Arnold battling his younger self, Image from EW.com
This post is about my skepticism that things are getting any better, whether for teachers or students, or the society as a whole. I will use the illustration of the illustrious Science-Technology-Engineering-Math (STEM) programs which have been such a hottie over the past few years. STEM teachers are being elevated in processes that have created a new rat race within the teaching system.
Want to teach STEM? It appears that if I hold an engineering degree, teaching credential qualifications, English or History masters, working experience, and team-building experience, that would mean I qualify. However it's not so simple. Teachers know that working as a STEM they qualify for extra pay, and extra grant monies. Ironically the ones who commonly entering the STEM field are using standard test-taking methods and years of experience in the school system to qualify. They are not necessarily qualified based on genuine interest as in college majors and work in the STEM industry.
For instance, in one school, the middle school English teacher teaching STEM was merely teaching her science students how to create a blog. They would be blogging about their science projects. Big yeah! Except she didn't want someone like me in her class. She took one look at yours truly and must have decided I was some kind of super-predator. Indeed, if she discovered I was indeed an engineer, teacher, writer, and all the rest, she would have had me expelled from the campus, which was what she tried to do not knowing much about me at all!
The White House featured President O. inviting middle school STEM project award winners to an evening at the White House. I LOVE how our politicians, failing to do anything else for the general population, are always eager to prove they know all about education. Just like President Bush in the classroom teaching elementary students something on 9-11; it didn't matter what since it's all about the photo-op and good (fake) public relations.
So almost all politicians have to get on the soapbox to prove they know more than a thing or two about how to teach our children, even if all around the world, we are providing arms in Africa or the Middle East to encourage the recruitment of child-soldiers.
Michelle Obama knows about nutrition for children. Gone are the days when we had decent school cafeterias where the food was cooked on-site. Today breakfast or lunch or snacks come in miles and mile or plastic wrapping. Enough to suffocate several baby porpoises every day, one from each school in the district. All that plastic wrapping is very profitable for the petroleum industries, and all that plastic is wonderful in our bodies and in the environment as it breaks down into dioxin, as it alters our gene material, and contributes to making our children reach puberty at earlier ages.
I can't exactly prove all that, but those of us who grew up from an earlier generation do notice that for some reason more of today's children are predisposed to be overweight, and puberty ages are dropping, healthy snacks not withstanding. (A lot of those diced apples and carrots get thrown out too).
STEM is one of those programs which furthermore seems to have so much hype built into it, with all the ridiculously greedy teachers fighting for a bit of the action, that it tends to have a repelling effect on all decent teachers and students. Thus, the self-confirming stereotype is that STEM is about creating wonks, and it must involve curricula like Engineering for Kids camps. The kids are generally favored are male in gender, predisposed to love rockets and fire-crackers, and want to create all kinds of artificial something or other.
Sorry, but what about STEM requires that it must be robotic? Is it merely the thrill of engaging with trans-humanism, that is studies about cybergs or machine-men as in Terminator Genisys? We are supposed to love these soul-numbing movies geared around man-versus-machine, as in the Matrix, with sometimes one, sometimes the other side prevailing?
There is nothing about Science, technology, engineering, and math that REQUIRES robot projects. In the traditional definition it could include civil engineering projects like windmills, solar farms, solar science, tree science, agriculture, culinary arts, even tailoring. It can be ANYTHING WE WANT STEM TO BE, from designing a sailboat to camping.
However the whole point of movies like Terminator Genisys is conjectured around competition, materialism, and capitalism. You may not quite think of it this way, but let me explain. We are brainwashing our youngsters into LOVING to fight to kill. That's the whole point of World of Warcraft or World War games. It deadens youth to the realities of war, death, bloodshed, and incidentally fostering appreciation of genuine loving human relationships. Men are predisposed into believing we must fight an enemy however conjured up, and that it's not about war profiteering or exploiting another country's resources or controlling the flow of currency. So the capitalism and materialism part are buried underneath mounds of bodies.
So it's not at all surprising that if our country is so bent global domination that entire peoples have become refugees for the sake of enriching gas companies and automobile corporations, that we place a premium on things over people. And one characteristic of this is the ongoing race to the bottom. We don't see the people at the bottom of the ant heap who are being ground up and trampled over into corn meal. We only recognize the need to get ahead. We mimic exactly what we see on T.V. or our magic smartphones. We live in hyper-reality. Even in our dreams we are driving, driving, driving, sort of like OJ Simpson once did.
In other words, in our mad drive to control the universe, we are undermining our humanity, subverting it into categories of success and materialism. We ignore that the real unemployment rate is 23% thereabouts. We minimize the idea that meaningful employment has become anyone working part-time even if they are earning only a couple hundred dollars a month. We leverage based on empty jobs and virtual space.
Teachers are so obsessed with the success mantra, they don't recognize that unions are being busted, that charter schools are pulling the rug from underneath them, and that austerity measures will finally kill off what little remains of their respectable middle-class lifestyle. All they worry about is why their children are still trying to live at home, blaming their children for losers.
Who will prevail in this internal drive to war, in which anyone over 50 will only be able to work part-time, and earn only a tenth of what their life skills, knowledge, and abilities are worth. So yes, what I am implying is that the kind of STEM we encourage, the kind of STEM we reward, exactly reflects our morally depraved society today. We want to reward people who will promote "the new era of robotics" in which human workers will no longer be needed. We have already created a class-based society in which exceptional workers are judged not on their merits but on who they are or where they came from.
For instance, it's become very popular for female celebrities to prove they are teacher-qualified and love children and can write books. Laura Bush, Jenna Bush, Chelsea Clinton, Taylor Swift, Madonna, just to name a few have bypassed our normal herculean efforts to produce a bestseller children's book and are probably welcome to teach in a classroom at any time. The rest of us can't step foot into a classroom as a volunteer unless we have applied with the school district, have an offer, taken our TB test, been fingerprinted, passed other security checks, and stay within the narrow, predefined confines in which we qualify to work.
Is this not a class-based society, then, in which the have-nots are working ever harder to stay on the treadmill while exceptional categories of people have RSVP spots reserved? At the top tier are the celebrity teachers, the second tier the ivy-league graduates who are better qualified not because they necessarily worked harder (frequently the opposite, they have an easier grading system) but because of name-university, at the third tier are public university graduates from teaching programs, and at the bottom all the rest.
(In fact, in the cities, you can pretty much geographically map the different tiers of people and whether or where they live in gentrified settings.)
The Grand Result: Far too few "respectable teacher" spots in our rentier-based economy! Way too many students lost in fantasy-land unable to relate with the larger realities and concerns of our planet unraveling!
So let me ask the question: "Are we there yet?"
Ask that guy from Verizon, no, Sprint!