Perhaps the wisest view on these issues ever articulated in the United States was that of Thomas Jefferson in an 1813 letter to John Adams titled “The Natural Aristocrat,” in which Jefferson described a model he had devised (but that, alas, was never implemented nationally) for making free, quality education through the university level accessible to all social classes, “at the public expense” — i.e., tax-funded.
“Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.”
Moreover, this model of universal access to education would have “raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly government, and would have completed the great object of qualifying them to elect the veritable aristoi [or ‘meritocracy’], for the trusts of government, to the exclusion of the pseudalists [those born to wealth and power].”
Deep Thoughts...
I have been thinking about this for a while now. At my school, they did a survey of the middle school kids and one of the things that came across is they said, "The teachers have given up". As I look around, this was said, all evidence to the contrary. But I have been wondering what they see that makes them feel that way. Added to this, I see the middle school students acting like it is them against the adult world. Even though, the teachers are kind and forgiving, calm and supportive. And in my position, I see all grades K-8 and I wondered how the middle schoolers came to that conclusion. This is what I really think. The students don't feel safe and protected. They have sat, traumatized, while peers with social-emotional issues trash classrooms, disrespect adults with impunity and destroy learning opportunities for everyone while adults stand helplessly by calling for backup on the phone or trying to calm the student in the red zone. If the kid were to leave the classroom, they return 10 minutes later eating a bag of Cheetos they were bribed with to calm down. What lesson would you take from this scenario as you watch it happen over and over? Adults are ineffective, fail to calm chaos, offer no deterrent for bad behavior, cannot fix things that are broken and cannot keep me safe. No wonder the kids see it as us against them. Now they are all scared and acting out.