Joanna says," I care about education because I don't like children to be tortured in order to justify profiting off public education. Better schools might not end capitalism, but it might help future citizens feel like they shouldn't be treated like crap.
A lot of things won't end capitalism, but that doesn't mean we can't fight for justice in whatever sphere we happen to inhabit." I agree with this wholeheartedly. But we were tortured in public schools. Denied even the partial development of our capacities, prepared mainly, as I said earlier, for the shit life to come. I had to chuckle when Alan Rudy talked about the teachers who helped prepare him for Swarthmore. I can guarantee that had he grown up as I did, he would never have gone to Swarthmore, no matter how good his teachers and no matter how smart he was. Neither he nor the teachers would have even known of that college. I absolutely hated elementary and secondary schools. I felt tortured every day. And we were treated like crap everyday. I wrote my PhD thesis on public school teachers' unions in Pennsylvania. I had a lot of hope, after analyzing over 500 collective bargaining agreements, that the unions would fight for more control over their work and in the process the schools would get better, and so forth. I was certainly naive about this. So I wonder how we might get better schools in this society. How, as long as inequality is so great and so intractable, how it will ever be the case that the majority of students won't be treated like crap. Now we have to fight on whatever fronts we find important to us. In the cities but in the cornfields too. In the schools, in the unions, everywhere.