Students Are Not Sausages

Three Essays on American Public Education: a Critique, a Pedagogy, a Manifesto.

Critique: "In America teachers are floor supervisors. They are hired and utilized to get the work done. The work to be done is the creation of students as sausages. We want them to be identically shaped and identically stuffed with the established ingredients in the correct proportions, so that, prepackaged, they may be delivered to the digestion of the economy."

Pedagogy: "Based on a lifetime of learning and a career of mainly teaching the “discouraged” learners who are “placed” in one of our “Alternative Learning Centers”, I have developed a point of view and methodology for teaching that replaces textbooks with discovery and dialectics and replaces standards with questions. While this point of view and methodology lacks orthodoxy and regimented instruction, it is nonetheless classical and vetted by a long tradition. Discovery and questioning are the beginning of all understanding. Dialectics (and its critiques) originates all knowledge. Discovery and Dialectics are the essence of philosophy in the Western tradition, the crux of theology in the Abrahamic tradition, and the discipline of the Buddhist monk and the Taoist mind. They are the method of discourse, reason, science, and self-realization."

Manifesto: "The underlying argument for these proposed efficiencies is that public education is widely understaffed and poorly staffed. This is not indictment of my peers. It is the condition of their employment that they are too few, too overworked, too underpaid, too undereducated, with too little time to prepare good lessons or individualize teaching as they should, and receive little help in teaching day to day.... What I propose is a further extension and deeper focus: to address the broader issue of child welfare and parenting....This calls for diverse services to support parents and children: daycare of course, after school programs, health care, mental health care, social services, community education, recreation centers and libraries .Additionally, the manifesto calls for an expansion of educational objectives for youth. Students may enter the work force or colleges at younger ages. Students should be afforded the opportunity of public service; ideally, it should be encouraged and expected."