A Note to My Readers
With the placement of this article, I now
provide the third of several snippets that you will read from PART THREE:
Philosophy, of my new book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future
Prospect.
Please now read this article, in which I
discuss the benefits to individuals and to society via the great purposes of a knowledge-intensive education.
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Job
readiness is one of three main purposes of an excellent K-12 education. Students must be prepared for a life of
professional satisfaction, in which they can earn incomes adequate for
maintaining a family in what we conventionally regard as middle class
circumstances. This is very important
for me, inasmuch as a chief goal of mine in giving my students an educationally
challenging and stimulating experience is to advance their economic prospects
for an adulthood in which they have ended the cycle of generational poverty
that has trapped their families---
ancestral and contemporary--- for
many decades extending into the present.
Education is the key to ending cyclical poverty.
But just to
escape poverty is not to be happy or fulfilled.
The happy
and fulfilled person is alive in the world of knowledge. She or he can go to a production of A
Street Car Named Desire or A Raisin in the Sun and have a sense
of the place that Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry occupy in the realm
of American drama. She can tune into Cosmos
and be alert rather than lost as Neil Degrassey Tyson, the great
popularizing successor to Carl Sagan, traces the evolution of humankind from
creatures who emerged from the sea and adapted through natural selection to
circumstances of the earthly terrain. He
can continue to be animated by the musical worlds of hip-hop, rhythm and blues,
rock, and country, while still appreciating the genius of Mozart, Beethoven,
and Chopin. She can understand how Sigmund
Freud and B. F. Skinner each challenged the assumption of free will--- and thus evaluate whether our approach to
criminal justice actually operates on sound principles of human behavior. The happy and fulfilled person has a sense of
her or his place in a world history that has known the Tang Dynasty, the
Togugawa shoguns, the emperors of Songhai, the mathematicians of the Maya, the
architects of Anghor Wat, the empires of the Mediterranean world and of
European ambition, the genius of a United States Constitution that nevertheless
required the responses of Frederick Douglass and A. Phillip Randolph and Gloria
Steinem.
Education is
not just a matter of professional satisfaction.
Education is also a matter of cultural enrichment. But that’s not all.
The purpose
of education is also civic preparation.
People in the United States live in a nation that is the envy of many
people across the globe who yearn for democracy. And yet too many people in the United States
do not understand the electoral college system, how primaries differ from
caucuses, the constitutional principles that inform the debate between liberals
and strict constructionists, the roles of the House of Representatives and
Senate when considering a process that leads from impeachment through trial for
a president or other federal official accused of “gross crimes and
misdemeanors.” People who have no or
little knowledge of the organizational efforts of Sam Adams, Harriet Tubman,
Floyd McKissick, Bella Abzug, or Saul Alinsky have no appreciation of the power
that lies within themselves if they were to exercise their full rights of
citizenship.
Instruction
in those features of history and government that prepares a person for
citizenship is a key component of the purpose of education. The exercise of citizenship animates a person
for the pursuit of causes beyond the self.
Understanding how one may act to advance one’s own rights is important,
and that is a part of civic preparation.
But civic preparation also entails an understanding of one’s own
demographically defined group, how that group fits into the body politic, and
how the rights of the individual, particularistic group, community, state, and
nation fit into the complex weave of the polity. When a person is given the factual information
necessary for embracing the responsibility of citizenship, the chances are
enhanced that a person’s civic responsibility will be exercised both to enhance
personal dignity and to promote human betterment in concentric movement from
the person all the way out to the nation as a whole.
And a person
with a strong sense of self, a grasp of the civic ethic, and dedication to the
lives of people in the larger community, is a person whose own purpose in life
is multifaceted. She or he moves forth
with a firmness of ego that allows for altruistic commitment to the greater
good.
One who has received
an excellent education will go forth to a life of cultural enrichment, civic
preparation, and professional satisfaction.
Cycles of poverty will end and society will be transformed by a culturally
sophisticated and civically engaged populace.
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