 Image via Wikipedia |
| Official portrait of Jerry Brown as Governor of California, from the California State Capitol Museum. Painted by Don Bachardy. |
The humanity and dignity of our children is not yet a collective value in the US and Brown stands out in his perception that the factory system we foist on our young people is an inhumane way to approach education. This approach was new and offered some great strengths when the US was an agricultural society and schooling was short and jobs did not depend on school at all. The whole world around the schools has changed but the schools have not.
From the article, Brown wrote this, a rare and literate view:
The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a "one size fit all" approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive memberof society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.
Also linked to within the post: Standardized Testing Mythbusters! - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher
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