More than half of New York City schoolchildren can’t tackle basic English or math, but a congressman representing part of the city has a solution: a “Green New Deal for Public Schools.”
Well, I long ago wrote that education’s three r’s had become revisionism, relativism, and racism, but now we can add a fourth: risibility.
But you can decide to laugh or cry. As TruthOut reports:
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) has introduced a bill aimed at combating the climate crisis while reducing inequities within the public school system called the Green New Deal for Public Schools [GNDPS].
The bill would invest $1.43 trillion over the next decade to upgrade and retrofit every public school building to be more climate-friendly, with a focus on schools with the highest need. It would also invest in expansions of social services at schools and funding for students from low-income families.
“It’s time for a revolution in public education,” said Bowman, a former teacher and middle school principal, in a statement. “The Green New Deal for Public Schools represents the level of school infrastructure investment that is urgent and necessary to heal the harm from decades of disinvestment, redlining and cycles of poverty and trauma, particularly for Black and brown children.”
The legislation has the backing of 22 cosponsors in the House, including members of the progressive “squad” like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). It’s also backed by progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party; education groups like the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union in the U.S.; and climate organizations like Sierra Club and 350.org.
The Hill adds to the story, writing that schools “‘are the best epicenter to be leaders in what climate infrastructure should look like, in terms of sustainable energy, in terms of renewable energy, and in terms of energy sharing,’ Bowman told The Washington Post Thursday.”
The congressman further stated that the Biden administration is “very receptive and very excited” about the deal.
If you ask what this has to do with improving education, some will say that purported concerns about such are just a ruse, that as a Students for a Democratic Society radical admitted in the 1960s, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” There certainly are people thus motivated, too, though they’re a small but radical (and powerful) fringe. Yet there are also those who tell themselves that they do want to improve education.
Now, it’s not surprising that those supporting a GNDPS are often the same people who say “Math is racist”; or that insisting on good grammar is so; or that, as a 2019 NYC education advisory committee to Mayor Bill de Blasio asserted, merit is racist. But while the reasons for such lunacy are many, here’s one seldom mentioned:
Does this not, just a wee bit, smack of the little child who, failing miserably in a competition with his peers, walks off while exclaiming, “It’s a stupid game, anyway!”?
The point is that all the aforementioned left-wing claims and proposals sound like dodges. If you’re failing miserably at teaching kids the three r’s and don’t know how to right the ship — or haven’t the courage to tackle the actual problems — it’s convenient to write off math and English as inconsequential. In our time, the pretext is that the three r’s are r-r-racist products of white patriarchal privilege.
The aim, among the useful idiot educators, is often to fool oneself; then one naturally fools others without even lying. Moreover, people generally want to feel as if their lives have purpose and meaning, and a GNDPS can help satisfy this desire. Spending all that money and instituting all the “new ideas” (which are often just old mistakes) really make you feel that you’re doing something. It’s a revolution!
So like a magician, these modern reformers (again, often fooling themselves) use misdirection — “Watch the right hand! The right hand!” — to distract from what’s really going on with the leftist hand, which represents a fatally flawed system that should be rent root and branch.
So many things, over the years, have served as distractions. We often heard “Schools need better technology,” as if being able to access the Internet and one million times as much information as a student could absorb will ensure he’ll absorb the relevant sliver of information he must. We heard “The buildings are too old” from big-city educators who, when buying a condo, consider “pre-war” status a plus. We hear “We need new curricula and pedagogies,” as if humans are now a different species and what worked 80 years ago couldn’t possibly bear fruit today.
What does work? As I often mention, we need a return to curricula and pedagogy oriented toward virtue (not “values”), which refers to the set of good moral habits. Part of this would be the educational application of the virtues fortitude, justice, prudence, and diligence, which would help eliminate a major impediment to learning in today’s schools: The permissive, wild, undisciplined environment that prevails.
“Education should be exercise; it has become massage,” observed physician and author Martin H. Fischer. Schools massage students’ feelings and massage their egos as they try to massage some performance out of them. Discipline and obedience are not only lacking in today’s schools — whose character often ranges from babysitting center to minimum-security prison — the concepts are actually considered antiquated. Yet those two things are prerequisites for education. Why? Well, how can someone learn from you unless he is first willing to listen to you? Listening precedes learning.
Unfortunately, educators won’t listen to the above. Too many teachers lack virtue themselves, common sense is very uncommon, and pseudo-intellectual pseudo-elites won’t learn from a past they view as the worst thing something could ever possibly be: conservative.
