Will The USA Ever Care About Education Again? #OccupyWallStreet and the Argument For Education

I understand the Tea Party’s fascination with the educational system in our country. It’s a well documented fact that the NEA is a very strong union, and very strong unions support the left very strongly. And then those ivory-tower-eggheads (or pinheads if you prefer) ram all those socialist, atheistic, liberal ideas into the poor unsuspecting children of good God-fearing Christians. And the science (also liberal!) also shows conclusively that the more education you get, the more likely you are to be a liberal. 

But the Tea Party, by most accounts, is only about 11 % of the population. While I will grant you that a much larger percentage are anti-education Republicans, is there really a majority of Americans who now believes that education is the problem, rather than the solution?

I look to the largest growth of wealth in our country, and the largest growth of the middle class: the “baby boom” after World War II. An excellent case can be made – and one few in the right wing would disagree with – that the GI bill, and low-cost college education, went hand in hand with the technology boom and our country’s increasing dominance on the world manufacturing stage.

I won’t go into all the “Good Christian” reasons for destroying public education here, and I also concede that there is little big-business support for higher education left, as more technical work can be done much cheaper in India and China. I wonder if it is even something the left is even still fighting for? Once again, Nicholas Kristof becomes our national Moral Compass:

Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.

Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

It’s a critical argument. Occupy Wall Street has started a real discussion among the middle class. I hope we are turning our attention to reality again; that we can have reasonable discussions about important things, not just shouting matches. And that will take some education.

Read the rest here: Occupy the Classroom – NYTimes.com.