Minneapolis Public Schools Teachers and Administrators Rather Than Students Bring the Worst Problem from American Society Into the Classrooms of Our Public Schools: Lack of Respect for Knowledge and Abominable Ignorance

Members of the education establishment frequently maintain that teachers and administrators cannot be held responsible for the problems of society that students from economically and functionally challenged families bring with them into the classrooms and hallways of schools.

 

My essential response remains the same:  That mission to educate students of all demographic descriptors is precisely what makes K-12 public education such an opportunity for the teacher and administrator who comprehends the importance of their professional response to those problems of society.  Just as a physician has an obligation to do everything possible to heal people suffering from severe diseases, and an attorney has the responsibility to help those charged with serious infractions of the law, so the educator in a democracy has the responsibility to provide a knowledge-intensive education to young people of all demographic descriptors.

 

Lately, though, I have observed that society is indeed a problem, but with regard to teachers and administrators who are a subset of an abominably ignorant and ethically suspect populace in the United States.

 

Having detailed the deficient skill and knowledge sets that students possess when they first enter the New Salem Educational Initiative, I now increasingly contemplate just how knowledge-deficient and intellectually languid the general citizenry is in the United States. 

 

Consider the percentage of the populace in the United States that would understand the following:

>>>>>     the concepts of empire and nation, when the latter emerged, and what vestiges of the former remain

 

>>>>>     the synchronicity of Judaism and Hinduism as seminal belief systems that served as progenitors of other major world religions

 

>>>>>     how the founding of the United States represented an effort of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to put the ideas of the Enlightenment into practice 

 

>>>>>     how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that frustrates attempts to arrive at a two-state solution is rooted in the Balfour Declaration and a British white paper as responses to the Zionist movement in the second decade of the 20th century

 

>>>>>     how the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein challenged from different perspectives the conventional understanding of humanity, in terms of the determinates of human behavior and the place of humankind in the cosmos 

 

>>>>>    the importance and function in the human brain of synaptic connections and discrete parts such as the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, corpus callosum, hippocampus, and amygdala.

 

>>>>>     how Skinnerian operant conditioning as descriptive of human behavior undermines the notion of free will and the whole criminal justice system in the United States 

 

>>>>>     the reason why a good case could be made for the Compromise of 1877 as the single most important event of post-Civil War African American history

 

>>>>>     the place in American literature and major works of Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison

 

>>>>>     how the Federal Reserve System works

 

>>>>>     what gerrymandering is and how that political maneuver is now predetermining most elections for the United States House of Representatives

 

We know from survey material that the knowledge of these and all manner of topics and subject areas from mathematics, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts among the American public is abominable.  Teachers and educational administrators are given the most lightweight academic training on any university campus;  they represent an especially ignorant subset of a starkly knowledge-deficient American populace.

 

The key dilemma in K-12 education lies not in the challenges that students bring from society but rather in the low respect for and possession of knowledge that abides in the society that produces the adults who preside in their schools as teachers and administrators.