Naming a Crisis- Losing Heart Ch 1-2

As we've discussed for much of this semester, the majority of policy debates around public education today tend to focus on schools as instruments of the economy--instruments not completely separate from many other raw materials-processing plants: Just as we need a mill to turn a forest into different piles of lumber, we need schools to turn children into future workers (or in the more developed and cynical view, future mill workers, managers and owners). Framing the question in this manner lends itself to certain questions depending on whether we focus on the student (Is every child being given an equal opportunity to compete and succeed in the job market?) or the system as a whole ("How will our school system ensure that the United States can compete and succeed on a Global Economic level?)

At this point, we've spent hours discussing the counter-productivity of endless test prep on its own terms, the cultural biases implicit in such testing, and the larger structural inequalities built into and exacerbated by the current public school system. For the most part, then, these discussions have revolved around basic structural and economic concerns, especially in the second half of this semester. However, one of our first readings still stands out for me: Ayers' conviction (Between Heaven and Earth) that we are always teaching for one thing and against something else. In spite of the eternal place in the realm of public debate reserved for the issue of prayer in public schools, the face is that today we have an education system primarily conceived of in economic terms. What moral lessons is this system teaching towards? What is it teaching against? Or, to re-appropriate Anyon's wording, what is the hidden moral curriculum of our schools?

H. Svi Shapiro's Losing Heart: The Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America's Children sets out to address these questions. Decrying a recent narrowing of the public discourse around education, Sharpiro lays out a world where standardized test scores measure the intellectual health of our children the same as the Dow Jones measures the health of the economy (5). Such a unit of measure should give us pause when we consider the fact that this year's high school graduates were likely between eight and ten years old on 9/11. Children are coming of age in an increasingly precarious atmosphere, one which we are told is permeated by limitless danger and uncertainty, endless crisis and war.

In an environment of such fleeting security it seems fair to say that morality (however defined) becomes more important. And in such an environment, what can we come together to believe in? For Shapiro, the answer is a consumerism:

To grow up in America (and, we need to add, increasingly throughout the world) is to be socialized into a culture where nearly everything of significance derives from the values of the marketplace.... The market has become the primary source of meaning and value in our world. Consuming is, in a very real sense, our religion, and it is linked to the very definition of who we are and how we live. (25)

Cultural critics have long argued that consumer goods act on levels beyond their most immediate function or "use value": Whether we purchase a pair of shoes or a car, we are also buying a reflection of ourselves--our understanding of who we are and how we want to be seen by others. However, the accompanying economic need for constant innovation to drive consumer demands and sustain economic growth leads to a sense of permanent discomfort: of insecurity, ennui, and inadequacy in the face of an elusive "ultimate life" as portrayed in the media.

Of course, much of this is nothing new, nor are passages lamenting the backhanded advertising tactics or sheer number of commercials teens sit their developing minds through. Shapiro has a sharper focus, though. This shallow culture is for him another manifestation of the shallow moral emphasis of our school system. Shapiro wants public education to prepare children for the complicated moral world as much as the complicated economic world of the 21st century: it should

be about teaching young people to think and learn what it means to become critically minded human beings. This is the great legacy of enlightenment values: the belief that our humanity is deepened and enriched by the development of the capacity to go beyond the accepted dogma or the conventional assumptions of a culture.