John Keynes said the government should even increase its own debt to create jobs and hire unemployed workers. In other words, print money to pay workers. To conservatives at the time such an idea was economic blasphemy. Giving the poor jobs would simply help create more poor people, and thus have more mouths to feed and children to educate. As we’ve seen, since the 1700s a small government laissez-faire economic model had been embraced, thus making it easier to wealthy folks to become even wealthier, so helping the poor would only increase their taxes and lower their wealth. To many conservative even today, such a feudalistic social system is best.
Thus, with the idea of deficit spending by the government, the all-important conservative-liberal fight over the size and role of government has become the defining and fundamental issue since the mid-1900s. During the 1930s Depression conservatives kept insisting Democrats and FDR should limit their deficit spending to put people back to work, which is what economist John Keynes said should be done during a depression. After all, how can people have money to spend and revive the economy when they’re unemployed and out of work? To Keynes, that question was the proverbial no-brainer. What’s more, it didn’t matter what jobs the government created, as long as they created some jobs. That way people would have more money to spend, and would thus help the economy keep growing.
Since the ‘80s and Republican deficit spending, however, conservatives have changed their tune to warning about too much debt and deficit spending. After all, Reagan’s deficits created by unfunded military spending, caused some Republicans to say Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. And if that was the case, then haven’t Supply Siders themselves become Keynesians? In fact, during the Iraq War in the 2,000s, arch-conservative Republican Vice President Cheney said flatly: Deficits don’t matter. The result became the greatest public debt in US and world history, some $15 trillion, give or take a buck or 2, and has also become the main justification for conservatives reducing government spending on the poor. So even high school students can become better at debating what a healthy government role is in the economy.
The Great Recession of 2,007-09
The deep recession of 2007-09 has been another very unsettling and stressful economic event for millions of people, thus increasing the need for more economic information in our public schools. What happened, and why did it happen?
Again, high school students can begin seeing how useful certain economic regulations are for economic health. Certain deregulation of the economic system began unfolding in the late 1990s, in the Democratic Clinton administration. Mr. Clinton is a big business Democrat, so he accepted the corporate goals of increasing international free trade with the NAFTA agreement in 1993, and then a few years later helped end some important economic regulations. Perhaps the most important one was the so-called Glass-Steagall law. It had helped regulate and stabilize the financial sector for decades after the Great Depression, and so became an object of hatred form greedy conservatives always wanted more money. Repealing the law soon enabled huge Wall Street banks to start running one giant investment gambling casino where selling bundles of subprime mortgages to other banks and governments creating yet another housing bubble, a major cause of the ‘07-‘09 recession! All things must end, even selling junk mortgages, and in that process even many huge banks became vulnerable to bankruptcy, and thus possibly causing another world wide Great Depression! No doubt, some liberals today wonder if was it just a coincidence the housing bubble collapsed at the start of a democratic administration? After all, the Great Depression started at the beginning of Hoover’s Republican administration, and they knew the political results of that situation.
Under pressure from a Republican congress, Mr. Clinton helped repeal Glass-Steagall, and allowed commercial and investment banks to merge, thus creating an even more dangerous monopolistic and unregulated financial system. In other words, feudalistic economic power increased! Of course conservative banking CEOs celebrated; it gave them even more freedom to create more selling schemes aimed at separating more people and governments from their money. Selling subprime mortgages was one of them, and debt-reduction packages were another; what government doesn’t want lower debt payments? In reality, however, even the people selling such great-sounding deals didn't know how they worked. It wasn’t necessary. About the only thing they cared for was getting their huge sales bonuses, amounting at times to millions. People were told such investments were sound and reliable. The bubble began bursting in 2007.
For years before that, selling sub-prime housing loans became a way of life for many banks, like Bank of America. For a small down payment people were told they could move into the home of their dreams, and those homes would keep getting more valuable! And other schemes promised towns and cities they could reduce their debts if they would just buy financial products the banks were selling.
For a while housing prices kept going up and so economically naïve people wanted to cash in on the situation. However, when the bubble finally did begin collapsing in 2007, and home prices plummeted along with jobs, millions were left on the hook, so to speak, to pay off mortgages now worth more than the houses themselves! Economists aptly created the phrase “houses under water.” Too bad they weren’t selling aqua lungs at the time. What more, no one even on Wall Street knew how much junk mortgage debt anyone had on their books, including themselves! Who cared when billions of dollars kept rolling in? However, billions of dollars were also rolling out to insurance companies buying some safety from all those subprime mortgages. In some companies hundreds of millions of dollars were needed every day just to pay out to insurance companies!
Being unregulated, government watchdogs too were kept in the dark and clueless about how much risky debt banks were piling up, until the whole mess started collapsing, that is. All his Wall career, conservative Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was a staunch defender of the laissez-faire economic model; government should stay out of the economic sector, and let the market control who lives and who files for bankruptcy! Until, that is, he began seeing the whole economic system start collapsing around him! The major Wall Street brokerage firm of Bear-Stearns, for example, filed for bankruptcy in March, 2008, and, naturally, Wall Street stock brokers began seeing their prices tumble. Huge banks simply wouldn’t loan Bear Stearns any more money to pay its insurance costs.
Just a few months later Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy case in US history, and the following month, in September, the stock market lost over 1,000 points in value. (csmonitor. com) So, being a pragmatist like every smart person is, Mr. Paulson began ignoring all his conservative economic assumptions about a free-market and eventually told a small group of congress people he needed $700 billion the next day or the entire US and world economy would collapse into another Great Depression! Other than that, everything was fine on Wall Street. Probably never before in US history was economic drama any higher than at that moment.
Needless to say, some conservative congress people began ranting and raving about government socialism, but eventually Mr. Paulson would get the money he wanted to prevent another Great Depression. All the while, financial CEOs were making many tens of millions of dollars in bonuses and salary! Even 5 years later it's just staggering for ordinary people like myself to realize what some greedy people will do to keep feeding their money addiction! With Mr. Paulson’s help corporate socialism would rapidly replace any laissez-faire fantasies anyone had about how the economy really works.
Classical economic theory, Mr. Paulson's laissez-faire model, said all those banks and insurance companies should have gone out of business; they made risky loans and so lost their right to stay in business. The market must be free to destroy those who ignore its principles. Mr. Paulson soon saw that result would be disastrous not only for his Republican party but for the world as well; Wall Street is the world’s financial hub.
Eventually Mr. Paulson would get his money and start doling it out to those huge banks with huge amounts of toxic debt. Such a bailout would ensure the banks could keep lending money and doing business. However, those banks have decided to keep their bailout money and instead cause the greatest recession since the Great Depression. In fact, they’ve used some of the money to keep growing larger by buying out smaller banks. Thus a few super-large banks now control over half the money in the US economic system, while millions have lost their homes, and more than 3 million people are still out of work. What’s more, a few wealthy banks continue sitting on over $1 Trillion, not to mention presenting a $15 Trillion debt bill to the American taxpayer! (Help! My word processor may be running out of exclamation ink!!) All such conservative economic actions have thus combined to produce a great number of stressful and dangerous economic results, like huge unemployment numbers, millions of home foreclosures, increased homelessness, and even more wealth for the wealthy! Thus our under-regulated corporate socialized system is revealed in all its glory.
Had enough? For the strong at heart there’s more. Other economic results are even more staggering! We have the largest income gap between rich and poor folks since the 1920s; the wealthiest 1% own more than 35% of all US financial wealth; about 400 wealthy people own more than 150 million poor folks; in the past 6 years middle class wealth has declined about 40%; and all new recent income raises have gone to the wealthiest 1%! (See Ravi Batra’s The New Golden Age.)
There's also more about the conservative 'fixing' of our economic system with government help, to keep profits flowing to our still huge and powerful corporations and wealthy folks. Corporate tax rates, for example, are the lowest they're been since the early 1970s. Thanks to a number of special laws, about 25% of our corporations pay no federal income tax, even though profits are at record levels! As a result, workers must work harder to make up for lower wages, and pay more taxes to lower the deficit! It has reminded some of tax-free religious organization during the feudalistic Middle Ages. Exactly what the difference is I’m not really sure.
Also, the government’s lowering certain taxes paid primarily by the wealthiest, like stock and bond dividend taxes, as well as what are called 'capital gains' taxes, help increase upper class economic power. As a result, rich corporate CEOs earning millions of dollars a year on investments often pay less in taxes than their workers! That’s a fair democratic tax system isn’t it? And to put perhaps the most bitter-tasting icing on this economic fiasco, many wealthy folks too simply avoid paying even those taxes by shipping their millions into foreign banks, like in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands. So again, more taxes from the middle class are needed and fewer services to the lower class are given, to help reduce government debt. Such off-shore tax loopholes are now a common part of our economic system, all legalized by faithful politicians often looking for much better paying lobbying jobs when they leave congress. The educational moral: general economic ignorance of this history keeps allowing it to continue on! Such ignorance makes it almost impossible to elect more progressive liberal Democrats to office!
A recent article by the noted liberal author and reporter Amy Goodman was entitled Poverty Wages in the Land of Plenty, (Truthdig.com, 12-4-13). In it she cites some more exact statistics. She mentions how merely 6 Walton family members, of the Wal-Mart corporation, have a combined wealth of between $115-140 billion which is more than 40% of the poorest people combined! In 2012, for example, their family-owned Wal-Mart business earned around $120 billion, and yet are not paying most of their workers enough to even live on! Students in liberal high schools will start learning such facts, so they’ll be better prepared to challenge such a feudalistic economic corporate system after they graduate, and make it more democratic and public minded.
Conservatives in Washington, D. C. love to attack government programs designed to offset such results, like increasing taxes on the wealthy, and yet their own policies are helping create the need for more government help! Evidently such conservatives feel the more feudalistic a society is, the better it is. To us liberals, however, such a mind-set has no place in our more modern democratic world where, too much has been given, much is expected!
Even 200 years after the US was founded, our economy remains more concentrated and feudalistic than ever before, run from the top down with little care for workers or the public good. For many conservatives, personal and corporate profits have become the modern version of god. In fact, in economics, politics, and education our society is still basically run by a small minority of wealthy folks and corporate CEOs who want nothing more than to keep increasing their social wealth-power, including, by the way, passing education laws like No Child Left Behind, signed into law by Republican George W. Bush. Wal-Mart’s super-rich Walton family, for example, continues resisting any kind of worker unionization. With such facts available to high school students it becomes much easier to ask, how much money is enough?
When liberal economic health isn’t taught in our public schools, and how the government has a vital role to play in economic regulation and tax policy then only a few ask themselves how can our socialized government help reduce those dangers and make life better for everyone? How can we not allow a few people to amass huge fortunes, and keep controlling our political institutions for their own benefit? How can we demand more information from those who would be elected to congress? Fundamental economic questions like those will become much more important as more people keep learning more about how our economic system actually works, and how it can be improved. Informed and educated liberal democratic-minded people are the most intelligent way to keep improving the system we’ve been given.
Economic studies in our public schools will help young students become better able to talk about and seriously debate both conservative and liberal economic ideas. Obviously, to us Deweyan liberals such knowledge should rest on knowing more about US economic history. With such knowledge young adults will begin seeing what our economic history has been, what ideas are important to know, what’s being talked about these days, and also how to become better involved in building a more democratic economy aimed at the public good. In liberal schools elections become all-important. As we’ve been seeing throughout these pages, the movement towards a more concentrated and feudalistic economic system continues growing to this day, and thus menacing more people outside our upper class and those greedy for more power in it. In fact, to many corporate CEOs today competition is one of the dirtiest economic ideas of all, just like it was to many Catholics in the 1500s! Strong Catholic habits created the will power to keep their religious monopoly in place in spite of Protestant and Muslim challenges! In fact, much of Thomas Aquinas’s theological writings in the 1200s were aimed at defeating competitive Muslim religious challenges to his religion and its social monopoly. Time, however, has proved all monopolies grow weaker. One day even modern totalitarian political monopolies will weaken.
Some Final Thoughts
Even such a brief sketch of US economic history tells us Deweyan liberals, economic skills and knowledge can no longer be ignored in liberal public schools. As we’ve seen many times before, such ignorance merely leaves people almost completely unprepared to enter our modern world. Unless workers know how to organize and focus their collective power, and demand more equal power in their feudalistic corporations, in the form of better wages and more decision-making board power, life for millions will continue on at basically a primitive subsistence feudalistic level. Daily life will remain hand-to-mouth living. Without better economic skills and knowledge, it’s simply almost impossible to form and work for more decent economic goals, like building a just tax system, stopping people from sending taxable money to off-shore accounts, sending jobs to cheaper labor markets, building monopolistic corporations, and allow corporations to be treated like people. They are human made works of art, and thus have no human rights of their own. Only 5 conservative judges say they have.
No doubt, to many conservatives those liberal ideas may sound like pure propaganda, but conservative propaganda about economic and educational ideas have been in effect for many centuries now, and look at all the obnoxious social results their schools have helped produce: wasteful prison populations, high youth unemployment, not to mention crime and drug habits. Isn’t it time we tried experimenting with more liberal ideas of both personal and social health? What have we got to lose, except overcrowded prisons, perpetual warfare, millions of unemployed workers, and our present feudalistic society? Such weaknesses might be best improved with Dewey’s main liberal educational goal: to build public schools helping prepare students for life in the real world, where students have the freedom to explore that world and start teaching themselves skills and knowledge useful in it! What better way is there to help make their dreams come true other than with the help of intelligent habits and skills!?
The more students don't know about the economic world, and how valuable creativity and good work habits are, the less comfortable and productive young folks will be in that world. How many young folks feel working at, say, some fast-food company is beneath them, rather than being the doorway to a better, creative, and more profitable life? Sure, it may take some protests and work to make it happen, but then again, what just cause doesn’t require work and effort to build? How many young folks don’t realize the business world is where creativity is celebrated on a daily basis! Even at low wage-paying McDonalds some sandwich inventions were profitable, and some weren’t. Shouldn’t students even be free to make spinach cookies taste better and thus become more profitable?
Admittedly, this is merely a brief sketch of US economic history as 2014 is about to begin. But the harsh feudalistic results of our profit-obsessed economic system is becoming much clearer to millions of people thanks to the great educative powers of our still small and independent press, our socialized and publicly owned Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and to some degree even our corporate TV news media, as shallow as that medium continues to be. Have you watched Sunday News shows lately? Their questions are often like someone throwing flat stones on some water; they just skip along the surface. News anchors ask a politician one question, the politician offers some abstract generalized ideas, then the anchor asks another question, followed by more abstract generalizations. Almost never are they asked to explain what they mean and defend their answers with real evidence. It’s yet another example of how many of those corporate news shows don’t want people learning anything useful about our economic and political systems.
At this point it should be clear how conservatives have continued using their economic power to build and maintain a feudalistic economy useful mainly to them, and also why that system needs to be changed by we the people. In truth, such systems keep creating genuine social disasters, like homelessness, poor people, a much weaker middle class, and a much more powerful upper class. But it should also be clear what liberal goals are worth working for, like more union power, putting more workers on corporate Boards of Directors, putting more students on educational boards of directors, and also liberating our elected politicians from corporate control with publicly funded elections.
No doubt, the most absurd and immoral part of this whole economic fiasco is this. Believe it or not, many conservative politicians, backed by wealthy folks, often accuse liberals of trying to unfairly take money from the wealthy and give it to poor folks! Amazing! It’s as if they haven’t been taking money from the people for decades now. Conservatives often picture the Democrats as ‘tax and spend liberals,’ and often generalize their ideas and say Democrats want to raise everyone’s taxes! It’s gross propaganda, but when economically undereducated people hear it enough they often believe it, and so continue voting for Republicans! Such conservative rhetoric is a great way to continue making people think liberal Democrats are really coming after their wealth, when in reality they're focused on taxing only the obscenely wealthy, called the top 1%!
To liberals like myself, such conservative economic ideas and rhetoric are truly the epitome of arrogance, selfishness, and pure propaganda! And money will keep it happening until enough voters elect people loyal to working for the public good more than for private fortunes. Many times politicians are rewarded by the wealthy upper class when they leave Congress with better paying jobs, sometimes college teaching jobs, and of course very well-paying consulting jobs. So, if you're now feeling there really is an economic class war going on in the US, you are definitely not alone. Millions of voters around the country, both young and old, are becoming more organized and better educated to start dismantling such a stifling feudalistic economic-political system; such liberals want politicians who aren’t afraid to start breaking up monopolistic corporations, making them more competitive, their boards of directors more democratic by including workers on them, and returning wise regulations like Glass-Steagall and others, helping create public state banks to better serve the public good, rather than produce private profit, and perhaps most important of all, amending the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling enabling corporations to be treated like people and use their billions to keep controlling the political system. We liberals now know such conservative judicial and congressional actions are a sign of desperation and fear, not of true caring for all honest and law-abiding people. And the best way to ensure such a liberal democratic system stays in place is with the creation of liberal public schools. They are the best insurance against an on-going greedy conservative agenda. How old do children have to be before they begin feeling what such liberal economic health feels like?
39. REALITY SCHOOLS -- DEMOCRATIC HEALTH
Finally, the 4th important liberal educational challenge is teaching more excellent and forceful democratic habits in our public schools. Democracy’s health itself depends largely on meeting that challenge. Such habits will empower the next generation to better guide and control those economic forces merely working for their own welfare and good, rather than the public welfare and good. After all, our Constitution itself says the government should “promote the general welfare,” and without the people there could be no government.
For us Deweyan liberals, teaching democratic habits are the best way of building a more equal society of rights and opportunities for everyone. With such equality of rights it becomes easier to reduce money’s great power to control more people and institutions in our nation, and at the same time keep building more democratic power-sharing institutions throughout society, in homes, schools, churches, corporations, and the government. Such habits taught all through the public school years will not only liberate our still-enslaved students to feel what democratic freedom is like, but will also ensure their continuation well beyond the life of any one person.
Such challenges are still with us more than 200 years after the nation was founded. As we’ve seen in these pages so many times before, conservatives have continued working throughout world and US history to keep their economic and political power concentrated within a small feudal segment of society, especially in the world’s largest economy and in what many conservatives like to call our ‘exceptional’ nation.
Our feudalist political and economic systems have been described by liberals all through US history, and even after World War 2 when the Cold War was just beginning. Over 50 years ago the Alabama governor was Jim ‘Kissin’ Folsom; the rather flamboyant governor liked to kiss women in public. In a Christmas message one year he said:
“Under … democracy, there emerges … economic barriers among the people. And … a controlling minority group, … through advantages, … obtains great portions of wealth. Wealth means power and influence. … often that influence becomes an evil thing; … it is used for a few, and not for the good of all. … for that reason we must have laws to establish control over power and authority … over forces … based on self-gain and exploitation. … And it is necessary that we have laws to establish a measure of assistance and help for those who are not able to grub out a meager, respectable living.”
Before the civil rights movement in the late ‘50s and ‘60s such liberal democratic values and ideas were alive in the deeply segregated Deep South. Since then, however, Democrats forced an end to racial segregation, and sexual freedom too has grown to the point of legalizing abortion and same-sex marriages; in that process many southern states became much more conservative.
Even for those few reasons, we liberal Deweyans say the more our weakest minority, young students, are freed to start feeling what democratic equal rights are like, and how all law-abiding people should be at least respected, the sooner the world’s oldest democracy will become the world’s strongest democracy. As we’ve seen in the last section, recent economic realities keep showing us Governor Folsom’s ideas ring true today. Our current political system remains largely controlled and guided by our wealthy upper class, numbering only about 3 million people. Economist Gar Alperovitz recently said some 400 wealthy individuals now have as much wealth as around 180 million poor folks. Such a feudalistic economic situation in fact makes liberal democratic like equal rights and opportunities little more than words.
So, the liberal educational focus remains on building healthy feelings, ideas, and habits of democratic equal rights, learning to practice majority rule in schools and even smaller work groups, and also learning how to intelligently challenge, with debate and persuasion, that majority when it’s not agreed with. We liberals say such habits can and should be practiced all through one’s public school career! As we’ve seen in the last section, feudalistic profit-obsessed laissez-faire economic models can no longer be allowed to monopolize our political system, promote the public good, and satisfy basic human needs for everyone – the general welfare! And in such schools all students will begin building their intelligent political decision-making power to, say, build an intelligent and fair school tax system equalizing students’ freedoms and options to keep improving their school and their neighborhood! In fact, beginning with the ancient Greek lawmaker Solon, such democratic political power was designed to give all citizens a more equal share in making important social decisions.
So, like the previous 3 sections, I'll start with some suggestions for the 3 main stages of student development, including a little more political history for more abstract high school studies. No doubt, entire books could be, and have been, written about such democratic habits, but until people put down such books and begin working to liberalize our public schools in their own neighborhoods, most everyone will remain vulnerable to those with more wealth-power.
Based on the last 3 US national elections of 2008, 2010, and 2012, there may at last be a new and more powerful kind of democratic energy alive and growing in our country. And, merely a recent Virginia election for governor, where a Democrat won over a radical conservative, may have finally convinced conservative Republicans the time for their help in building a better working government and economy has come. Such elections, normally on the public airwaves for merely a few minutes, are actually the crucially important political events in our nation. They help people feel the real democratic power they have in their own voting actions. If so, then without a doubt, the next 2 national elections in 2014 and 2016 might well signify another very important turning point in US political history, moving us further away from conservative feudalistic systems to more democratic ones.
In short, these are indeed exciting political times and more liberal parents, students, and teachers can keep that movement alive and growing by helping build public schools where democratic health is celebrated, rather than ignored. For the first time in decades we liberals and independents may now have enough power to start making some major changes and improvements in our still feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems!
Thus, again, the question becomes what actions might young students practice to grow such important feelings and ideas? How can our public schools begin training and educating the next generation to keep democratizing the largely feudal political systems still at work in our nation? To more and more people these days, concentrated decision-making political power is becoming more and more dangerous; the recent revelations about the government collection of electronic data both at home and around the world is merely one example of how fragile our Constitutional rights are. The noted Roman historian Plutarch reminds us, as the Roman upper class continued concentrating its economic power, Roman political institutions became servants of them, rather than the other way around.
The First Sense-Based Stage of Democratic Health
So, what might some sense-based experiences at this level of development be useful for building healthy democratic habits? Even at the first stage of democratic political health students should be free to visit the places where politicians work, study, and debate. They should be encouraged to make a list of questions they would like to ask those representatives, like what do they do daily, who do they talk to, what laws are they working on passing, and questions like that. They should be taken to the places where they work and which were built with public tax money, to see what kind of things can be accomplished with that money. They should also be encouraged to make personal and electronic connections with those representatives, so they can invite representatives to school and tell them about their current projects, and so become a larger part of school life and improvement. After all, constructive student projects will cost money and they control large sums of it. In such ways healthy political student feelings and ideas will begin growing even at this 1st stage of development.
Based on such sense-based knowledge, young students can also start voting to elect their own representatives and form a simple student government. Those students who want to learn more about such careers will volunteer to run for office and perhaps also give little weekly reports about their work as well as ask students what problems they’re having both in and outside of school, and possibly ways of solving them. In such ways feelings for a healthy political community begin growing, as well as feelings about what healthy politics is all about. For example, those representatives can help students vote to decide what plants to grow in the room, on school grounds, and even in neighborhood parks. Sample plants can be passed around the room to learn which ones smell, look, and feel best? Such democratic freedom will not only help students listen to debates about different plants, but also about how to grow them intelligently.
After voting on the best plants to experiment with themselves, they can also vote on creating smaller teams to work in for growing specific plants, like a roses or a tulips team. Even within such teams they can vote to decide how the work should unfold, like what fertilizer to use, what kinds of pots are best, where to plant, and many other questions posed by either students or teachers? They can also be taken to neighborhood plant nurseries to sensually learn more about different plants grown easily in their areas, and growing techniques. Such neighborhood contact will continue building important community connections growing more useful in their constructive 2nd stage of development, helping them build their own school plant and even food nurseries. What public school students shouldn’t help build their own green house where intelligent experimentation in an on-going event and skills like good writing and math habits don’t grow naturally?
With such sense-based team activities it’ll also be easier to students to start forming the questions they’d like to have more information about. Such practical and useful questions are essential for any kind of healthy mental development at any level of growth. For example, where else can we take our flowers to brighten up someone’s life? How can we best teach them how to care for their plants? How often should we contact those people to see any problems they’re having with their plants? All such useful and practical knowledge can start growing with enjoyable role-playing at the 1st stage of development. What young student wouldn’t like to play an elderly person who has problems with not knowing how much to water their plants?
For those students interested in building their singing or acting skills, healthy democratic voting skills can also keep growing: who has the best voices; what would they like to sing; how can we provide the music for them, and a host of other questions. With all such sense-based learning student can begin feeling what real democratic diversity and learning enjoyment is like. In such schools voicing their opinions are a normal part of every day, talking about ways to keep improving their own communities, finding out where to get accurate information about their ideas, voting on how to actually improve their neighborhoods, and even how to intelligently raise the money for constructive projects. Those kinds of liberating and intelligent democratic choices and habits are what we liberal Deweyans say are political health! The more students learn how to intelligently guide their own growth, and intelligently overcome obstacles in that process, the less they’ll need government help later on. After all, our own cities are small versions of larger nations, so why shouldn’t our schools become smaller versions of our cities?
No doubt, once such schools begin experimenting with the kinds of health described here, they’ll come up with many more sense-based political experiences for students to learn more about. That’s the great beauty of intelligent experimentation; no one can predict exactly what the results will be. But in any case, liberal schools will thus slowly begin allowing even 1st grade students to start building their own intelligent democratic powers of free choice, focusing on the constructive and helpful, not the destructive, hurtful, or irrelevant. Such intelligent experimentation will also encourage students to start imagining at the results of their ideas, and then use them as a guide for intelligently choosing which ideas they want to test, and see how accurate their imaginations were. That’s the real enjoyment and drama of experimental learning. In such ways even 1st stage student can begin growing their sense and instincts for on-going work and improvement projects; not all goals can be reached today or even tomorrow. And best of all, learning itself remains as naturalistic in school as it is in real life. And, in such schools, students will also begin growing a sense of personal freedom and responsibility for their actions; they won’t need a teacher’s permission to use the bathroom, or even ask to see and talk to the principal about what they’re doing and talking about? They’ll learn to make an appointment, have a list of questions ready, and be on time for that appointment.
In such naturalistic, student-centered, and democratic schools, students will thus begin growing a sense of freedom for choosing what to study, and how such skills and knowledge are best used helpfully and constructively. If, say, a 1st grader wants to learn more about how to better train a pet animal for some shut-in senior, then it’s the teacher’s job to show them how to do that intelligently, rather than merely talk about the idea. In that way students will soon become more intelligent themselves and begin feeling how all their actions are important. At this 1st stage of development, young children are active sense-based learners, and so the skills and knowledge they learn now builds a foundation for all that’s to come. At any rate, what’s important is starting to grow peaceful and helpful skills with the help of intelligent decision-making, and also making plans for making their helpful decisions come true. In general, then, the ultimate educational goal is to keep student curiosity alive and growing in positive and constructive ways, and learning how their decisions can become more intelligent and respectful as they get older.
Students can even be given a choice on what books they would like to hear and be redd to them first, second, third, and so on. That way there’ll be the all-important emotional commitment to hearing what they want to hear about, and thus learn more about what they want to know more about. Who knows? After that, some may even want to start writing their own stories, and thus start learning more about writing and how to do it intelligently. From such desires have grown some of the best reporters we’ve ever had. In such ways they may also begin feeling how books are an important source of useful knowledge, rather than being the only reason they’re in school.
Also, being free to decide what they want to hear about is another way healthy democratic habits of choice and respect for diversity can grow stronger. Different teams of students will normally want to hear stories about different kinds of things. After all, in the real world good listening and talking skills are very useful throughout life; how else can students begin learning how to talk sincerely, with some humor, and with some confidence and joy as well? Why shouldn't students spend an hour each day voting to hear more about what their fellow student teams are hearing and learning about? The different topics can be written on the board and then voted on. Such intelligent and healthful democratic activities will start building a respectful feeling for what others have to say, as well as a feeling for what intelligent talk sounds like.
Such democratic activities are the essence of respect for social diversity and equality, without which life remains merely a collection of often antagonistic tribes living together – our present world. Such democratic skills help make school something more than having all students keep quiet, read the same books, and answer the same questions day after day after day, even though many don’t need to know such facts? Is making young students learn what they don’t want to learn the source of the old saying: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink!? Such is often the result in our own conservative public schools where healthy democratic habits are largely ignored, and yet parents continue believing that’s the best educational model. Adults are free to learn what they want, so why shouldn’t students be just as free? It’s yet another proverbial double standard passed on in feudal conservative institutions. By what right do conservative educators and politicians tell everyone in a democratic society all students must learn the same body of academic facts, and thereby make de facto slaves of the next generation for 12 years? Feeling such questions cannot be answered reasonably are at the core of democratic health. And to see how hypocritical conservatives really are, they more than anyone else love to use abstract ideas like freedom and liberty. We liberal say it is time we started holding conservatives to their principles of liberty and freedom within our own public schools.
The Second Constructive Stage of Democratic Health
Healthy democratic habits can continue growing throughout these constructive years of school too. They are equally important for building all the democratic feelings upon which abstract political knowledge will become more meaningful in the 3rd stage of growth – the final 2 or 3 years of high school. After all, whether they have children or not people pay property taxes for our schools, and so have a right to benefit with constructive projects from them. And, how many computer-anchored adults would love to have such carpentry and pottery shops open at night for their own constructive, creative, and stress-relieving projects? Or would they rather keep watching people eat bugs on Reality Shows?
So, what kinds of constructive projects can students use in this 2nd stage of development to keep building their healthy democratic political habits? The key to answering that question rests with the general intent of all liberal schools, namely to make school life reflect life in the outer world as much as possible. With that idea comes ideas like voting to keep improving their school government, building a student police force for those students who want to make law enforcement their life’s work, school courts for those students who’ve chosen legal careers, like lawyers and judges, a medical system for students wanting to learn more about body-mind health, perhaps also building a system of better educating those students who, for one reason or another, have chosen to disrespect others or the law, and of course voting on the school laws their representatives suggest.
At this level of development their elected student representatives can have 2 constructive roles to play. One is suggesting new school laws and construction projects; the first helps protect students from others, and the second helps build any new workshops. After explaining to students why such laws and shops are needed, students can then vote on them. The 2nd important role for student representatives is then to reach out into the surrounding government, business, and private communities to find support for those projects. Thus important communication lines between schools and the community remain open and strong. With those roles students interested in a government career will gain valuable firsthand knowledge and experience. In turn, the government and business community can help supply materials needed to keep constructive projects growing, and also creating more ideas about what should be done to make life more satisfying. For example, fixing pot holes can be one constructive project at this level of education, even including teams of girls to learn more about the process of getting the needed materials and also do the needed work. Student representatives can help make intelligent plans, and then ask students to vote for them. Also, student representatives can coordinate repair projects at school as well, under the intelligent supervision of a maintenance department or volunteer parents. Students can even be asked to vote on manning such a department; would students like to make all such work voluntary, or should a drawing-lots system be used?
The building of student police and legal systems is also important constructive work helping build democratic health. After all, their school taxes will pay for such work. Ignoring such habits merely makes citizens more vulnerable for paying into expensive pensions later in life, and thus endangering their own safety. As we’ve seeing today, many states passed such pension deals and now retired workers are seeing such funds evaporate before their eyes. The more we keep people out of such decision-making loops, the more dangerous life becomes for both workers and taxpayers. At this 2nd stage of development students can continue guiding and directing how their school tax money is being spent, and even the need for good tax laws in general. In that way students can also begin feeling how they can control what their taxes are spent on with their democratic votes. Our present republican government system almost completely separates taxpayers from saying and guiding how their taxes should be spent. Considering the recent results of how that system is working out, the need for improvement remains strong.
As students grow older and increase their reading and writing skills, they’ll also have the option of voting to build a school newspaper, to help those students who want to become reporters and writers. In that way they’ll continue feeling how important information and a free press is in a democracy, and how important information about what our government is doing is the key to building a safer and more enjoyable life for everyone. How free and open do we want our government to be? Should they be forbidden from publishing anything our government does, and if not, then where’s the line to be drawn.
With such constructive activities students will also begin feeling how important it is to elect the judges their taxes support and pay. Without that freedom, the entire judicial system remains feudalistic and undemocratic, as is the case with our own Supreme Court! Our conservative Framers wanted such a feudalistic judicial system, and so they built it into our Constitution.
Who should decide what information to print and what to keep secret? Is there any reason to keep any government information secret, and if so, then what is it? In more democratic schools such ideas can be talked about and debated even at this 2nd stage of growth. Should we build a tennis court, a soccer field, a new science lab, a greenhouse to grow more vegetables for the cafeteria, or a pottery shop? Do we need more exercise equipment or not, and if so what kinds? All such questions are more chances for students to see how important it is to look at future results for making decisions about constructive projects here and now, and see how that art is the heart of democratic intelligence itself. Motives may be somewhat important, but actual results are far more important. What does it profit a society to, say, allow the government to collect information about innocent people, either at home or around the world? Can it all be justified with the idea of national security, even while violating constitutional guarantees against freedom of search and seizure? Are so-called whistle-blowers traitors or patriots? Should those who provide information about questionable government actions be protected by law?
Such questions are difficult to answer clearly and concisely; technology keeps creating new powers and abilities. But students can start feeling how important such questions are even in their own schools, where newspapers and information are at work on a daily basis. Without democratic power for deciding what information students should know, the largely feudalistic political system we have in the real world will continue on. In it tax money is controlled not by the taxpayers, but largely by the huge corporations we have today. Students can begin feeling how important and complex such questions are, and then later on begin reading more about how, say, our feudalistic military-industrial system keeps taking hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year to build more weapons and bombs. Is that the kind of economy we want, especially when most other nations have gotten rid of such a system?
Building a healthy student police system would also help students feel what kinds of respectful and helpful habits they need to learn. While learning more about what they want to learn, they can also be asked to vote on how student police officers should be trained? What do intelligent police people act like? Voting to answer such questions would thus continue building enforcement health. Considering how important such habits are in the real world, tomorrow’s officers can start learning those habits today in more liberal schools. Such intelligent law-enforcement skills can be built in more liberal schools, so there isn’t a separation between police and their community, as so often happens. For example, wouldn’t knowing which students have access to dangerous guns and assault weapons be a great step forward for making our schools safer places to learn in? It certainly seems that way to me, given the on-going and increased school violence and killing around the nation.
Also, student police officers can then help students build intelligent problem-soling habits themselves.
We’ve already seen such ideas on anger management in the section on psychological health. After all, why shouldn’t both unjust and unfair laws, as well as unjust and unfair parents, be confronted intelligently as soon as possible; such intelligent democratic skills of respect help reduce frustration and the dangerous results growing from them, like criminal actions for example. Also, intelligent civil confrontation and disobedience is another sign of democratic health useful throughout life. With such constructive habits Mohandas Gandhi helped end over 200 years of controlling and stifling British rule in India, and gain India’s independence. And Martin Luther King Jr. helped end centuries of unfair laws against Africans with similar actions.
Also, students can be asked to think and vote on building their own school jail system. How should they treat students in such a system? Like a life-long criminal, or someone needing to learn more useful and intelligent employment skills? Without such questions in our public schools, we will continue paying for our present inhumane jails wherever they may exist. Students could vote on whether to let such students, say, re-paint the school, or build a carpentry shop where others can learn to make intelligent repairs for projects both on and off school grounds. As intelligent people have noticed since Plato’s day, the time to teach the next generation intelligent and useful work habits is as early as possible. The more our schools neglect that idea, and keep forcing students to read more books, the more expensive jails will be needed, and the more taxpayer money will be diverted from building better schools.
Around the world today punishment is often the preferred way to treat undereducated people, rather than asking them what they want to learn about, and then helping them to make their dreams come true. My guess is such jail systems will not be needed in liberal public schools, simply because students will have the freedom to start learning what they’re interested in, as well as learn more intelligent ways of dealing with those who might be abusing and harassing them. Thus, they’ll have fewer reasons to start disrespect others and our laws. Still, there will be abusive, dictatorial, and controlling parents helping produce frustration and anger in their children, and so learning more about psychological health will be useful. But again, the sooner those parents are identified, the sooner they too can be educated to act more intelligently and helpfully with their children. Here the connections between liberal schools and helpful government child agencies can work together to build more loving habits in parents and children, and thus fewer destructive and disrespectful feelings in children. More educated-oriented jails would be a big step in that direction.
No doubt, to many people such educational ideas will sound so different from the ideas they’ve seen at work in their public schools. That’s because they are so different from conservative education ideas! But, such liberal ideas rest on the best learning psychology conservatives themselves have been practicing for thousands of years already. For thousands of years they’ve known actions are the best way to train young students to accept conservative habits and feudal social systems. With such schools such feudal systems have existed for all that time, and still exist even today. Both democratic and totalitarian governments work better with obedient and passive people.
In more liberal public schools constructive and intelligent community service projects become important for all young students. Actually, before the Wall Street-caused Great Recession of 2007-09, such programs were growing in many schools. For example, California’s Long Beach School District was requiring some community service-learning work for high school graduation. Even though it was only a small 40 hour requirement, it was a great baby-step start for the program. We Deweyan liberals say such work can and should begin even in the lower elementary grades, especially in the 2nd constructive stage of growth, during the 8-14 year old age group. As Behavioral psychology teaches us, it’s best to start building any new habit or institution on a small scale, and then keep expanding such changes as students grow older and more capable of more abstract thinking and learning.
In any case, it remains very important for parents, students, and teachers to know, they in fact already have the right to start experimenting with building such schools in their own neighborhoods. What’s missing most places is the collective power to make that right a reality. It starts happening once a critical point is reached in the numbers of parents demanding such power. To us liberal Deweyans, what’s made the present system last so long are the passive and accepting conservative habits students learned in their schools; nothing more and nothing less! More students are becoming activists too. Almost daily, however, I see reports from around the country how more and more people are finally saying enough; we want more educational freedom for ourselves and our children. Some students in California, for example, refused to continue taking standardized tests as part of their education. Those interested in learning about more ideas for reconstructing and improving our schools, can read John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow. Many of the ideas mentioned here are from there.
One thing seems certain: Not encouraging students to constructively build more intelligent political habits, and thus take a more active and intelligent control of their own schools merely keeps students vulnerable to democratic injustice, bullying, petty theft, and disrespect. The liberal antidote simply encourages students at this 2nd stage of development to continue learning how to build respectful habits even for fair and just bicycle safety laws. What should such laws look like? The more students think about those questions, the healthier their democratic habits become, and the more democratic our nation becomes as well. Should we build a bicycle and pedestrian practice course on school grounds, so young student can begin feeling how important such actions are for everyone’s safety? And if so, where can we get the money and materials for such projects?
How can we expect students to practice such intelligently constructive democratic habits when they’re not allowed to vote on them in their public schools? Should we keep making school grounds places where the grass is watered and cut, or should we start making them places more useful for all students? Would exercise or greenhouse areas be a much better way to use our public school grounds? By denying students the right to learn more about such democratic health, we perpetuate our own weaknesses and excesses. Thus, improving them is like expecting an animal to act a certain way without the proper training; it’s almost impossible. Children at this level may not be instinctively bad, but they also aren’t instinctively good and intelligent either. Like every young animal they’re basically ignorant, and so need useful education and training. In fact, being free to vote on and then build such areas would help children learn how reliable math and science ideas can be used in the real world. To us liberals such ideas are really just common sense thinking, once, of course, our assumptions about learning are common sense based too?
Many educational psychologists say children need to have limits, and know what’s allowed and what’s not, as well as the probable results of going beyond those limits? Building such practical and useful limits is almost completely ignored in our conservative public schools. Why shouldn’t students start learning about building a healthier jail system, where students are free to learn what they want, rather than merely giving them ‘time-out’ in school? This 2nd stage of development is a good time to start learning how to build intelligent political habits. The sooner young students begin feeling how important such democratic health is for everyone’s safety, the sooner they’ll also feel no one is exempt from respecting just and fair laws; just and fair laws should apply equally to everyone, from jaywalkers to serial killers to Supreme Court Justices. For example, a few years ago one married Supreme Court nominee was reminded of his disrespectful behavior with a former female law clerk; she said she was a victim of disrespectful sexual harassment by the nominee, like his pleadingly referring to pubic hairs on a Coke can as a way to seduce her. Such an embarrassment from him eventually came around to him in front of a national TV audience! No doubt, it caused a collective laugh in the whole liberal community, but there’s a deeper lesson for everyone in a truly healthy democratic society. No one is completely exempt from disrespecting both just laws and innocent people. In California over 60% of prisoners return to prison within a few years! For many undereducated people prison has become home. For those running our prisons that’s good news; for them it means job security, and for for-profit prisons it means more money too; what business doesn’t want return customers?
We liberal Deweyans say democratic habits help young children start building feelings of equal justice for all? With such habits it becomes easier to report bullying and harassment of any kind, by any student, to student police officers. It’s good for student safety and confidence as well. Also, if we don't celebrate making peacefully intelligent choices and actions, then war remains an on-going option. With such rewards our business community could be more involved. What business doesn’t need more good advertising: These awards for peacefully intelligent actions are brought to you buy the following corporations?
In this 2nd stage of political development, public school students can start learning what democratic fairness and equality feel like. For centuries undereducated Africans in the US allowed themselves to be treated like Aristotle suggested, like mere living tools and sub-human work animals, as were many women and other minorities. The Chinese workers who built Leland Stanford’s railroads worked on a bowl of rice a day while allowing themselves to be paid pennies a day for their labor! For decades Asians in general were routinely treated as second class citizens, and unjust laws restricted them from even owning land or buildings. Liberal democratic schools help students build habits of fairness and equality, and thus make it much tougher for others to take advantage of them. History tells us until such habits are built, such results will continue working. Such shallow and weak democratic feelings have been perpetuated by our conservative public schools, by merely telling students what to learn and study. We liberals say, in many ways that conservative system is inhumane; educational freedom is reduced to either learning academic book facts or leaving school. And in vocational schools it’s either learning how to run a machine or else leave school.
Nowadays, people still keep giving their tax policy power to their representatives, and such a feudal system of money will continue until enough people demand more democratic power for themselves. So, in our public schools we ask why not let students decide how much to tax themselves, and also what those taxes should be spent for!? No doubt, many conservatives might even be terrified of building such a school system; after all, it attacks the very foundation of our feudalistic political system. But for us liberals such habits are the best way to make democratic equality something more than just 2 words. Why shouldn’t students even at this early stage of development also feel the democratic power to build a public school bank, where school improvement is the aim and goal, rather than merely more and more profits for the bank? In such schools, building more useful services would be much easier, like, say, building a public cleaning service. Wouldn’t it begin teaching students one of life’s important lessons: if we want more services, like cleaning or humane banking services, then taxes need to be collected? Why shouldn’t we hear some 3rd grader working as a janitor yell at a 5th grader to keep the bathroom cleaner, or else his taxes will go up and he might even be cleaning it himself? The more students choose where they want their taxes spent, the more they can feel what it’s like to guide their own school’s growth and development. Do they want their taxes spent on more student police, or on more recreational equipment, on workshops or on library books? How many student police officers and security fences do we need to make our schools safe from unstable and dangerous people?
The Third Stage of Democratic Health—Political History
Finally, at the abstract level of political health, our whole political history of Western civilization becomes a subject for study as students get ready to become full citizens with voting rights. Sadly, however, for us liberals, both our economic and political history are not very pretty pictures. For thousands of years, and to this day, conservatives have worked to keep their political power by denying liberals, as much as possible, the power to keep experimenting with building a more satisfying public good for all. The following is just a brief sketch of some political events liberal high school students might find interesting and enlightening about the world they will enter.
Some Ancient and Medieval Political History
As Aristotle saw in the ancient world, a stable and large economic middle class helps build a stable government. No doubt, when it’s in place people are more hesitant to send their sons off to die in some foreign war, and also inclined to political moderation. In effect, then, he saw the important relation between economics and politics. If the wealthy are too wealthy, they tend to control the political system for their own benefit, and if the lowest class become too powerful, they tend to control it for their own good. The challenge, then, is to make democracy work for the public good, not the good of any one social class. It’s a challenge continuing to this day.
Even before Aristotle, however, democratic power had been growing since the early 500s BCE, with Solon’s Athenian political reforms. However, after it blossomed in the 400s BCE, it became dominated by imperialists like Pericles, who built an Athenian empire of other city states and used their wealth for Athens’ beautification. The Parthenon is merely one example of that policy. Also, in that process, he kept challenging Sparta and her allies, thus creating feelings of fear and separation eventually provoking a Greek civil world war from which Athens and Sparta never fully recovered. Today, we call such actions foreign affairs, and the same dangers still exist here in the US. Military bases around the world keep draining needed funds for domestic improvement, and help breed hatred overseas. How much longer will the US be able to afford spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on its military, while people go hungry and often homeless in the US? Some 60 years after World War 2 we still have an over bloated military stifling the building of a better nation here at home, even though our enemies have been reduced to a mere trifle of what they were in the 1950s. If nothing else, such facts and conditions show us political history continues being a very useful study at this 3rd stage of educational development.
Then, during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), feudalism was the standard political system in Western civilization. It was a class-based system of loyalty from the peasant class up to the ruling class, often dominated and controlled by the religious system described earlier. Certain amounts of peasant crops were taken each year for their feudal lords; those lords, in turn, owed the politically more power nobility and aristocracy knights to fight their religious and secular wars, and of course the aristocracy owed the royal family support against other nations eager for more territory. England and France and other countries warred for centuries.
Within that political system even as late as the 1400s kings too bowed to Church leaders. A series of Crusades during these centuries show how politically powerful the Church was at this time, encouraging a series of wars against the Muslim world. Above all else, the Church’s feudalistic monopoly of political power was to be preserved, and after 1500 expanded to all American primitive tribes. The 1600s, however, marked another major turning point in Western political history.
In the early 1600s, the main challenge was separating religious and secular government from each other. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the main spokesman for the royal family and its absolute political power over all other forms. In his view even religious truth was controlled and set by the sovereign; whatever they said was true. The monarch’s main role was to protect the nation from outside forces, as well as protect citizens from other citizens. In the 1500s England’s Henry 8 declared himself head of a new Protestant Church of England, confiscated Catholic lands and buildings, and Hobbes became a spokesman for justifying such feudalistic political power. Only absolute political power could make aggressive and warring men more peaceful than self-destructive and combative; such was the model of human nature Hobbes built. However, a few short years later, after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, John Locke (1632-1704) ushered in a much more modern political model, one based on representative government and a Bill of Rights for all citizens against conservative abuse. It became the model for the US Bill of Rights about 100 years later.
Some Modern Political History
No doubt, nothing marked the difference between medieval and modern political worlds more than political democracy, even though it began on a very limited scale. Though the Industrial Revolution created a very wealthy and power political upper class in Western civilization, and even though its US version continues dominating the political scene, democratic power has continued growing and becoming a major political force opposing conservative dominance.
After 1600, with the growth of modern science and the decline of religious power, democratic power began growing again, thanks in part to Locke’s politically democratic writings. For him elected representatives should have the most political power, which the royal family became merely a figurehead office. To this day democratic power continues growing stronger around the world as the voting base has kept expanding and more people demanded the right to vote. The amazing Swiss, for example, already have a system of direct democracy, where, if enough people want a law passed, legislators are required to pass it if its results seem reasonable. And of course throughout the still largely conservative Muslim political world these days, millions more are beginning to work for their individual democratic freedom and equal rights! No doubt, such actions warm the hearts and deserve the support of all liberals. For most of the 20th century concentrated forms of political power, on the right and left, have continued warring against each other, and destroying millions of lives in the process.
In any case, however, we liberal democrats love to see long-dominated Egyptian, Pakistani, and Afghani women on the streets intelligently protesting against all those conservatives who would deny them their equal human and political rights and freedoms. After all, the Koran itself celebrates such ideas and Mohammed himself married a Jewess. What’s more, before she was killed in 2007, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto kept reminding her Muslin sisters about 70% of them were still denied equal education rights. For centuries conservatives around the world have known knowledge and democratic equality are their natural enemies, and have worked to restrict both kinds of growth. Clearly, then, in many ways the undemocratic feudalistic Middle Ages is ending in more and more places around the world, in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the US. Even in China, North Korea, and Iran people may soon be building much more powerful democratic movements as well; let’s hope they’ll produce more peaceful rather than violent results.
Since the 1600s the liberal political movement has worked to keep increasing the number of people who can vote. It’s been the main weapon for weakening concentrated conservative political power. In the US, for example, at first only a small number of white land owners had any voting rights, and so most people had little political power for themselves. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay boldly declared: Only those who own the country should govern it. And as white folks continued taking more and more land from Native peoples, the phrase Manifest Destiny convinced many people after 1830 they had a right and duty to build a Christian nation from ocean to ocean as well as take around half of Mexico’s land before the Civil War.
Not surprisingly, then, from the very beginning of the US, the government has worked to deny democratic voting rights to women, poor people, Natives, and of course slaves. Only after years of demanding the right to vote, in 1920 women were finally allowed to vote in national elections, and until only recently were Africans given the same political power. Almost all during the 1800s all such minorities were kept uneducated and economically weak. As in ancient Athens and its empire, conservatives like Plato and Socrates has ridiculed and despised democratic ideas. And even today conservatives still work as much as they can, and wherever they can, against expanding democratic equality and voting rights. Such historical facts are yet another vivid example of how strong conservative anti-democratic habits can become, and how much political power they still have. Conservatives know full well, the stronger democratic voting freedom becomes, the more endangered their conservative feudalistic political control becomes. Just recently in the Wall Street Journal, an article talked about how taxes will go up on wealthy folks around the world, as if corporate taxes moving from 20% to 25% means the end of the world.
Minimizing and controlling democratic power is alive and well to this day. In the US the feudal court system created over 200 years ago still works against allowing people to share political power equally with those who have great wealth and influence. The Citizens United decision in 2010 began allowing corporations to use their great wealth to help elect whoever they wanted. What’s more, because our Constitution is so difficult to amend, conservative power continues stifling majority rule in many ways, mainly by allowing corporate wealth to play a bigger political role! Also, at the state level, conservative politician power to draw their own district voting lines has made it more difficult for more liberal people to get elected. How long those conditions will remain in place is anyone’s guess.
In such ways, the old conservative feudal political world of concentrated monopolistic power lives on even in the US – the world’s oldest democratic republic. Of course, democratic growth has brought more freedoms and liberties in many ways, on both personal and social levels, but to this day, the democratic challenge remains: to keep political power-sharing habits growing and more intelligent! Should honest taxpayers continue seeing their money used for maintaining around 1,000 military bases overseas, while people and children go hungry and without medical help here at home? No doubt, we’ll continue hearing conservative politicians telling many still undereducated people the government is the problem, not the solution; if we only allowed the wealthy to keep getting wealthier, we’d all become wealthier too. No doubt, such conservative economic and political ideas reflect the conservative wing of our upper economic class, and its desire for less government regulation and more money-making power. However, to us Deweyan liberals, such ideas are becoming more laughable every day! Recent US political and economic history both tell us such results have yet to happen, even though the rich have been getting much richer for the past 40 years! In fact, since it began in 1789, the US government has been helping the wealthy become even wealthier.
As we saw earlier, conservative President Reagan told the American people the government is the problem, not the solution. As we saw in the last section, however, the recent Great Recession of 2007-09 was helped by deregulating some key banking laws, helping create an unstable housing bubble resting on millions of toxic sub-prime home loans. In the late 1990s conservatives convinced big business Democrats like Bill Clinton to deregulate certain parts of the banking system, thus setting the stage for that housing bubble to grow. Eventually such banks were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Together with paying for 2 unfunded and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, public debt has soared to nearly $15 Trillion!, even emboldening conservative to keep yelling the economic sky is falling and we must cut back on food for the poor and many other useful social services. So-called austerity politics has become the policy in many Western countries.
Merely those economic facts alone tell us liberals the conservative control of government is the problem, not the solution! Even moderate young folks are becoming more convinced of that idea; they’re seeing rents and student loans skyrocket, wages and jobs shrink, and healthcare costs remain high for many. Thus, for many of those young folks, reducing conservative political power remains the main challenge, even though conservatives continue painting themselves as political saviors and wise people. Recent election results won by Democrats, however, tell us more and more voters aren’t buying such conservative rhetoric and propaganda. Many different news sources are telling such voters the rich are controlling more and more of the nation’s income and wealth, and thus making life more difficult and stressful for millions of people. Political and economic history, too, tell much the same story. In the early 1800s, for example, the quest for more profits provoked the British to force China to allow the heroin they bought in India to be sold in China! Why not Google The Opium Wars to see how vicious greed can become when liberal voting rights are kept small and confined?
More Hopeful Statistics for Liberals
A recent article by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post (4-16-2013) cited more disturbing numbers for conservatives. According to it, the Republican Party has become separated from mainstream American voters by 70% to 23%! In other words, 70% of those polled said the Republicans are now out of touch with their basic values and desires. Is it any wonder, in Republican controlled states they’ve quickly created enough safe voting districts to gain control of the House of Representatives in 2010, and thus produce the least productive congress in US history! It’s yet more evidence conservatives are working merely to prevent democratic programs from growing at all, programs aimed at increasing the public good.
What’s more, in more specific groups of voters, like independents, the political dis-connect between them and the Republicans is even worse! Moderate middle-of-the-road voters register a 75%-20% split for Democrats. And, by a 51% to 46% split, people say the Democrats are more in touch with their more liberal values, like same-sex marriage, taxing the wealthy more, liberalizing our immigration laws, better regulating our huge banks, reducing our military, and passing better gun control laws. On immigration too, the numbers are 64% to 32% in favor of a more liberal democratic policy. Clearly those numbers spell trouble for conservative Republicans, so how is it they still have so much political power in our system?
Basically conservatives use 4 major political tools to slow a more liberal democratic program: the Senate filibuster, drawing voting districts to favor Republicans, re-election financing, and media control.
Until only recently, filibuster was a political Senate tool whereby a minority could effectively kill bills and appointments from going forward; even liberal judges were prevented from being appointed! With it, conservatives have killed more Democratic bills and appointment than were killed in the entire history of the US! Lately, however, that filibuster power has been changed. Now only a majority vote can confirm appointments of judges, but not pass laws. In effect, it’s an undemocratic and rule to ensure feudalistic power remains controlled by a very small political minority of voters, rather than a more just and fair democratic majority. A recent gun control law was defeated 54-46; it simply required gun sellers to conduct a background check on customers. It didn’t get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, even though most people favor such checks.
Secondly, there’s re-districting. As described above, Republican state legislators have designed voting districts to more easily keep electing their conservative politicians to the US House, thus making it almost impossible to pass money bills promoting more jobs for the unemployed and thus increasing the public good. How can people even think about voting when they have no job or money? Many have been using their retirement savings in so-called IRA accounts, but steep penalties for that action helps shrink their funds and increase Wall Street profits. Merely increasing the taxes on the already obscenely wealthiest Americans, or cutting defense spending, could easily put more unemployed people to work on our old highways, bridges, and schools. However, in their quest to keep the Democrats from making the economy more productive and useful, conservative politicians regularly refuse such ideas. They can’t seem to look beyond preserving their own political power by increasing social stress and frustration. Although austerity economics is proving disastrous for people around the world, conservatives in the US continue saying cutting government spending is the best way to improve our economic health. In law school students learn how to delay any kind of legal proceeding, and so if they get elected the same delaying and stalling skills are often used. Meantime, popular frustration with conservative Republicans continues mounting around the nation, as the above poll numbers tell us. Public approval of congress has recently reached new lows.
Thirdly, Citizens United. In 2010, a conservative Supreme Court gave wealthy corporations the power to finance more conservative politicians with their vast wealth. Five conservative Justices simply decreed corporations are people and thus have the same political rights! Thus, highly paid lobbyists regularly visit politicians, suggest and even write laws they should vote for, and direct campaign funds to those who agree. And if politicians don't go along with their ideas, then they just might find re-election money scarcer next time. Clearly, such a feudalistic and narrow judicial and economic system is perverting and weakening a more liberal democratic agenda, and thus helping conservatives cling to their political power. Even though the people got the right to elect their senators in 1913, it’s basically remained a club for the wealthy; most of them are millionaires, and with Citizens United it will probably stay that way in many states.
And finally, there's the large conservative and moderate corporate mass media – the main educational tool and source of political information for millions of Americans. In fact, that situation was noticed in the 1920s, and it became even more obvious in TV news in the 1950s as it helped create fear of communism. On a daily basis TV news reached out into more than 50 million homes around the country. By contrast, only a million or so people were reading newspapers. Little wonder, then, even fifty years ago media journalists like the much respected Edward R. Murrow felt corporate profits kept TV news shows from better educating the public about important events going on in the economic and political world! Thus, they helped prevent people from making more intelligent political decisions at voting time. Anti-communist hysteria, for example, celebrated on TV and in newspapers all during the 1950s convinced most Americans the Vietnam War was necessary for our own national security and safety, even though it was over 10,000 miles away and posed absolutely no threat to US security and safety. The situation might be considered high comedy if the actual results of that war weren’t so pathetically heartbreaking and violently absurd. Before the days when useful public TV stations were created, like the Public Broadcasting System and the Internet, Murrow wrote:
We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the (political) affairs of the nation. ...
Let us dream ... that on a given Sunday night (an hour will be) given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education, and a week or two later ... to a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East. ...
... unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television ... is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us (from intelligent political debate), then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture (of life) ...
(Civil War general) Stonewall Jackson ... is reported to have said, ‘When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.’ The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival. (Lend Me Your Ears, 2004 ed., 776-78; additions are my own)
Murrow was himself fired by CBS for daring to speak out and verbally criticize his own employers. To allow such ideas, as well as his liberal criticisms of radical conservatives like Senator Joe McCarthy, would simply have lost too many corporate sponsors who were making money from Cold War defense spending at the time. Nothing new, really. For thousands of years feudalistic conservative leaders have been creating an endless list of enemies to fight, and wars to keep their populations limited and their incomes flowing.
More recent political and economic events are once again breathing new air into Morrow’s word ‘survival’? The word refers to democracy itself, and the power to convert popular will and desire into real political results! For decades now, these 4 conservative political tools have often stifled and manipulated that will. Of course during the Vietnam War conservatives like Vice-President Spiro Agnew lashed out at the media for being much too critical of President Nixon, for continuing the Vietnam War, for example. Not all newspapers are conservative, or all TV stations either. In fact, the brutal and vicious Vietnam War was the first to be brought into American homes with TV. But, not many news reporters dared do more than merely show footage of it. To voice an opinion against it was considered not only inappropriate, but un-American as well.
For us liberal democrats, accurate and reliable information is essential for promoting intelligent debating and voting decisions; accurate and reliable information rests at democracy’s very heart, and so they too will be practiced on a regular basis in liberal schools, homes, and churches everywhere.
With the corporate take-over of much of our TV news and information shows, the so-called ‘dumbing-down’ of the American public continues even today. Much of our corporate owned TV news shows continue convincing people the Democrats and Republicans are locked in a never-ending debate that gets nowhere and does nothing. Even Sunday news show hosts continue mainly asking politicians about what they think of some issue, like increasing taxes on the wealthy, and after responding in vague and general ideas, then goes on to ask another question. Rarely do hosts ask what exactly do they mean, and to clarify the abstract words they speak with. What evidence do they have for their opinions about higher taxes on the wealth hurting the economy? Without that kind of questioning and debate, even such important political shows remain merely a stream of abstract and general ideas; as Edward de Vere might say: … full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing. Even when opponents offer some objective evidence against their ideas, hosts allow them to simply deny its reality and go on to criticizing their opponents.
What’s more, to save on production costs and increase their profits, so-called reality shows have become more popular on network TV. Millions of people seem to enjoy watching people eat bugs, run around different parts of world, watch contestants answer trivial questions with trivial answers, and gawk at a large number of police shows sponsored by car, cosmetic, and drug companies. Psychologists have known this for decades already: High interest shows and emotion-based advertising promote higher profits!
As we’ve seen before, advertisers’ job is to make people feel they need the product being shown by the attractive woman or handsome man; such images promote emotional identification. Young folks too want to be attractive and handsome, but meantime viewers remain disconnected from what corporations are doing around the world merely for profits! For example, ultra-conservative David Koch has helped sponsor a series of science programs about Australia's 4 billion year geologic history, while ignoring how Australia’s fossil fuels burnt today are slowly helping wreck our entire planet’s biosphere, where we all live! Mr. Koch’s father Fred became a wealthy multimillionaire in the 1930s from Russian oil, and then helped found the ultra-conservative, rabidly anti-communist, John Birch Society in 1958, eventually even accusing Republican President Eisenhower of being a communist! If there isn’t a category of Absurd Political Comedy somewhere in all those awards shows, there certainly should be! Apparently no idea is too ridiculous for some politicians.
More recently, however, Birch’s radical ideas have become much more mainstream conservative. In what way? Well, these days they just want to disband the entire Federal Reserve Bank System! And Koch’s 2 billionaire sons reportedly tried to buy 8 major daily newspapers recently, to help spread their conservative ideas, including the once liberal and highly respected Los Angeles Times. The deal has since fallen through for the time being, with the help of the press, but the trend of conservative media control will, no doubt, continue on. Delivering consumers to corporate products, and moderating public opinion remain important network media goals. Much freer to reflect life is the viewer supported cable network shows.
Modern Political Issues
In liberal high schools, students will be freer to both learn and debate such ideas about the world they’re entering. Debate remains crucially important for political health in any government system. For example, should taxpayers continue allowing their money to support, say, a huge wasteful military-industrial system where $500 toilet seats, $700 hammers, and multi-billion dollar aircraft are paid for even when not wanted, while millions are homeless and unemployed and student debt is at all-time record highs? And if not, then how can we liberals become better organized to deny the government that power? As we’ve seen earlier, over 600 billion taxpayer dollars goes every year into that military system, and yet how the money is spent remains almost completely unknown to taxpayers, much less high school students!
In liberal public schools, students will begin feeling what a healthy democracy is like, and how to more easily find out what tax money is being spent for, and who is getting it! They’re also be freer to organize and demand a stronger voice in saying how their taxes are spent! That power may take the US to the next democratic level of political evolution. Our present feudalistic political system is still designed to keep people out of the public spending loop, so to speak, and thus keep people separated from the fruits of their labor, much as been happening for thousands of years around the world, all in the name of national security, of course. Meantime, personal fortunes keep growing astronomically large and be used to control political actions.
In liberal public schools students will be freer to keep asking their fellow students if such huge sums of money are needed to protect us from a few deranged would-be bombers, who are often convinced by religious leaders dying for religious purposes is the highest form of death. Such questions will help remind everyone feudalistic systems of government continue operating to this day. For those who want to read a very informative article about pentagon waste, fraud, and economic abuse of taxpayers, please see the Mother Jones issue of January-February, 2014. Building more democratic habits in our public schools, homes, and churches will no doubt be important baby-steps helping improve our present closed and wealth-dominated feudalistic political system.
Improving That System
Liberal public schools are a very important part of that process. In them students are taught democratic respect and equal rights should be given to all peaceful and constructive law-abiding people, not just certain social tribes. In fact, liberal public schools can start teaching intelligent democratic habits and skills even in the primary grades, thus building their values and feelings! They are, in fact, the means for fulfilling and sustaining democracy’s great ideals of equality or opportunity and equal rights for all. Why should, say, wealthy students have more freedom to go to college than students from lower economic classes? That system is feudalistic, not democratic. No doubt, voter turnout even in major elections reflects how weak democratic habits still are in our schools. And, through 17 years of my own schooling not one class was devoted to even talking about liberal democratic schools, where students have the freedom and respect to study what they want, or even learn how to use student power democratically to keep making their neighborhoods and cities more satisfying for everyone. For example, the important student anti-war protests in the 1960s and ‘70s were mainly on the college level, and involved mainly a minority of students that could be drafted and sent to die in Vietnam, while believing they were defending the US from communist attack! Mostly, public school students were taught to obey and believe what they were told. As a result, military brutality, as well as racial and sexual discrimination too, remained rife in society and the world. In effect, public school student voices were kept out of the political loop, so to speak. Even after they were drafted into a feudalistic military world they had no Constitutional rights of free speech or equal rights. Such conservative public schools treated students as if they had no right to even think about what peace, democratic health, respect for others, and equal rights are all about. On the other hand, liberal public schools are intentionally designed to politically empower students, not keep them isolated and politically powerless.
Thus, for us Deweyan liberals, the sooner such democratic ideals become a part of public school life, the sooner those ideals will become something more than mere ink on constitutional paper or ancient history. We liberals in the US are already on the way to building such a democratic political system, but without liberal public schools to keep teaching such skills to the next generation, democracy itself can quickly wither and die. Merely a brief glance at how our public schools continue ignoring such skills and knowledge should be enough evidence for anyone.
Our conservative religious systems too keep working against the growth of democratic ideals. For example, many are still telling millions of people today not to feel kindness about sharing their marriage rights equally with same-sex couples! They’re told only their personal habits are eternal and unchangingly True, right, and good, and democratic equal rights are not god’s word.
As powerful and forceful as these conservative systems are, all is certainly not lost; far from it. The result is to keep making adult life more interesting and challenging. Lately, liberals are becoming better at challenging conservative power, especially since the Great Recession of 2007-09. More people are seeing it as yet another episode on our on-going political soap-opera. The liberal Progressive movement gained national power in the early 1900s, in the 1930s, in the 1960s, and more recently. Each time important new improvements were made. For example, one important media event opposing corporate network control occurred in the 1960s, with the creation of a socialistic tax-supported Public Broadcasting System! It was freer to do more in-depth reporting. Liberals like Bill Moyers, and shows like The News Hour, continue educating millions of people today. Despite conservative calls to end it, PBS continues educating the public on a more thorough and in-depth level than most network news shows. Such public shows and their reporting of reliable events here and now keep many conservatives edgy at least, and worried at most. Such shows keep exposing conservative actions, actions which they would prefer to remain out of public view and behind closed doors, so to speak, to keep profits flowing. Such behind-the-scenes actions best maintain a kind of social status quo, rather than democratic diversity! In that respect, however, they are working against nature’s 4 billion year record of diversity itself, as Mr. Koch’s own series demonstrates!
Also, since the 1960s, a very powerful electronic Internet teaching tool has been created in what’s called cyberspace. So far it remains beyond corporate control, but no doubt they would like more control over it. Millions of people around the world are reporting the sometimes disastrous results to corporate actions, like the death of poorly paid clothing workers in dangerous buildings overseas; many work for pennies-a-day while retail corporations sell their products for hundreds of dollars in the States.
Needless to say, that new electronic medium is proving to be a crucially important democratic educational tool, available to most anyone. With it dangerous corporate actions around the world are becoming more easily known and responded to. In fact, without its help, this book would be far less informative and widespread than it is. With that Internet system even students can go to websites and get accurate information on just about any subject, especially the important economic and political actions merely mentioned in network news programs. Thanks to the Internet and the many new liberal electronic news magazines, like Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now, Link TV, The Guardian, and Truthdig. com, millions of liberals, moderates, and independents are now becoming much better educated about conservative economic and political forces shaping our world on a daily basis. In turn, such information is better preparing liberals to oppose such actions. It’s also helping people know more about who to vote for, how to stay connected to their elected representatives, and where to join and stage important attention-getting protests, often reported on network news shows.
Even with such new liberal tools, however, without more liberal public schools, homes, and churches, the conservative agenda remains relatively easy to keep in place. Conservative education laws like No Child Left Behind are merely one example. Our public neighborhood schools remain an essentially important tool for building stronger democratic habits like voting, protesting, staying in contact with our representatives, and holding them accountable for increasing the public good and democratic equal rights. In such schools students learn politics is much more than voting once every 2 years; it’s a continuing and on-going habit throughout life. After all, wealthy conservatives have been practicing their educational habits for thousands of years, and so know how they work. Still, more people are realizing great wealth often isolates people psychically from the social sources of their wealth. It’s one reason Ayn Rand’s novels are so popular for conservatives; in them poor people and the lower classes are almost non-existent; psychically they don’t exist. Thus, it’s easy to see them as a menace to their own conservative power given to them by nature.
In more liberal public schools, however, such an aristocratic psychic separation becomes more difficult, with community service projects, for example. In any case, such schools are not something evolving automatically or by some innate natural law of progress, as even some old Marxists might still believe. For we liberal Deweyans who feel at home in an always-changing nature, there is no final state of political evolution. There is only the continuing, on-going, eternal challenge to keep making life more enjoyable and satisfying for everyone.
In such liberal schools, students will also learn more about how to keep making our own system more democratic and enjoyable. For example, students can begin feeling how many universities are still feudalistic in nature. As we’ve seen before, many Boards of Trustees were merely appointed by people with political power, and thus are often more dedicated to preserving the educational status quo and the flow of endowment funds than anything else. Students in liberal schools will thus more easily accept the challenge to build more democratic universities and colleges, where students and teachers have equal decision-making power on those Boards. In more liberal public schools students will learn not merely to keep accepting rulings and declarations from unelected people, but rather keep working to make them share their decision-making power more equally. Such students know there should be more to our universities than merely building a multi-billion dollar investment endowment. More democratic decision-making on those Boards of Trustees will keep equalizing educational freedom for everyone, not just for a privileged few. Many such Boards arbitrarily keep raising student tuition costs, fees, faculty and administrative salaries, much of which students pay for. In a more liberal democratic system, however, there are more important goals than merely educating the wealthy and increasing student debt for everyone else, much of which will go, once again, to the already powerful financial sector, better known as Wall Street.
No doubt, not all high school students will focus on learning all about our political system, with its weaknesses and possible solutions. But if students start learning about just one of them, it might increase their actions for building a better system. Some students may decide to work in voter registration, and some in overturning Citizens United, but either way the liberal democratic movement continues growing. In liberal public schools such work will be at least as important as football or basketball games. And the more parents become organized and begin demanding such school studies and activities to taught, the easier it becomes to keep making our nation itself more democratic and satisfying for everyone! What better gift can such parents, students, and teachers give to all future students than to create such democratic schools and universities? After all, institutions live on, not people. Before they graduate, such high school studies will make it easier to working and voting for a more democratic system all throughout life. They’ll know better what ideas to support and which to reject, knowledge lacking all too often in the next generation.
The feudalistic political field remains wide and in operation to this day. For example, should our representatives allow our powerful corporations to be largely uncontrolled and unregulated, or should they be better regulated? If so, then in what ways? How much are teachers and administrators getting paid, and what possible economic results might their contracts produce? Nowadays students still go through their public school career and never realize their own schools are a part of the political system; they’re paid for with public taxes and so learning more about them is a good way to continue building important healthy political habits. In such schools students and parents will more easily know what their public servants are doing their tax money. Are they just working to keep the educational status quo in place, or helping make it more liberal? Why should such knowledge, skills, and freedom be kept from any student who wants to learn more about it?
Are local teacher unions respecting public tax monies with their contracts, or are they too out to get as much as they can, as quickly as they can? Such important questions and information are the foundation for all healthy liberal democratic schools, whether public or private, and they’re certainly much more important than merely learning more abstract and irrelevant academic facts and ideas. We liberals say citizens should help empower student governments with real political power rather than merely helping plan proms, pep rallies, school dances, and Arbor Day tree plantings. On the contrary, student and school government should be free and open to any student at any time of the day, and to start learning more about the adult world they will, with luck, one day soon enter.
Also, at this 3rd level of political development, students in liberal public schools will be freer to see the personal and social results of conservative education laws like No Child Left Behind and Common Core Standards! Those conservative laws affect student day-to-day actions, and so are extremely important and relevant. They too are political events affecting millions of students today. Are they really anti-democratic; do they keep forcing both teachers and students to treat mere academic facts as educational gods, to be worshipped and obeyed above all else! Are they merely the result of a still weak democratic social system, where parents, students, and teachers have limited knowledge and thus limited political power to better control their own neighborhood schools? In a healthy democratic society people have a fundamental right to say how their taxes should be spent! Without that right, school becomes similar to paying a doctor or lawyer to say what they think clients should do, without knowing what’s medically or legally best! Again, such a system is feudalistic, not democratic.
We’ve seen a little of the so-called Charter School system earlier, in Section 34, but it has yet to be used to build more liberal democratic schools on a wide basis. No doubt, the more parents and students learn more about a more liberal democratic educational system, the easier it’ll be to start experimenting on their own. Obviously, no one can accurately predict what such schools will look and act like everywhere, but that very fact makes the work dramatic, challenging, adventuresome, and rewarding. In any case, in such liberal public schools, democratic kinds of health will certainly become a much greater reality than they are now. Students, for example, will have more power to continue increasing constructive projects in their own communities, and thus end school-community isolation. In such schools children will begin feeling how active, vibrant, robust, and interesting learning can be when they’re allowed to democratically build their habits of intelligent choice, and experimental learning habits.
Some Final Thoughts
Democratic health itself is people becoming more intelligently involved with their own communities, cities, states, and nation. For example, at the local level, how many slum landlords are keeping people poor with high rents while living in unsanitary buildings, and how can that situation be improved? Who’s dealing dangerous drugs making life much more self-destructive than it should be, and how can they help such dealers become better educated about promoting the public good with more intelligent habits and skills? What students have psychological weaknesses and excessive habits?
The sooner students begin feeling how a healthy democracy works best with concerned, informed, and caring people, the sooner their own lives can become safer and more productive. If we think merely having students read in some civics book about how laws are passed and the Constitution amended, and that’s all they’ll need to know about democratic health and excellence, then we practice the same kind of conservative education model that’s produced dangerous and undemocratic habits for thousands of years. The sooner students learn healthy and intelligent democratic habits, the sooner they’ll begin feeling their own power to help make life more rewarding for everyone. More students will ask, for example, shouldn’t more public money be available for building homeless shelters where people can start learning useful skills and knowledge? Or should we continue allowing fundamentalist religious orgs to get public tax money and keep yelling at the homeless every night to repent and come back to a god they know nothing about? Down through history conservative upper class people have liked such feudal systems; such ideas kept them in power and the lower uneducated classes controlled and dominated. Such political questions about their own neighborhoods will become much more deeply felt in more liberal schools. In truth, with their taxes people gain a right and duty to become equal partners in improving the public good, and will if enough people demand it.
For thousands of years undereducated, passive, and accepting people have continued allowing others to spend and use the fruits of their labor as they saw fit, not as the workers saw fit. In the Middle Ages it was justified with religious ideas of absolute Truth. Has we evolved since those days? Today, millions of taxpayers keep allowing their elected representatives to keep taking hundreds of billions of dollars from them and use them to keep building weapons and bombs, now justified with equally vague and abstract ideas like national security, freedom, and liberty. The ideas have changed, not the systems.
As a result, human history itself has remained largely a series of brutal and vicious wars between equally conservative feudalistic systems. We liberals are now seeing the possibility for growing much more intelligent and healthy political habits, and also for reducing, with a more intelligent tax system, the power of a small class of people to keep controlling the wealth and lives of most everyone else. About 12% of the nation’s wealth is now merely sitting in a few big banks while people are thrown out of their homes for lack of work, and our homeless and prison populations continue growing. Why should people keep giving their tax dollars without having a say in how they’re spent? Improving such a feudal and undemocratic political system remains a challenge for liberals everywhere.
We Deweyan liberals say, the more we students psychically young and naïve about how our political system works, and how it can be improved, the more difficult it becomes to build a democratic nation. So, let’s start empowering our young folks to live more intelligently in the world they’re about to enter. Isn’t it time we brought such intelligent and healthy democratic habits into our own public schools, where children are challenged from an early age to start thinking more about what they want to become, what they want to learn, what’s going on outside of school, and how they can keep improving it?
Teaching such healthful and intelligent democratic skills in our public schools remains another new and modern educational challenge. To some it may sound like too high a mountain to climb, but to others the time has come to start climbing one small step at a time. After all, only people can improve all our still conservative feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems, and build stronger democratic habits in the next generation. No doubt, those are exactly the kind of schools conservatives don’t want, but peoples’ taxes alone entitle them to at least an equal share in deciding how that money is spent. If our political leaders rely on debate and consensus to plan out what’s best for everyone, then why shouldn’t such skills also be practiced by public school students? Why continue denying them the right to learn democratically healthy habits? We have only our own feudalistic institutions to improve. One health insurance CEO at Signa Health Corporation, for example, is reported to make over $10 million a year without ever treating one patient! Clearly, something is drastically wrong with such an economic system. Meanwhile health costs keep rising for everyone, even the poorest. Why shouldn’t the people whose work helped pay that salary also have the power to say how much it should be taxed and used for the public good?
When Thomas Jefferson created the University of Virginia as a secular public school, he helped better unite students with to the real world around them, rather than continue being dominated by religious leaders celebrating their conservative status quo. For secular and Epicurean Jefferson, such a school was the best way democracy could keep growing and getting stronger, by producing a little peaceful and intelligent revolution every few decades. Dewey simply extended those active and intelligent secular ideas to our public schools; he saw democratic health as the result of educating everyone to practice intelligent and healthful democratic habits of choice. Liberals like myself say it’s time to end all such weak and undemocratic school systems; should no students have any individual rights to learn such habits in our public schools? Have they no right to life, liberty, and happiness?
We liberals say people should no longer believe their children will magically acquire, overnight at age 18, strong habits of physical, psychological, economic, political, and healthy character habits without ever practicing them in our public schools! How many hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed in needless wars since Jefferson’s day because such liberal habits of health were weak and ineffective? How can we have a healthy democracy when so little in the way of practicing those habits are encouraged in our own public schools, homes, and churches? Brutal criminal gang activity, greedy economic crime, from Wall Street to Main Street, and drug abuse throughout the nation are objective evidence: our schools, churches, and homes could be helping actively teach more young folks those 4 liberal interrelated kinds of health, helping people become more honest, law-abiding, joyful, and creative! If intelligent habits of liberty, freedom, and intelligent individuality are signs of democratic health, then they must be actively practiced, and the sooner the better.
40. HOW DO WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE?
What Should Our Schools Look Like?
We begin this book’s last section by answering that 2nd question with ideas from both
conservatives and liberals.
Even though conservatives have been preaching the idea of small non-regulating government
since the nation was founded, since 2,000 they have passed major legislation in
Washington working to control more of what students learn and thus what they
think. Many so-called neo-conservatives believe our public school systems
should be even more centralized, regimented, and make students learn more
abstract academic ideas in history, language, math, and science. In essence, it’s a book-centered model, rather than a student-centered model.
Conservatives have also worked to make students take more standardized tests about those abstract
ideas, justifying those ideas with the hope of getting well-paying jobs after college. What’s more, many neo-cons continue ignoring the important relationship between school and many of our unhealthful social problems, like gang violence, youth unemployment, crime, drug abuse, and the rapidly rising costs of a college education. No doubt, many may even admit if we don’t continue building conservative public schools, then we won’t have enough soldiers to keep fighting our enemies both at home and around the
world. Students need to be taught obedience more than anything
else. And the recent Charter School movement has focused on weakening
teach union strength by privatizing more schools and keeping teachers who
continue to teach an essentially conservative program of abstract ideas to
students, many of whom neither want nor need to know such facts, thus ignoring
around 70% of students who don’t go to college.
In opposition to all those ideas stands John Dewey’s liberal model of
education. Even though conservatives have been rigging our public
school systems to support their ideas, and thus giving people the experience of
only one educational model, we liberal Deweyans continue offering a very
different educational model, one based on student needs, rather than book
publisher needs. In such schools children are given a choice about what
practical skills and knowledge they want to learn, while also getting some
valuable training in character development as well as building healthy physical,
psychological, economic, and political skills. In such schools education
becomes much more practical and community-based, rather than keeping students
isolated from their own neighborhoods.
Some Results of Conservative Educational Dominance
Some results in the liberal community have been rather depressing in our current economic chaos and feudalistic present. Not only have many liberals given up on even talking about what
more liberal schools can look like, but have continued focusing on other
democratic challenges. Instead, we more optimistic liberals keep
hearing on our public news stations how bad things are in our public schools,
about our many social problems here at home, and about brutal events happening
around the world, events most people can do little to improve. It’s as if
they’re purposely trying to depress people when public morale is already low and
might go even lower. The overall result is to deflect people from thinking
about how to actually build more liberal public schools. . It’s as
if liberals have completely divorced themselves psychically from any kind of
constructive educational critique.
For example, some people keep telling us our public schools can only get better if the great
economic gap between rich and poor is reduced! Only then will people have
more money to better educate their children to succeed in our conservative
public schools. Although well-intentioned, such talk ignores the basic 3
stages of student development, and how until high school students really don’t
have the mental equipment to use abstract knowledge outside of school, and thus
not learn all they could be learning to live more intelligently in the adult
world. Around the country I keep hearing scattered reports of teachers or
parents refusing to comply with many conservative educational ideas, like
NCLB. No doubt, that’s encouraging news for us liberal Deweyans,
however, supplying the public with genuine educational options, useful in both
poor and rich communities, is the first real and MOST intelligent step towards
building more liberal public schools, and thus reducing the feudalistic
educational, economic, and political systems we still have today!
A recent article by the noted liberal journalist and Public Television reporter Bill
Moyers is a good example of what I mean. I certainly mean no disrespect; I
admire almost all of his work, but merely criticizing our many political and
educational weaknesses, like he does in a recent Truthdig.com article of
12-12-13, is like hiding his head in the educational sand. He doesn’t want
to look around and talk about what liberal parents, students, and teachers can
do here and now to build more liberal student-centered schools. After all,
if someone doesn’t contribute some positive ideas about education, then what
good is mere criticism?
Mr. Moyer’s article does a great job of ignoring educational solutions to our many
social weaknesses, as if public schools have absolutely no power to sharp more
healthful student habits. Martin Luther King Jr. described the vision of a
promised land here on earth, and told us it’s a place where people will be
judged by the character actions, but unless that poetically abstract idea is
embodied in public school character studies, then any such idea will be that
much harder to become reality. Such liberal thinking makes us
Deweyan liberals wonder if our movement is now suffering from a lack of creative
thinking and constructive actions! Such weaknesses are certainly not
the formula for education success in further weakening our feudalistic
institutions and building a stronger democracy.
Mr. Moyer’s quotes some people who continue whining
about the present declining health of democracy in the US. For
example, he quotes liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan:
“We do not have justice, equal and
practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally
accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for
alienated youth, for the urban masses … Ugly inequities continue to mar the face
of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the
struggle.”
And earlier in the article he lists many of the same social facts of
inequality I’ve been droning on about all through these pages. But,
surprisingly, there it ends. Like so many other journalists today, he
merely paints a dark picture of our many challenges, but then leaves it
there. He offers people no real educational choices and options for
building more liberal public schools and their power to liberate student
energies to build more democratic habits in the next generation. For us
liberal Deweyans, neglecting a liberal public school option is neither wise nor
intelligent, especially when Dewey wrote books about such liberal educational
options and choices about a century ago!
Even worse, Mr. Moyers certainly isn’t the only liberal neglecting positive liberal educational models and ideas. Even conservative Libertarians who love talking about freedom and liberty, cut
students out of that loop as well. And we saw earlier in Section 1,
even some liberals are becoming more pessimistic about improving all our
feudalistic conservative social systems with the help of more liberal public
schools, and building a healthier democratic society based on character
excellence, rather than skin color or religion. Hey, we’re all just
people, aren’t we? Again, it’s as if more liberal schools are
completely out of the improvement loop, and are completely
irrelevant. The more parents, students, and teacher reject that
idea, the easier it becomes to start building those kinds of schools.
As I’ve been showing throughout this book, our public schools in every neighborhood are not
only not irrelevant, but are, in fact, essential to any kind of on-going
democratic personal, economic, and political forms of health. In large
part, because education history has been almost completely ignored in our
history books, people continue believing their own public schools aren’t really
an important part of building and maintaining a healthy
democracy. It’s another result of allowing others to select
the books their own children are reading.
No doubt, homes and churches are important education tools too, but until more
liberal schools are built, our democracy remains much more feudalistic than
people might at first think is the case. Where are the history books
drawing parallels between the Middle Ages and today’s world?
So, we continue suffering through a world where
wealth is still controlled by a small upper class, and where a political system
is aimed at making them even wealthier. In truth, however, the more
building liberal public schools is ignored, the easier it becomes for even
liberals to feel as if our so-called democratic republic has already seen its
Golden Age in the early 1900s, and after which conservatives have built an
unchangeable system. It certainly looks as if democratic health has
been eroding on all those social levels, as the rich have gotten richer, learned
how to control more politicians, and keep building a conservative public school
system. But, to us liberals, such events merely define the challenges to
be overcome, not the inevitable fate of all mankind. Such feelings are
encouraged every day in liberal schools, where students have more power to
control more of their lives.
Make no mistake, conservatives have built impressive social systems for increasing their own wealth; the recent looting of public money during 2008-09 is merely one example of that power. What’s
more, our money-obsessed corporate upper class is helping create more enemies
around the world to keep our nation in a state of perpetual warfare, thus
helping increase their profits from public taxes to build more
weapons. Such challenges are real and powerful, but when in the past
5,000 years has there not been thousands of reasons for liberals to feel
pessimistic? Mr. Moyers, for example, quotes the ancient Roman
historian Plutarch (46 – 126 CE) who bemoaned the fact of his wealthy upper
class continuing to control the Roman republic’s political system and keep
making themselves even richer!
What person couldn’t go on about such events all day long, but us Deweyan liberals say it’s
time to start building more liberal democratic, student-centered schools in this
country. They’re the best long-term antidote to all our present
conservative educational, political, and economic feudalistic
systems. So, we come to the crucially important question: how
might such schools be built? Should they be built at the local level by
organized concerned and caring people, or should we continue waiting for enough
national politicians to resist all the economic pressure from status quo
conservatives to start passing more liberal education laws, and helping build
liberal schools? No doubt, the more people become organized to start
building more liberal student-centered schools, the more our national
politicians will jump on board that democratic train, so to speak.
Reform From the Top Down?
No doubt, some rather lazy liberals may feel such schools should be built from the top down, so to
speak. They may feel our federal government must begin building such
schools, and if they don’t, then trying to build them on the local level will be
almost impossible. After all, our entire public school system, with over
50,000 schools and thousands of Charter Schools, are just too many to convert by
local liberal groups, especially in the poor neighborhoods of our great
cities. And not only that, but how can democracy’s foundational ideal of
equal rights and opportunities for all be respected and kept growing when
schools remain controlled by local officials, and often teacher unions remain
satisfied with the conservative educational status quo? No
doubt, many conservative want nothing better than to tell voters in 2014 and
2016 how Democrats are incapable of governing the country and building a healthy
economy, but with the growth of educational freedom and Charter schools, the
educational power at the local level has increased greatly. They have made
it easier for people at the local level to start making their own neighborhood
schools more liberal and enjoyable places for students to learn and
work.
One model for reform at the local level is the early 1900s Progressive Movement itself. If
thousands of local farmers in Texas and other western states didn’t get better
organized and start demanding the government help better control greedy railroad
CEOs, so they could more cheaply ship their crops to market, Teddy Roosevelt
would probably never even have bothered to talk about busting monopolistic
corporations like railroad companies. What’s more, in Washington D.C.
there now exists a very polarized conservative-liberal national law-making
system, where radical conservatives are fighting to block any kind of liberal
growth and change as much and as often as they can. Little wonder,
confidence in our national representatives remains a little higher than 10%, and
might be even lower for helping build the kind of schools described in these
pages! Such facts help us believe the best place to start building more
liberal public schools is at the local level, and the best time is here and
now. At that level, students, teachers, religious leaders, and especially
business people can all be included in that process. At the local
level, maintaining a high level of personal interaction with all segments of
society becomes easiest, and such interaction is best for building any kind of
local improvement.
In short, federal lawmakers may be useful, but not necessary. True, after the French
Revolution and the borders of many nations became more or less fixed, national
politicians began experimenting with more centralized school systems, like
Germany, Russia, Japan and China. Centrally-controlled Chinese schools too
are currently turning out more engineers than any other country; no doubt, part
of it’s because they have a centralized school system. But for us liberal
Deweyans, relying on federal help merely weakens the will to start building such
schools here and now. As history tells us, those nations were often more
interested in regimenting young students, rather than liberating them from
feudalistic systems. Economic class differences are growing both here and
around the world, as are conservative governments. Even going back to
emperor days, China was more interested in regimenting its next generation to
accept all its feudalistic systems, rather than teach liberal democratic habits.
No doubt, before the US Civil War, a more liberal centralized school system
would have helped educate more students about democratic equal rights, and how
all law-abiding people should have them, including Africans. But it just
wasn’t practically possible before the Civil War; the South had too many
conservative representatives in Congress for that to happen, as well as too many
racists at the local level. In the 1980s many conservatives told
people the federal government was too big and even the entire Department of
Education should be eliminated! The idea was alive in Ronald Reagan's
administration with his Secretary of Education Bill Bennett! But NCLB
showed us such ideas were more talk than action.
In fact, real education improvement can happen at the local level IF ENOUGH PEOPLE
WANT IT! Right in their local neighborhoods people already have the
democratic power to start building more liberal student-centered democratic
schools. Once people at the local level get beyond the conservative idea
of mere high test scores and grades being the ultimate education goals, then
building more liberal schools becomes almost downhill from there.
Here’re some more encouraging words about action at the local level. On 4-6-1997, over 5
years before NCLB was signed into law by conservative President George W, Bush,
the Los Angeles Times carried an article by Stanford University education
professor Larry Cuban, questioning the power of centralized education laws to
increase test scores. He wrote:
“This (national) campaign rests on two assumptions. First, public schools’
productivity, as measured by test scores, will spur the larger economy.
Second, poor US (test) results (grow) from a lack of national standards and
tests. Both assumptions are false; corporate and public officials have
pointed to Japan’s and Germany’s schooling as the model. Yet, consider
what has occurred in the l990s. National productivity (in the US) has
risen. The US economy has outperformed both Germany’s and Japan’s.
Unemployment and inflation are lower than in the 1980s. But no awards have
been handed out to public schools.
The bogus connection between (conservative) public schools and economic conditions becomes
glaring when the spotlight shifts from public schools to university
research. Century-old ties between federal and corporate funding of
university scientists have led to the development of commercial products,
medical advances, and defense technology. Such products starkly reveal how
critical university research has been to the larger economy, and how phony it is
to connect students’ test scores to lowered economic productivity (and test
scores).
The (second) flawed assumption -- US
students do less well on international tests because we lack national curriculum
standards and tests (like NCLB) -- shows up most clearly in the recent reporting
of the Third International Math and Science Study for 7th and 8th graders.
Japanese and French students, for example, whose countries have national
ministries and centrally driven standards and tests, scored significantly higher
in math than their US counterparts. Few pundits, however, noted the
contradictions.
Other countries with national
curricula and tests -- England, Norway, Israel, and Spain -- ranked the same as
the US in math. Thirteen year olds from Switzerland, Australia, and
Canada, who come from decentralized systems much like the US, also scored
significantly higher than students from countries with ministry-driven
curricula.
When science scores are examined,
France’s and Spain’s, which have heavily centralized curriculum, fell
significantly below students in the US. Students from New Zealand, Canada,
and Switzerland -- all lacking national curricula and tests -- did just as well
as students from countries with strong national direction for local
schools” (parentheses and emphases are added)
So, even before NCLB was passed there wasn’t any
evidence it would work to even raise test scores, much less better educate
students for living in a democratic capitalist country! There was no
real evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between national standards and
actual test scores. In short, as Dewey clearly saw, educational excellence
depends on whether schools are helping students satisfy their own educational
quest for personal health at the local level, and not on a conservative
book-centered national system of tests, laws, and regulations. So again,
the main challenge for liberal school reformers remains teaching all students
how our 4 basic liberal kinds of health can be used for living well in a
democratic capitalistic society! For Dewey, learning those kinds of
excellence depend on a number of unique and special local conditions here and
now in each local neighborhood! Those local conditions are what make
teaching both a science and an art. It’s a science when based on
individual student needs, and it’s an art because every student is an
individual, with different needs and wants!
Obviously our federal government can help build such a system, like it helped
build a first-rate system of state universities in the 1800s, like Texas A &
M. Today many thousands of native and foreign students study at
them. What's more, federal money also helps finance research
projects at them, like the first self-sustaining atomic reaction built at the
University of Chicago in 1942. But, again, in today’s political world
where wealthy conservatives can control re-election purse strings, liberal
reform at that level is often difficult to occur. As we saw in 2010,
merely one election can change political power from liberal to conservative, and
thus change a national public school reform
effort.
Once again, we see the importance of people at the local level working to build such
schools. No doubt, many parents, students, and teachers are still
undereducated about liberal school options, but the more they keep working
together with the ideas in this book, the sooner such schools will become a
working reality. In them students won’t be intimidated with
promotions and grades to keep learning more academic trivia, or realize such
threats are merely words as they get promoted whether they learn the material or
not. In fact, many school districts don’t have the money to keep retaining
all those students who haven’t learned what they were told to learn.
Many districts now have a standardized test for high school
graduation. It’s currently the state policy in California, and for
the 08-09 school year a little over 43,000 students hadn’t passed both the math
and English tests, while less than 400,000 did pass them. That’s a pretty
good pass-rate, but it still leaves many in a system already over-crowded and
underfunded. Thus social promotion becomes a reality.
The liberal good news remains this: such conservative book-centered schools are certainly not eternal and unchanging; they are merely habitual ways of educating students, and so can be best improved
slowly, one grade at a time, and one year at a time. In other words,
educational improvement can happen, in spite of all the obstacles. Slow
and steady wins the race. Leonardo worked for about 5 years painting
the Mona Lisa and he was one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all
time! Knowing such facts about habit improvement and the great important
of planning, helps make any constructive process more intelligent and easier to achieve.
In a world such as ours, a fact of life many people don’t like to accept is this: only might makes
right! In one form or another, whether it's military of democratic might,
only might can make right. Once the intelligent idea of democratic might
is accepted, then it becomes easier to keep organizing enough people at the
local level to start building more liberal schools. In a healthy
democracy the intelligent might of people-power is the key to keeping
progressive change alive and growing. That fact alone explains why
conservatives have purposely kept poor people ignorant, unorganized, and feeling
helpless in life. Such pessimistic, defeatist, and helpless feelings
are exactly what conservatives in power want people to feel. Upon
such feelings was built all feudalistic societies for the past 5,000 years!
How Can Such Schools Be Built, I Mean Besides Very Carefully?
And so we come to this section’s key question: How
can such schools best be built? No doubt, the first step is the most
important: Organizing enough parents, students, teachers, and especially
retired folks to begin making a plan for 1st grade students, and then begin
testing it on those students. In other words, step by step life’s a
cinch. It’s really not necessary to have a detailed 8 or 12 year plan for
a school system. When students are brought into a new system it’s best to
bring them in one grade at a time. That way there’ll be much less
confusion and stress on teachers and students. And as they go through the
more liberal system, students can also help younger students learn some of the
important ideas they’ve already learned, like intelligent experimental learning,
and useful character habits. Also, building such schools one year at a
time allows parents and students to focus on building a simple plan; they’re
always better than complex plans. Before students even step into a
classroom, teachers and mentors will already have a list of sense-based ideas they want to test.
Also, because these early grades are so important for success in the later years, it’s very
important to have enough teachers and mentors for students, somewhere, perhaps,
in the ratio of 4-5 students for every mentor or teacher. Then,
after a few years students themselves can become mentors to younger students,
especially those wanting to become teachers themselves. In such a plan the
retired community too can play a very active and long-term role. Their
experience, maturity, and humor will help young students learn important basic
skills, and also help keep seniors alert and involved.
With one year plans it also becomes much easier to
build the next year’s plan! Teachers and mentors will have more
ideas about what ideas and activities work best, and be able to keep building on
those. For example, parents may discover 1st grade students in northern
urban schools might like to sense certain winter activities like building snow
forts or having sled races. Then, as those activities become more
intelligent with student-made plans and experiments, they’ll begin learning
intelligent habits useful in their constructive years, like how to build fast
sleds and long lasting snow forts. It can also help prepare students
for, perhaps, building even small places for, say, neighborhood homeless people
to use who don’t like religious people yelling at them day after day to repent
and accept the lord.
What’s more, in much of the world, sled businesses are a good way to make some honest money,
help people get some healthful exercise, and help students become more
knowledgeable about the adult world they’ll soon enter. Won’t workshops be
needed to build such objects? In short, such intelligent flexible
planning one year at a time can make all the difference when building anything;
improving anything is almost always a process of seeing what works here and now,
and what doesn’t, and how to improve the product. So, the less time
is spent in planning what to experiment with, the more difficult it becomes to
actually build liberal schools. And, that brings us back to another
important question: what kinds of planning might happen before 1st grade
students ever step into a liberal classroom?
Again, at these first 3 years of sense-based learning, it becomes very important
to keep the student-mentor ratio as low as possible. Why? Well, in
liberal schools children will be asked to start learning many healthful habits
usually neglected in conservative public schools, like intelligent planning, how
to experiment, excellent character habits, job skills they want to learn, and
start thinking about community improvement projects too. In fact,
all through those first 10 years of school, the retired and professional
communities can remain a great help and asset for building such schools.
They all can help educate the next generation to live and work intelligently in
their communities. Retirees have the free time and the experience to
help young students begin feeling what a healthful and helpful community feels
like, and also help save scarce education funds for other important uses, like
materials and tools for workshops.
Older folks are important for teaching character habits too. Earlier I mentioned a student who tried to change a grade in my grade book, and then offered me money not to say anything about
it. However, when I did tell my Vice-Principal, the result seemed
much less than best. The student was simply expelled for a few days, but
how psychologically excellent was that, or worse, getting paddled?
The student needed ways of intelligently managing the stress and pressure for
grades he was getting at home, rather than merely being sent home to face more
stress and pressure for being expelled! Helping set up a psychology
lab in school would be much more useful for learning more healthful habits for
intelligently confronting parents obsessed with good grades or good looks or any
other parental obsession. Those with some psychology experience can
help students write a role-playing activity, and then practice it, to help
students learn what psychological health can feel like. The school I was
working at simply didn’t have the funds to build a character development shop,
where such students could go to talk with counselors about personal problems,
and practice more healthful habits like talking intelligently to parents who
often act like a little Napoleon or Hitler.
Without starting to learn more intelligent communication skills like that, parents remain dictators and students remain vulnerable to social pressure from anyone. Even in the 1st grade, students
can begin feeling school is a place where their weaknesses can be made stronger,
like simply telling someone they don’t accept their pressure, and if it
continues they’ll get some help in seeing it stops. After all,
even young students have rights like anyone else, don’t they; and if they don’t,
then shouldn’t they? How many elderly mentors would love to play the
role of a demanding parent, and thus help young students build a plan for
talking intelligently with their guardian? Doesn’t that sound like a
much more intelligent way of dealing with unhealthful habits, and start teaching
students about psychological health, rather than merely expelling
them? Expulsion still leaves students psychologically weak and
vulnerable, and worst of all, unable to prevent such stress and frustration from
growing and possibly exploding into violent and destructive actions later on.
Okay, so a planning team of parents, retirees, and older students is in place, and they
begin making a list of all the sense-based activities children might like to
feel during the school year. They can even break the plan down into
months, so seasonal events can be exploited. It might include eating
certain foods, training pet animals, sports, personal beauty, playing with
dolls, or just sitting and talking. Those are the kinds of sense-based
events the school can begin experimenting with in small student teams. How
such teams can be divided up might be by job preferences, or friend preferences,
and then ask students what they might like to see, feel, and know more
about. How many children have the same feelings, and can become a
learning team? After all, in the adult world team work is an important
skill in many ways. Within such common feelings it becomes easier to start
learning more important skills and knowledge about those feelings.
From there, mentors and teachers can begin expanding those likenesses with some imaginative, experimental, and creative questions. Do pet animals get sick; what do they eat; how do they
treat their babies, and so on? Then they can begin answering those
questions intelligently and experimentally. A team of student
chefs, for example, might want to start experimenting with other foods besides
the ones they like, cooking them and perhaps even growing some. A
team of flower lovers can start learning those same kinds of things, as can a
pet animal team, a computer team, or any team more than one student
likes. In that process not only will students begin feeling more in
control of their own lives, but parents too will feel how much of an adventure
it is just building such schools. After all, no one really knows what will
happen after testing starts.
In any case, the on-going challenge in such liberal
schools is to keep students interests and curiosity alive, growing, and
expanding while building intelligent learning skills like creative
experimentation and imaginative thinking, and all the many liberal learning
goals mentioned earlier. The whole atmosphere is to enjoy such
experimental learning, and make it as enjoyable as possible. In such teams
those students who like to talk will be encouraged, but not allowed to keep
dominating the conversation; other students should be encouraged to say how they
feel about what their team is learning, and if it’s fun and enjoyable. No
doubt, such teams will be flexible and flowing, as students from one team will
want to know what other teams are doing. In short, it’s an exploratory
period, but one in which intelligent kinds of exploration begin
growing.
On the first planning team, as many from the business and service community as possible
should be included. That way, children can begin hearing more about what
local firefighters, police officers, cooks, computer programmers, architects,
doctors, lawyers, and any other local professionals can tell them about life
outside of school. It would also be a great way for those people to
take a little break in their usual routines and help answer student questions
about their work. In short, these first 3 years of school are tremendously
important in so many ways; they help lay a healthful foundation for all the more
intelligent work to follow in their constructive and abstract periods.
Unlike quiet conservative schools, student freedom to talk is very important in liberal
schools. Each day, students can be encouraged to stand up and talk
about what their team has been working on, and what new feelings they’re getting
from their work. That way, students themselves will learn everyone’s
feelings are important. After all, our most important human habit,
intelligent and caring talking, began growing about 100,000 years ago, when
human speaking biology evolved to their present state. Such talk
helps liberate subconscious feelings so they become shared feelings, rather than
merely personal. When they’re not allowed to talk and express their
feelings, fears, and hopes, then psychological health itself becomes more
difficult. And when that happens, then intelligent problem-solving
habit-arts are more difficult to learn.
Already by the 1st grade, how many students have problems with their parents or siblings, and if so then
why not help them learn more about psychological health? If young folks
often feel like hurting other children or animals, then shouldn’t they be free
to talk more about those feelings, and how to build more intelligent
feelings? Not being able to freely talk about their feelings helps
make conservative public schools places where students are emotionally
disconnected from themselves, and thus make learning that much more
difficult. And it promotes the feeling schools are places where they’re
ordered around and made to learn what they don’t want to learn. Even
medieval monastery and guild schools weren’t so heartless; they often included ethical studies.
Police mentors can also help
students begin feeling how important our just laws are, and how good ones help
everyone have equal rights and freedoms. It’s another important character
habit liberal schools can encourage during these first 3 years. In
fact, knowing what the law is, and how best to respect it, is a big part of
character excellence itself, and how to live with less stress both in and
outside of school. It also gives students limits to what they should
and shouldn’t do, and what should be allowed and what shouldn’t. The
more students practice those laws in schools, and basic habits of politeness,
the safer and more respectful they’ll be. If such important
character habits aren’t taught at home, school, or in churches, then, as our
prisons keep reminding us, students remain vulnerable to their own weak,
excessive, and unhealthful habits.
Medical professionals too can be asked to visit schools perhaps once a month, to talk with students about healthy diet and exercise habits, and how important they are all through life. Also, seeing
and feeling basic models of human anatomy can begin expanding student ideas
about their own bodies, and also about some of the changes they’ll be going
through in the years ahead. Models of human body parts can be passed
around so students can begin learning more about what’s underneath not only
their own skins, but under nearly everyone’s skin. Some may even
want to build their own clay models, or use whatever building material they
have. Such knowledge increases respect for all human bodies, as we’ve seen
earlier.
Knowledge about what diseased bodies look like, and ideas about how they can be avoided, will also help encourage students to tell their own stories about relatives who may be sick or practicing
unhealthful habits. Is such liberal educational gold really too deep
for even young students to start digging? If it is, then it seems
human progress is a myth and civilized progress is doomed to be rewarding only
for a few, and painful for most everyone else.
Psychologists too can visit occasionally to help increase student feelings about how important their own actions are to their health and happiness, helping create some curiosity about how to intelligently
build such habits. Thus the whole important art of experimental learning
continues opening up. Psychologists can also talk to students about
some of the problems older people have, and what they’re experimenting with to
help improve themselves. Students can also be encouraged to talk
about some of the problems they’re having while building better character
habits, and perhaps get some suggestions for improvement.
As we’ve seen many times before, such excellent healthy habits are important all through life. Somewhere around 50% of all medical problems are really the results of peoples’ own weak, excessive, or
unhealthful eating and exercise HABITS! And when they realize their
own guardian or parents have such habits, then interest in how to intelligently
help improve them can start growing too. What’s a polite way to help
parents eat more healthy foods and build a better exercise habit? Much of
the time important medical services aren’t even available, which means our own
excessive and unhealthful habit-arts are making life more dangerous than it need
be! With such habits people remain their own worst enemy!
Also, encouraging health professionals to occasionally come into local schools
and talk with students makes it easier to seek their services outside of school,
where problems and learning challenges still exist. In any case, students
need to see how knowing more about solving problems makes their lives easier and more rewarding.
The Constructive Years
Planning for these years is just as important as the earlier years, and in some ways is even more
important. These students are becoming more skillful and active, and so
mentor and teacher help in planning safe and challenging projects remains a
major educational challenge. The more students learn about how to
make such projects safe and well-planned before work begins, the safer students
become. During these constructive years students will thus begin
feeling safety is the most important part of the work; to borrow a phrase from
the auto industry, safety is Job #1! With that idea they can
continue feeling how important planning is, and how dangerous acting foolishly
can become. They should see how necessary it might be to assign some
students to a role, at least for the day, talk about what’s expected of them,
like walking safely on the job, working safely, or gathering building materials
for a project. Either way acting as safely as possible is a habit
useful throughout life, and not just in school. In that way they can
begin learning how to safely enjoy their work, and not endanger others.
Such a work plan continues helping students become
stronger and healthier both psychically and physically. For example,
when training pet animals, it becomes important to know what kinds of rewards
are healthful to animals. It not only helps them feel how important
rewards are, but it also helps build a healthy respect for non-human animals;
they can be very helpful for elderly folks who feel useless and
shut-in. And they can help weaken unhealthful and disrespectful
habits some students may already have. In The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn Mark Twain describes psychically twisted men setting cats on fire just for
fun. Fun like that no intelligent, caring, and helpful person should
allow! If nothing else works to educate such people to practice more
respectful habits, then perhaps burning them on an arm or leg would let them
know how it feels -- what goes around....
Also, some students might want to build a school day-care center during this second stage
of development. It could help produce a number of useful personal
and social results for both boys and girls. For one thing it would
help neighborhood poor folks stretch their limited money budgets.
For another thing it would help students see how Behavioral conditioning with
rewards can be used on younger children. Who knows, for older
students who’re going out into the retirement community for their constructive
project, such psychological knowledge would be useful for helping even senior
citizens improve their exercise and diet habits. Who wouldn’t like a
cookie after their workout? And finally, such a school project would be
useful when students start raising their own children.
Think about it. Billions of socialized tax dollars are now wasted every year to jail able-bodied people, over 90% of whom have been excessively punished and thus are psychically disabled.
Also, they often refuse to learn any intelligent and constructive
habit. Learning how best to keep building better habit-arts with
rewards could do much, even within one generation’s time, to begin reducing the
wasteful need for more and more prisons. Such unhealthful actions
can be more easily improved in more student-centered public schools. How
many prison guards would much rather have more rewarding lives as public school
teachers and mentors? If such ideas are helpful, then why
should we remain the slaves of our own less-than-excellent conservative public
schools, like most medieval people did for centuries? Are we to be
the masters of our weak and unhealthful conservative public schools, or remain slaves to them?
In short, the more our schools, homes, and churches help young folks see what constructive and helpful
habits feels like, and how they make life safer, more creative, and more
rewarding, the easier it becomes to raise a more intelligent next
generation. And if neighborhood school work-shops could stay
open longer, then more retired folks could stay more active and creative using
and teaching in them, even if only for starting a new hobby. How
many students and older folks would love to learn constructive pottery
skills? If not, then more unhealthful 'couch-potato' habits seem
inevitable. Such creative and constructive habit-arts best foster what
Pericles said long ago about his democratic ideal -- of acting like lovers to
our cities and their undereducated people.
Students in this 2nd stage of development can start building such intelligently useful
habit-arts. The more they practice them in school, the stronger
they’ll become. After all, around 70% of students don’t go on to
college, and of those that do more than 75% of them never graduate, and yet the
vast majority of them raise children. Psychologically constructive habits
learned at this time will make that challenge more satisfying and
rewarding. Unless unhealthful punishment and excessive reproductive rates
are improved, then weak and unhealthful habits, and serious population problems,
will continue growing and causing everyone unnecessary economic stress, if not
both psychic and physical stress. As drug addicts and many smokers
know, even unhealthful and self-destructive habits are propulsive. We
Deweyan liberals say more useful constructive skills, for building more
beautiful neighborhoods and more intelligent habits, is the best personal and
social antidote for many of our on-going and expensive social problems.
Third Stage Planning
Finally, at this 3rd stage of growth, students will be encouraged to keep reading and learning more about the economic and political world they’re about to enter. Such studies will have been primed, so
to speak, by their previous economic and political practices. At this
stage they can be encouraged to ask more questions about them, as well as also
practice political and economic health as well. After all, democracy is an
active political system; the more people sit back, ignore what’s going on in
their nation and the world, and relax, the easier it becomes for greedy people
everywhere to keep taking advantage of them. Instead of being told
what to read and study, they’ll begin becoming more independent thinkers and
questioners. At this level they’ll be most free to keep learning what most
interests them, either building a product or providing a service. Thus,
the need for adult mentors will probably decline as these students are also
encouraged to help younger students learn the same intelligent habits they started learning years earlier.
At this stage of growth, students will themselves continue deepening their abstract knowledge
about what ideas to make more meaningful, and which ones to make less
meaningful. Not all students will want to become city hall aides, or Wall
Street traders, but doesn’t that reflect life itself? Student
athletes, for example, will continue learning more anatomy, physiology, healthy
eating habits, as well as learning more about how to keep increasing their
skills intelligently and safely. Student doctors and nurses too will
continue learning more about medical ideas both in and outside of school, as
will student lawyers, electricians, carpenters, computer programmers, and so
on. And, for those going on to college, such abstract studies will become
the main activity. In any case, however, for all practical purposes
the differences between school and the neighborhood will continue shrinking to
almost nothing. Student carpenters, for example, may be allowed to
work on neighborhood projects and school projects, as long as they have a plan
and agree on terms. They won’t have complete freedom, but will be expected
to stay in contact with adult teachers and mentors to make sure they’re alright and working safely.
Summarizing
Such is merely a brief glimpse of how liberals can start building more student-centered schools in their own
neighborhoods, schools where students have some control of what they learn, and
also what health means in a money-based democracy. Such
possible educational results make it easier to see why they should be
experimented with wherever enough parents, students, and teachers want to
experiment. Will they work? Well, aren’t such learning
practices going on in millions of homes today? How else are doctor,
lawyer, and carpenters habits learned if not in such ways? If
so, then the potentially useful results to both students and our nation are
simply too important to keep neglecting! For us liberals, body-mind health
is the ultimate educational excellence. To make yet another lame
joke, they’re even more important than coffee and chocolate, at least for many
of us!
The more students learn about such personal kinds of health, the more liberated they become from their own weak, excessive, unhealthful, and stressful habits. And, obviously, the more
intelligent the next generation becomes, the more 'we the people' will become
freer from all the many feudal institutions and restraints still existing in our
world. It's either that, or keep allowing conservative public
schools to keep teaching students more and more useless and abstract ideas,
generally disconnected from life and thus soon forgotten. The more
those kinds of habits are taught, the easier it is for conservatives to keep our
already feudal institutions as politically and economically controlled as they
now are. Two hundred years of US history is certainly enough to
convince me of this fact: For almost all of that time conservatives have
been working to control our political system mainly for their
benefit. Isn’t it time our young folks started seeing all our
wonderfully colorfully advertised corporations as merely modern versions of
feudal fiefdoms, aimed primarily at maintaining an aristocratic class of
obscenely wealthy people!? In many ways, such a conservative class
keeps defending their money-making privileges in much the same way kings
defended their privileges with feudal knights, barons, earls, law courts, and religious ideas.
The more such healthy democratic habit-arts are taught in our homes, churches, and
public schools, the less dangerous become the ‘hells’ of economic recessions,
depressions, wars, poverty, and disease, as well as corporate greed, personal
meanness, and disrespect. The more students learn a healthy person
respects all law-abiding others and our just laws, the less violence and
lawlessness we'll see on our streets and in our daily news shows.
The good news is this: because all such habits are propulsive, once they’re in place
and working, once even primary age students learn them, then the easier it
becomes to keep controlling greedy and dangerous social forces, like predatory
corporations and individuals, as well as enjoy more of life's simpler pleasures,
like the tender touch of a loved one and their encouraging words.
Who knows? The more such healthful habits are taught, the easier it might
be to find a store where a good pair of walking shoes doesn’t cost 2 weeks'
salary! And for those interested in reading about what some people are
doing to protest our constructive public school system, see the article Did This
Little Election Strike a Big Blow to Education Reform?, in the Atlantic magazine
of 10-13-13.
No doubt, our alcohol, tobacco, and drug industries, both legal and illegal, are thankful for
not teaching such excellent personal habits to young students, but does that
mean our public schools should never teach students how to work enjoyably and
intelligently even in school? Isn’t it time liberals in every state
started calling their representatives and demanding the oppressive and overly
conservative No Child Left Behind law, and the Common Core Standards policy, be
repealed immediately, if not sooner? Both laws turn conservatives
who preach liberty and freedom from government into hypocrites! And
what’s more, as our economic history shows over the past 40 years, the knowledge
they claim students must learn is almost completely irrelevant for maintaining
democratic economic health! Even with low student test scores our
economy has, until very recently, remained strong and innovative. Again,
for those not convinced of that fact, see Valerie Strauss’s article Four Lessons
on new PISA scores – Ravitch in the 12-3-13 Washington Post.
No doubt, some students will not choose to learn
all they could, but, then again, who learns all they could? Some
students are underachievers, just like many adults. But everyone wants to
learn something, and whatever lawful habit it is, it’s most important to teach
them how to intelligently and enjoyably learn to use that skill
constructively. After all, how many months out of every year do rich
folks do little more than relax, go on vacation, gamble on the stock and futures
markets, and buy more paintings and sculptures for their collections? Two,
Three, Six?
In a more philosophic model of life, for us Deweyan Humanists, there’s a very important result from
choosing a life of helpful and intelligent experimental learning.
That kind of learning goal is always satisfied; no matter what happens we always
learn something about that goal and how intelligent it was. Thus, with the
goal of experimental learning, we’re always capable of broadening and deepening
life’s meanings, even the meanings of enjoyment and relaxation. So, if we
choose Dewey’s naturalistic path we choose to continue enjoying-improving
nature’s rhythms HERE AND NOW!—everyone’s entire life is lived in the present,
so why not teach ourselves to savor and enjoy this eternal present through which
we all live, for whatever time any of us has? What’s more, that goal
can help liberate adults and children from our present feudal systems, and thus
keep learning how to deal more intelligently with satisfying our own desires and
frustrations. The power for all forms of such excellence is within
our own muscles and actions. We refuse to wait for a better life only
after death, and instead enjoy working to build a more democratic life here and now.
Liberal, moderate, and conservative philosophic models may be practiced in our cities, towns, forests, valleys, mountains, oceans, and even space’s vastness, but only our liberal Deweyan Humanism
celebrates the art of learning how to keep growing and improving life itself
here and now, without promising any kind of reward after death.
Besides, no one knows for sure if there even is a life after death. In
fact, that experimental, sense-based learning habit-art has finally begun giving
us some control over many natural dangers. Thus, experimental learning
helps us feel more confident about living in an always moving, dangerously
stable, and always challenging nature. Choosing Dewey’s educational
ideas can help us consciously FEEL that power in our own actions, and keep
making even our daily actions as intelligent as possible, and to keep building
the person and democratic world we want.
When applied to our public schools, that one experimental learning habit-art is wide enough for everyone, not just to those of some particular sexual, religious, or fraternal “tribe,” but democratically
wide enough for all people. Modern science has recently proven we’re
all descended from the same little tribe of African San ancestors who began
accepting life’s challenge to see what’s out there and make it more
satisfying. Today our great challenge is to continue helping even
young students begin learning and enjoying that same kind of learning
adventure. For us, what’s important are the excellent learning
habits we can teach the next generation, so they will be better prepared for
life in our natural world. In short, we can choose to make the next
generation feel like they’re part of a human tribe, and to continue working to
help others become better and more intelligent at learning itself.
Such liberal schools offer students an infinitely open, creative, and always learning
life and nature, even on a common and ordinary daily basis. Often we may
learn what doesn’t work, but no idea, experimental or otherwise, is always
trustworthy and infallible, except the idea of change. What’s
important is how much we can learn from our mistakes and still keep improving
life. Used that way, our excellent experimental learning habit-art is
educational; it’s constructive actions can help liberate us from staying angry
and tense with our precious energies, from punishing our self with ignorance,
and thus make life more rewarding.
For those who choose our liberal path, building more liberal schools becomes a duty. They beckon students and adults into a daily life brimming with new possibilities, opportunities, and challenges for
making life something it wasn’t before. We can now choose to start
building such schools, one step at a time, into something friendlier, natural,
harmonious, and satisfying; psychically dancing with those feelings keep
deepening life’s feelings themselves. In liberal schools such a
learning habit-art is practiced on a daily basis. In nature’s always
changing and infinite variety, experimental learning offers the opportunity and
challenge to literally create a little newer and more powerful body-mind each
day, and to thus be re-born every day until we reach our natural limits, as all
creatures must. And as those limits keep expanding, then science’s
experimental learning art will continue creating stronger people! Schools
where that habit-art is taught on a daily basis will also teach students to
limit our own numbers, and also build constructive impulses and habits, rather than destructive ones.
To those who choose to build such liberal schools,
the best immortality anyone ever achieves will sprout from the soil of useful
kindness, grow in the good one does for others, and blossom best in the joy and
happiness encouraged with the arts of peaceful democratic equal rights and
healthful experimental science. Who’s ready to make such choices?