The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to expand, inspiring more and more complementary sub-movements of people who want their voices heard. The protest movement has adopted a tagline, “We Are the 99 Percent,” in reference to the notion that the upper one percent of society continues to get richer while the rest of us work harder for less and less. The latest addition to the “99 percent” is Occupy Education, and it’s giving spirited teachers and students a space to express their concerns, their hopes, and their ideas about the present and future of education in America.
I may not be a teacher, but I fully support their cause. For far too long now, public school teachers (as a general group) have been bullied, beat down, and scapegoated for problems that have arisen, not from them, but from a politically driven system that treats students as widgets and teachers as factory workers. It is an educational model that punishes creativity and rewards stale uniformity.
The Occupy Education blog aims to take advantage of the momentum behind the Occupy Wall Street protests by giving teachers, students, and others involved in education a place to share their passion (through stories and pictures) for transforming the broken educational system. Here are a few examples of what has been posted so far:
“I work to help my students make life happen so that they don’t feel like life happens to them.”
“I see my students as individuals, not data points. We aren’t perfect, we’re people. Learning is messy—sometimes you need to get your hands dirty.”
“In my classroom students are treated as equals. They have as much to do with the teaching as I do.”
One of the issues that public school teachers and educators across the nation are most passionate about is that of standardized testing. The test scores of students are now the primary way in which teachers and whole schools are judged and held accountable. But this data-driven system, many argue, has only made education worse. That’s why teachers are beginning to band together through sites such as Occupy Education. They want their ideas heard. They want our leaders to recognize that there is more to learning than teaching to a test. They want to have a meaningful stake in transforming America’s educational landscape.
We are all people, unique and complex. Yet, standardized testing, a doctrine that strips education of its humanity and robs learning of its organic elements, has become a religion. Politicians, operating on blind faith, hold onto its confining dogmas as they—through regressive policies like No Child Left Behind—seek to rid our schools of non-believers. It’s akin to a new kind of Inquisition.
No amount of pretending is going to change the fact that the Industrial Revolution is over. It’s time to move on from the factory mindset.
A society of innovation can no longer be produced from an educational model that places black-or-white standards, conformity, and outdated conventions above nuance, imagination, and risk-taking. Education should help each one of us discover our individual talents through methods tailored to how we learn best. Uniform testing, while well intentioned, leaves many students behind.
I hope Occupy Education gains traction. Students and teachers are humans, dammit! Our economic and political leaders should stop trying to make them robots. It’s insanity. I could go on, but I think Sir Ken Robinson (a funny and outspoken critic of standardized testing and one-size-fits-all educational models) says it better than I ever could:
