Leila Rosen, English teacher and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
As a person who attended the NYC public schools, and proudly taught in them for 29 years, I’m thankful for the existence of public education. And I’m outraged at the huge and growing effort to undermine American public education—an effort by people who want to use schools for profit.
In several issues of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss has described with exactitude and passion both the kindness of public education and the cruelty of the drive that’s been going on for more than a decade to privatize America’s public schools. What she describes can help everyone understand not only the beautiful, ethical basis of education, but also the state of mind of those who want to privatize it. Ms. Reiss writes, in issue #1448 of this journal:
The coming to be of public education and compulsory education—education for all children—was a tremendous victory of ethics in human history. Humanity’s biggest fight, Aesthetic Realism shows, is between respect for reality and contempt for reality. This fight goes on within every person; and it has also been the fight in history itself. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” He showed that contempt is what all cruelty comes from; and it is the thing in us which weakens our minds.
Public education and compulsory education are not the same, but they are fundamentally connected; and both represent the victory of respect for people over contempt. Compulsory education for all children was a saying, after thousands of years, that every child has the right to knowledge. It is based on the oneness of self and world: the idea that the world as knowable is inseparable from the self of everyone, and therefore everyone is compelled to learn. Public education is based on the opposites of one person and the manyness of the nation. Public education is the saying that all the people of a land owe it to a single child to have knowledge come to him or her. It is also a saying that a child’s need for knowledge should not be exploited for private profit.
And she explained, at the start of the 2014-2015 school year, why the drive to privatize our nation’s schools has continued and intensified:
In recent decades, as traditional venues for profit-making have fared ill, persons have looked for new ways to use their fellow humans for private gain. Behold—that huge ethical achievement in human history, public education! And the profit-seekers thought, “There’s a whole new industry for us here!” The one reason for the enormous effort to privatize America’s public schools—and that includes through vouchers and through charter schools—is: to use the lives and minds of America’s children to make profit for a few individuals.
This use of public schools is related to the effort to privatize public sector work in various fields throughout America: to have public monies used—not for the American people, not to respectfully employ public sector workers—but to finance private enterprises. And through it all, again, a big aim is to undo unions so workers can be paid less and the money can go instead to some private-profit-maker.
Read these two important issues of The Right Of:
- #1448, “Education: Ethical and Beautiful,” with the first section of a great lecture by Eli Siegel I want every teacher to know about—Educational Method Is Poetic; and
- #1883, “What Education and the Economy Are For,” which includes an article about the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method by NYC social studies teacher Christopher Balchin.