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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Education: All Children Left Behind I think one of the great tragedies (and travesties) of our American lives is our educational system. The recent debates over intelligent design versus evolutionary theory confirm the American failure to truly educate their children. I wrote this blog on February 3, 2005 as a direct criticism to the Bush initiative known as "No Child Left Behind." My idea is that we are training our children to be good consumers and good transit material for the economy. We are not educating. We certainly aren't teaching them about creativity and imaginal thought. I don't know what is happening with either the Mythic Imagination group or Pacifica's MA program that combines myth and education. I have not heard of any gains from either group since February 2005. I suppose I despair that myth will ever be truly taught in the public school systems of America. In any case, these ideas still rile me up and my brother (the high school teacher) tells me that teaching in publics schools in America is worse then ever. You can see this blog as an early, foundational thought that has been expressed in numerous blogs since. No Child Left Numerous factors and ideas have to converge every morning when I sit down to blog. There are mornings where I simply have no idea what I want to write about while other mornings, I wake with a firm idea. This morning, it was the convergence of a number of ideas, incidents, and conversations that got me thinking about education. Here is how it went. In the last month, my brother (a high school science teacher) and I had a rather dreary conversation about the state of public education in this country and the increasing pressure put on teachers to ensure students pass standardized tests, with little regard for teaching students to actually learn any kind of independent skills of reasoning. About two weeks or so ago, I made the decision to remove myself from the Mythic Imagination Institute's Education committee. My decision was based on the flood of emails that had to do with meeting educational standards and giving educational credits (something I'm really not particularly interested in). The issue of standardization seemed to take a strong priority over the idea of mythological thought. I'm not blaming the folks of that fine committee - how can they possibly be successful in today's educational climate without dealing with the expectation of standards programs? Yesterday, I blogged on the fact that teachers are increasingly opting out of teaching what many consider to be standard scientific theories, like evolution, because of the pressure and influence of creationists who really want to turn belief into fact and theory into another kind of belief. According to the NYTimes, increasingly, teachers in public school systems are afraid to teach the theories of evolution, even though these are foundational to many scientific discourses going on in the world today. Yesterday, I received a brochure in the mail from Pacifica Graduate Institute , about a new 2-year program that is a combination of Mythological Studies and Education. According to the brochure, its purpose is to offer "...a strong grounding in theoretical approaches to myth and depth psychology...[giving] educators the opportunity to explore the exciting world of archetypal study while deepening their professional skills, invigorating their teaching and furthering their educational credits." This morning, I woke up to Mr. Bush's State of the Union Address (no, I didn't watch it, I watched Hellboy instead ). As I read the text of his speech, something started to click in my mind about what is happening to education in this country. Bush said: To make our economy stronger and more dynamic, we must prepare a rising generation to fill the jobs of the 21st century. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, standards are higher, test scores are on the rise and we're closing the achievement gap for minority students. Now we must demand better results from our high schools, so every high school diploma is a ticket to success. We will help an additional 200,000 workers to get training for a better career by reforming our job training system and strengthening America's community colleges. Ok, so now I think I finally get it. There are large groups of people in this country who think that the purpose of education should be the ability to test well on standardized scores so that we have more fodder for a rather depressed and depressing economic base. In other words, the point of education is training for a job in which there is no chance to be imaginative or creative. Instead, workers should be encouraged to standardize their knowledge and skills. "Scientific" testing will ensure that they reach the standardize level of skill. In such a climate, I wonder about the potentiality for success of educational programs like Mythic Imagination's and Pacifica Graduate Institute's. They are preaching to the choir about the importance of myth. How do these ideas reach beyond the minority of people who think myth and imagination are important even if they are not "useful”? Because if anything, myth is never standardized, and never particularly *useful*. Nor should it be. It used to be that getting educated had to do with being "lead out". The word educate, is from the Latin e - duce, to lead out. Lead out of what, you might say? The idea was that when one became involved in an education, that they would be lead out of the darkness of a self-contained ignorance and instead become opened up to a world of critical thinking and imaginative processes. In the process of learning how to think and imagine, one learns to create and be innovative. It is easy to see that part of the problem in the United States is that there is a loss of innovative, creative, and imaginal thinking. Ultimately, the economic growth of this country will not be based on how many children can pass a standardized reading or math test, but rather on innovative and critical thinking. As we become more standardized, we're losing imagination. As we become more focused on job skills, we're missing out the potentiality of ideas themselves. In the end, we're training children for hopeless futures in which being a useful citizen and a useful employee will ensure a useful life. I applaud the efforts of Mythic Imagination and Pacifica in bringing out programs to educate educators about the power of mythological thinking. But I'm not convinced of their success in this climate. Because they'll educate people in myth who will go back into school systems that can't even insist on teaching widely accepted scientific theories. And truthfully, how much imaginal work can a teacher introduce into a classroom when funding and even a teacher's tenure and compensation is based on performance on standardized tests? How can children be imaginal when they are already being forced into a straightjacketed system that insists that they be standard. The answer is not in teaching the teachers, but rather in broading the ideas and messages and dealing with the fears of a fearful populace who want their children to be useful and successful. In the meantime, I'm sitting here writing blogs that are of "no use" to the great polis of the United States. I'm not being a "good little girl" or a useful worker or consumer for the economic welfare of the state. These blogs are blogs of critical thinking and imagination - a great "to do" about nothing. Let's face it; no one's going to pay me to think imaginally and creatively unless they think it is useful. And I'm tired of a culture of use.
Poster Comment: I didn't watch it, I watched Hellboy instead BWAHAHA!! Hellboy is a tuly mythic film, although it's more Catholic mytholgy than anything else. As for the article, like Maggie, I utterly despise the modern education system. If I could, I'd burn down the schools and salt the ground, then pepper the teachers who supported the whole monstrous thing.
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#3. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Not surprisingly, a gimmicky proposal by Shrub sounds a lot like Senator Rigby's "Everyone Eats Food Act" in the Onion
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