The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.
Hanson features a caricature of Donald Trump, accompanied by quotations that capture the essence of Trump’s recent assertions regarding the November 2020 presidential election:
“It was rigged!”
“President forever!”
“They love me!”
“Was cheated!”
“Fake news!”
“It’s a hoax!”
“A Democrat plot!”
My observation is that truth-telling is particularly lacking at the local level, directed at people in one’s presence or at those with whom one very likely may come face to face. Hanson’s implication in quoting from historian Daniel Boorstin is that citizens representing a high percentage of the public find reason to believe Trump’s assertions, rather than to rely on factual evidence: They prefer the fantasy over the truth. But the quotations are of the kind lampooned by liberal and moderate pundits and derided by Trump’s detractors among the citizenry; actually, then, the truth is fairly well known and spoken by quite a few on the matter of Trump’s utterances.
With regard to preK-12 education, one of my own key matters of advocacy, the search for the truth, ability to embrace the truth when revealed, and willingness to speak the truth if grasped are all notably absent.
We therefore get a string of assertions regarding the condition of preK-12 education and remedies for contended maladies that have little bearing to reality. We get general exhortations to follow best practices, provide culturally relevant curriculum, give every student regardless of demographic descriptors access to quality early childhood education.
But best practices are not very evident and just as accessible via logic as observation. Cultural relevance is of low utility unless embedded in a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that necessarily encompasses the history, literature, and art of people of all ethnicities. And most students currently enter second grade with minimal literacy needed to thrive; the real problem is the abominable curriculum and teaching that they receive in grades 2 through 12.
With regard to the actual problems at the Minneapolis Public Schools, the truth is hard to embrace, takes perceptivity to comprehend, and once comprehended takes courage to tell.
Perpend:
The key problems at the Minneapolis Public Schools concern knowledge-deficient curriculum and poor teaching at the median. Knowledge-deficient curriculum exists because all major academic program decision-makers have been trained the same way, by education professors making ideological anti-knowledge proclamations traceable to Teacher’s College of Columbia University dating to the 1920s.
Of this type at the Minneapolis Public Schools are Superintendent Ed Graff, Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, and the four mainline school associate superintendents Shawn Harris Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno. Of this type also are all subject area facilitators in the 24-member Department of Teaching and Learning. And neither Michael Walker (Director, Office of Black Student Achievement) nor Jennifer Rose Simon (Director, Department of Indian Education) have the required training necessary to comprehend or implement knowledge-intensive curriculum.
Senior Human Resources Officer Maggie Sullivan does not have the background required to train the necessary teacher-scholars. Eric Moore, Senior Officer for Accountability, Research, and Equity, is a masterful collector and purveyor of data but lacks the ability to grasp and implement knowledge-intensive curriculum. Suzanne Kelly (Senior Executive Officer, Office of the Superintendent) has better ability to grasp the curriculum and the elevated quality of teaching necessary but lacks the courage to risk her salary in excess of $190,000 to tell the truth.
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But these are people that one has to face at the local level, at meetings of members of the inept MPS Board of Education, and other gatherings at the district. People take comfort in accessing whatever bromides are in the conversational ether, rather than digging deeply into the history of public education in the United States, discovering the source of the problem in errant anti-knowledge ideology, and doing what actually needs to be done to develop logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum in the liberal, technological and vocational arts, and training teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum.
Discovering the truth about the wretched proficiency levels of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools takes time, patience, and discernment. Once discovered, effort must be made to embrace the truth. And then the truth must be told.
And though this truth involves discomfort in the telling at the local level far beyond launching deserved verbal bombs at Donald Trump, nothing is more important than speaking that truth to power or to anyone making decisions that currently ruin the lives of so many of our precious children.
For we will get nothing right until we overhaul preK-12 education for the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to each one of our youthful human treasures, of all demographic descriptors.
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