A Twenty-Year Veteran Prepares to Leave the Rickety Structures of Public Education

Abstract

he founda~ton of thought upon which public schools are based is as rickety and rotten as the old grandstand where TIplayed when I was a child. The wooden baseball stadium f my youth was rebuilt years ago, yet very little has changed in public schools since the beginning of the century. The education system in the United States was set up to provide a reasonably educated work force for an industrial society. The mass production system was designed to prepare the top 25% to go on to further education, and the balance would exit to become laborers. In our technologically complex global economy, the majority of our need to be taught communication, computation, and thinking skills equal to the top 25% from a system that is not designed to serve them. The world has changed dramatically, but the system has stayed the same. Watching what is happening to the other 75% of in public education is what has made me want to escape from a job in which I feel like I am merely pretending to educate my students. After teaching for 20 years, it is not easy giving up a job I love to do. I have held out my hand and offered my heart to high English and drama students, year after year. I love those bundles of energy, most of the time. But the system in which I work is a structure that needs to be torn down and replaced. Rather than stay, I have made my decision to leave. When I was little, I pretended to be a and my played a guessing game. In my neighborhood of mostly boys who did not invite us to play ball, we girls played school in the grandstand overlooking the field while the boys took over the local park's baseball diamond. My students started grade seated on the bottom bench. As teacher, with my hands behind my back, I would juggle a pebble between my left and right hands, then swing my fists around and ask each individual which fist held the pebble. If she tapped the correct fist, she passed and moved up a grade. The stadium had exactly 12 tiered rows of seats, so my could actually graduate. The first to graduate could then become the teacher.