Jesus effing Christ what the hell does it take to be understood, much less have one's words treated well, on this list these days?! I never once made any claim that school was a good or enjoyable experience or that I was treated with respect! In fact, the primary thing I said and the only point I was making is that teaching teachers to know and teach their subjects better wouldn't solve anything because what mattered was the social milieu within which schooling occurred - which is, I believe, your point, Michael!
Nor did I indicate that my teachers had ever heard of Swarthmore - I was the first kid from my pretty darned elite public school to go there. My brother was tortured (he ended up in Beloit's writing program) and my sister radically misunderstood and abused (she ended up institutionalized from depression after three semesters at Reed) by the same school system that treated me well - or treated me well by their lights. I was a multiple letter-winning athlete in the National Honor Society and AP classes who figured out early that the leaders of the schools and my cohort were somewhere between fascists, ignoramuses and assholes but that I could make my life easier by choosing my battles… After a couple bad experiences in primary school, I lost all respect for Principals and their minions but saw no way to win against them so I focused on never getting caught at my little resistances and staying out of their way as much as possible… for me, it worked.
Furthermore, after a number of my teachers showed that not only did they know infinitely less about the topics they were teaching than my parents - all I had to do was write a report on Nixon's red-baiting and corrupt history in early 1973 and watch my teacher's reaction, do a report on the Cambridge, MA, recombinant DNA controversy soon thereafter and then try to learn math from an anal-retentive creep in 1978 - I stopped expecting to respect my teachers. Did I mention the psychotic ex-Marine soccer coach (or his dickwad assistant who took ever the next year [and we, effectively, got fired by not "winning for him"]) after we won a state championship - with 7 starting sophomore - almost completely out of fear of the ex-Marine?
> 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.
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Where oh where did I say anything that might have stimulated this? I don't expect for a minute that most unionized teachers have much if any commitment to understanding the history of labor or labor unions, much less why there are public employee unions - hell, most of the PhD-weilding unionized university professors I work with want the union to defend their status and salaries but do not see themselves as unionists… and most are not interested in democratizing the university much less society more generally. At the same time, and I believe this was Marv's point a while back, and some of Shag's point a few minutes ago… there are lots of things to work on, some revolutionary, some not… most are worthy of the work, most are going to be local and most are going to fail - at some level or another - and they're all in this society until another, better, one is made.
> 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.
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Again, this was my point, all of the problems in education are about inequality, overworked and underpaid parents, decaying community infrastructures, wholly contradictory responses to manufactured fiscal crises, competitive high-stress testing for everything, and so on ad infinitum, not teacher quality.