Letters to the Editor
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@ ondelette
I share the sense of outrage you so eloquently expressed in that last paragraph. As we all know, though, our public schools, by and large, resemble those in the last season of The Wire more than we'd like to admit.
For this we all bear some share of responsibility. You can't blame it all on underfunding, as we tend to do, or on the entrenched interest group represented by teachers' unions, as the right does.
As a parent confronting it over the years, I've identified all sorts of bad ideas, and a wide assortment of culprits, from overly ideological parents to undereducated and underpaid teachers. I remember a school librarian of many years experience lamenting to me that by the time the left got rid of Huckleberry Finn, and the right got rid of Judy Blume, she had hardly anything left on the shelves.
At the heart of all these manifestations of failure, I've come to believe, is the lack of a unified cultural narrative which at the same time includes the experience of all Americans, not just those who were an absolute majority at the end of the Civil War. We've wrestled with this for a long time, with more heat than light so far. Is it to be the melting pot; is it to be cultural diversity?
Now that Europe is finally wrestling with similar issues, perhaps some helpful suggestions may be found there, where school systems are smaller, and cnsequently better-funded, and school administrations are more centralized (not that centralization is a good in itself; in fact it is often the opposite, but I would argue that it makes controlled experiments easier to conduct and assess.)
We shall see -- sooner, I hope, rather than later.