The Circle

Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Opinion

Though I'm confident broadly-privatized education will be presented to the public as the solution to all its pedagogical problems, nothing could be further from the truth. For several simple reasons, education needs to be kept public. Private education institutions, it is important to remember, are, in essence, the incubators of social inequality. In time, they will also contribute significantly to the loss of individual power and the descent of emphasis from proper subjects in favor of those thought to be more important by whatever private forces influence these new education systems. It is also highly significant to recognize that the government is, at least in theory, accountable to the public; corporations are not. They can operate freely and independently from progressive education legislation that has taken generations of fighting to acquire for our children. Privatization will effectively neutralize the hard-earned victories of over a hundred years of activism with the effortless swipe of a pen. These are the issues at stake; these are the reasons we must wrestle public education from the jaws of predatory politicians and prevent it from being consumed by the oversized megacorporations that will most certainly convert it to waste.
Realizing and appreciating the magnitude and urgency of these injustices is important, but acting on realizations is another thing unto itself. Dissuading government from behaving against public interest is becoming an increasingly difficult endeavor (implicit testimony to who government actually represents), but it is not impossible. Exemplary victories exist, though at this point they are not as large scale as are the crimes they combat, but they are still hard-won and significant. The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University has actually researched and written a comprehensive account of individual cases that have been brought against the federal government and won; it also goes into detail about how to take education back from those who have stolen it. The document, called "The Unraveling of No Child Left Behind: How Negotiated Changes Transform the Law", can be useful, but not as useful, I believe, as grassroots action. People need to get involved with education. If we want our children, and indeed all children, to have the highest quality education possible, we must be vigilant about hunting down and exterminating anything that attempts to undermine this goal. This sort of vigilance requires social action, solidarity with teachers and administrators, involving the kids themselves in the struggle to protect their own education, and overall a side-by-side forward movement of each of these groups in an effort to restore democracy and resist oppressive legislation like No Child Left Behind.

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