Today at the college we all walked out at 11 to protest budget cuts to education. I took the class out the the quad and told them not to leave the rally until the normal time for class to end, sat on a bench where I could hear but not see, and ate my lunch. Then the events moved to city hall and I met my afternoon class, who had been given the choice of going downtown and writing about it, coming to class and writing their representatives, or just coming to class and doing their homework. Or making up missing work, which some always need to do.
I did demonstrations a lot when I was young. Now I don't go places where I have to stand too long and there's no bathroom. And the truth is that my heart isn't 100% in this one.
Not that I support the disintegration of public education in the state of California.
It's not so awful to have to bring your own chalk and work around the fact that some of the students can't afford the textbook, which I had to do back in the Peace Corps when I was first learning to teach. The strategy and intrigue required to get stuff (like class time in a computer lab for instance), is also familiar from those days, although the specific goals are different now, and back then you could figure out who to bribe and how much--a carton of Marlboroughs from the Navy base commissary often went a long way. Here, in my own culture, I grope to figure this out. Nor do I really mind having to explain to recent high school graduates the difference between the Roman Empire and the British Empire (the history of western civilization does not seem to be prominently featured on the STAR tests). The differences are kind of interesting, quite apart from the time line on the board, and I'm always encouraged when they don't know a thing like this and somebody in the room has the curiosity and gumption to ask.
But public education developed because the founders of our democracy realized that it wouldn't work if too many people were ignorant and illiterate. I am haunted by the idea that public education and functioning democracy may go down together.
At the same time, clamoring for more money to buy chalk and books and all the rest of it isn't going to have any more effect than it would have thirty-five years ago in that dusty little market town on the edge of Sahara. Now, as then, there isn't any money. The question to address here, and now, is why there isn't any money; how the richest country in the world has managed to squander its fortune and now must settle for a third-world education system.
