"When Jamal, an 11th grade student, arrived at his English class in January of this year, he thought he would be continuing with his reading and analysis of The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. The Crucible is 11th grade reading for the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, a 6-12 high school in Detroit, Michigan . Jamal was sadly mistaken. As he took his seat in class the teacher notified all students that they would be shifting their focus, just for awhile she told them, from the reading and analysis of literature to the construction of a mock ‘resume’ or ‘job application’. The ‘resume’ or ‘job application’ the students were to produce in their class was to be based on a ‘resume template’ handed out by the English teacher, by which students would then create their own ‘applications’...
Jamal later discovered that it was not just his class that was asked to do the mock resume for Wal-Mart, but it was the whole school. The lesson, he told me, was given through English classes to all 11th grade students, and not just at Frederick Douglass Academy; the lesson had made its way to three other high schools that had been targeted by the retail chain. Western International High School was targeted, Detroit International Academy (the sister school of Frederick Douglass, an all girls schools), and Westside High School were all in the firing line. The four high schools had been selected by ‘administrators’ in conjunction with Wal-Mart and other corporate business interests. But that’s not all: the schools had also been sought out to host “internships” by Wal-Mart; eleven weeks (11) of job readiness/soft skills training that would replace the curriculum, but as an ‘elective’. All of this was, as we will see, cleverly designed by the skilled manipulators."
"Evidently the most successful thing the US Educational System does is teach people to hate learning. The tedious, mediocre, enervated curriculum sucks the excitement and joy out of any topic. American History is (somehow) rendered irrelevant and dull, a recitation of battle dates and the names of white slave-owners. It's an experience to be endured and then avoided, like a root canal. Are our standards for teachers useful or merely convenient? I had a conversation for over an hour at a party in Boston one night with a guy about the "zero-based number system" ("do these guys know how to party or what"). Not only was it fascinating, but afterwards I understood, appreciated and could learn mathematics better than at any time in my math-loathing academic experience. Why didn't I get him for a teacher when I needed someone like him, when I was in school? Because, like so many truly intellectually-engaged people, he'd hated academia so much that he's dropped out of school and was a clerk at a 2nd-hand store. A "BA" doesn't insure a good teacher, nor does its lack preclude it. A 24 year old teachers' college graduate, never been outside Orange county, never read a classic book, never DONE anything interesting will brush aside a middle-aged, self-educated world traveling, "Jeopardy" winning author under the present rules. Our culture does not settle for mediocrity, it does not aim for mediocrity...It demands mediocrity. What part does the educational system play in all that?"
