Thoughts and many more questions

This week’s reading was awfully heavy for me, but I did find some interesting points to ponder. I’ve listed them here not as a coherent writing piece, but as a list of my thoughts while reading. Please, when reading, do not think that I am opposed to one political party or another. I am reflecting on how I see Williams’ chapter relating to today’s American society. As you will see, the reading gave me more questions than answers.

First, on page 5, Williams says Greek “rhetoric began to emerge when a shifting economic base effected changes in politics and education.” Funny how history repeats itself. While we are not establishing American society for the first time, we are certainly seeing a revision of American society every single day. We have grown up in this "new" era of American democracy, and have the privilege to fully participate in our government. However, most Americans choose not to participate in the government, or in the society. We saw this change in record numbers last year during the election, and regardless of your thoughts on the outcome, you have to admit that it has changed the United States. We are now seeing more people involved in what is going on. There is a new rhetorical shift; a shift towards ordinary people wanting to be heard. If the economic meltdown of last fall had not occurred, would the election have been so dramatic? Would there be so much passion and emotion and concern about health care reform? Would we have a congressman calling the president a liar, basically, to his face? Would we being hearing words like socialism or Marxism being used again? I think that Williams’ simple statement about the Greeks is happening right before our eyes, thousands of years later.

Second, on page 24, Williams talks about how the Romans banned rhetoric because it was seen as a “powerful tool for democratic change.” Yet again, history is repeating itself. We saw this last week when so many people were so vehemently opposed to our elected president taking to our school children. People were afraid that he was going to “brainwash” our young people. He was going to talk to them, and use this speech to get them to support his ideas on health care, but use the cover of education to be able to reach out to them. Parents would have no control of the message. The conservative right was afraid that this one speech was going to dramatically alter our children and the way they think. Personally, I think the protesters over-reacted. It was a simple speech that told kids that they have to be responsible for their education too. It is not a one-way street where teachers do all the work and students are expected to share no responsibility in the learning process. Will this speech make a dramatic shift in student learning? Probably not. But the idea of the speech made a dramatic shift in the ideas of democracy here in the United States.

Finally, about how the Harvard system has failed (p.41), we seem to have a mode of operation in the United States that if it isn’t broken too badly, it doesn’t need to be fixed. We saw this with the collapse of the auto industry and the banking system. We knew there were problems, but they, individually, weren’t big enough problems to warrant intensive scrutiny or change. Then, the bottom fell out, and now we are making changes. Is this what has to happen to our education system? Do we have to fall all the way down and hit bottom before we as a country are willing to admit that change in the education system needs to happen? What will it take to focus on how we train teachers? What needs to change in our colleges and universities to be able to have great teachers coming out prepared and ready to meet the needs of our children? Why are we, as a society, less concerned with who is teaching our children than we are about what is happening in Hollywood? What does it say when we have teachers who barely graduated from college with a C-grade point average teaching our children? We are okay with the idea that mediocre teachers are responsible for educating our children. Why don’t we expect our children to be taught by the best, and then, why don’t we put a higher value on education and the teachers and administrators trusted to educate our children? Why are we less concerned with the changes that should be made in our courses of study at all education levels than we are about the changes in the fall television line-up? To me, we need a shift in rhetoric to start emphasizing the need for some education reform, reform that will really benefit our children rather than sticking to what doesn’t work.