A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School

[Godot51]

112. Truth!

This is not over the top, this is not an exaggeration, it is the truth of the 21st century.

This is a child who should be nurtured.

The recent conservative effort to control and, in effect, destroy public education in the U.S. has several goals.

One goal is to discredit public education, the whole system. The "No Child Left Behind" farce, with its testing and ranking system has changed schools from places of learning to places of competition and failure with it's meaningless, unrealistic goal oriented ways.

Another goal is to create a new system of private religious and elite schools, often paid for by taxes (vouchers anyone?), to replace the public system.

Another goal is to abandon those who either cannot afford or cannot compete for places in the new system. What happens to those who cannot read and write when public schools are gone. They will become the slaves of the 21st century.

A large part of this will result from the incompetence, either willfully or in ignorance, of the teachers and administrators of today's public schools. While I'm sure some, probably a majority, are doing their best, they don't have the resources or the support to truly educate their students and their numbers are shrinking. As they are replaced with newer, under-educated teachers the decline will increase.

Parents, communities, states and the nation will see the broken system and give up on it, and where will the hopeless students go? To the "christian schools"? To the private academies?

This is not "going to occur someday" it is ongoing right now and has been for a long time. The U.S. is already far below the educational levels of most industrialized nations and falling fast.

The future belongs to places like China and India who have more young people than the "western" countries put together and therefore will have more top level, educated people too: those who will become scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers and teachers for the future.

We? We'll turn out home or private schooled pop idols, mega-church preachers, fashion models and sport stars along with soldiers and a mass of struggling, partially employed drones and consumers.