User:Ryangenova/sandbox

Some of the sea changes in education have been for the better. Past disenfranchised student subgroups (females, English language learners, students with different needs, “hyphenated Americans”) achieved significantly higher levels of equity after the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. English as a Second Language (ESL) programs and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) subsequently became legally mandated for students who were once considered “uneducable” and warehoused in altogether different buildings. The responsiveness to social activism additionally steered a profoundly Eurocentric curriculum toward a more cultural and heterogeneous offering of courses. Attention to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory has adopted methods of differentiated instruction, in lieu of a “one size fits all” pedagogy. However, as federalization, administrative power, and regulation expand, diverse views about how and what students should learn have bottlenecked. Early in the United States’ history, families, churches, apprenticeships, and communities augmented the roles of schools to help create an informed, capable and democratized citizenry through civic responsibility. More and more, such decisions and responsibilities are relegated to distant figures in centralized institutions. Many of the changes have shifted the inherent purpose of learning. Capitalistic policies, for example, have helped to repackage knowledge as a commodity for personal use, as opposed to a public good to be shared, embraced, and supported, both financially and ideologically, by all citizenry. Copyright law and minimum standards of intellectual property (IP) have given rise to the globalized concept of private “rights” to knowledge goods. As higher percentages of the population enrolled in public schools, reformers have also tried to redefine the fundamental purposes of education from a collective social benefit to one of personal gain to be financed by the direct benefactor. Today, the effects are perhaps most palpable in higher education, an institution once offering low tuition with ancillary funding coming from the public. Though still considered a lighthouse system, current college costs are rising at six times the rate of inflation. At the same time, state appropriations for aid are falling. Degree inflation has enrolled a more diverse student population through which the university loan infrastructure, largely driven by banks and the private sector, has dropped the lower classes into often unmanageable levels of debt. Currently, student loan debt in the United States tops $1 trillion. With fewer and fewer public endowments, universities have less pressure to lower costs, despite a theoretically competitive system. The business community has helped reignite the century-old view of education as preparation for the workforce - an extrinsic means to an end in which outcomes are defined by performance and national interests. The ideology aligns educational goals with economic productivity, and claims to measure and compare each student and school through scientific procedures. Creative pursuits of the individual, constructivistic learning, and inquiry-based pedagogies have been diminished and devalued by this shift. An economically-driven education includes the comprehensive standardization of textbooks, curriculum, certification, financing, buildings, and teaching methods. This charge has been accompanied by funding decreases in trivial and quadrivial liberal arts and an increased emphasis on “STEM” subjects - science, technology and mathematics. With the help of the corporate influence and strong nationalist language, the government has usurped the roles of local authorities to establish a highly centralized, top-down federal system. By leveraging its extreme wealth, the business community has been able to influence and deregulate domestic and international policy, as well as engineer elections. As the discussions of national wealthy disparity and economic decline reach an unprecedented pitch, this Note argues that the most pervasive shift in public education has come from corporate activism in policy decisions. Against this trend, Kovacs and Christie wrote, “When corporate leaders shape government institutions according to their needs, countries move away from democracy and toward corporatism, a relative of, and arguably a precursor to, fascism.” Government-politico partnerships undermine egalitarianism by removing institutional members from the process of decision making. In this way, the educational landscape is emblematic of a broad and deeply historical national trend in which a representative democracy is controlled by a neoliberalistic, unelected, often wealthy hegemony with no public accountability.