Brooklyn Boro

Howe’s Brooklyn: How to save public education

August 27, 2015 By Sam Howe Brooklyn Daily Eagle
howes_brooklyn.png
Share this:

This concept could easily be called “A Modest Proposal” because it might be just as outrageous to some as Jonathan Swift’s bitter, biting essay about the Irish famine. But having heard some of these ideas about education, I want to pass them along to our readers. I hope that some will shoot me…that is, shoot me an email with good reasons why it wouldn’t work.  

—SH

* * *

If every family, regardless of income bracket, nationality or religion, were required to send their children to the local public school for K-4, a transformation in education could occur.

Subscribe to our newsletters

First, with so much more “skin in the game,” all levels of society would be forced to rally behind the highest level of training and preparation — and funding — for the teachers it would take to make this work.  

Second, the curriculum would be required to exemplify the old adage “an ounce of prevention….” thereby providing the strongest possible base in early education for the broadest spectrum of society. Those families with wealth or motivation could choose to move on to private schools after grade five; but they and their less fortunate comrades would have been forced into mixed exposure in an enriching educational experience that might prove to become the “pound of cure” society has shown to need sorely.

Third, research has shown the power of educational stimulation on young minds, even in infancy.  A more rigorous and required curriculum, universally available — and universally supported — would most certainly pay off later.  What follows is an offensive example, but nonetheless, one supported by statistics: a rich guy with kids in such a curriculum could point to a less-fortunate classmate of his child and say to himself, “By supporting this universally-mixed curriculum, I am preventing this other kid over here, or that kid over there, from a lifetime in prison.”  This concept — spend a buck now to save a hundred later — is something good government SHOULD do but does not, because  adequate levels of accountability are lacking.  Just look at the woefully low percentages of people who vote.

A forced communal early education system, as communistic as it sounds, would make a stronger democratic citizen base later. In society at large, degrees of polarization, gaps in educational abilities and communication, could become greatly diminished.

Finally, private schools and their endowments and physical plants need not suffer. The opportunities of choice need not suffer. All of those things we say are so valuable — freedom of choice, freedom of opportunity — are only enhanced if they proceed from a stronger base of solid early education. And the only way to ever fund it, in a democracy, is to force the rich to have skin in the game.

Readers with comments should email [email protected].


Leave a Comment


Leave a Comment