Thanx for Public education, Human Drama and Finding Truth

One sure-thing in the world of television production is that people enjoy a story of human drama where a web of evidence slowly unfolds. One sure-thing television advertizers recognize is that, if told well, people will stick around for the climax of a story. They will hold out for the truth to be revealed.

Many billions of dollars have been made from this basic tenet. Many hundreds of thousands of crap television programs have been aired on this basis. And many hundreds of billions of hours have been lost by all of us in this commercial-driven trap.

However, the two facts: that people like to share stories and people like to unearth the truth, are overwhelmingly good things for human society.

The myth of what we call Thanksgiving will remain mostly untouched today. Families will sit down and catch up with one and others' own life stories. Most working people are sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, whose contact with Europeans put them at the center of Thanksgiving. Most people also will feel that Native people have little to thank for their experience with this society.

One story that may be shared today, particularly by students returning home for the holiday, is the battleground of education. The struggle for free, public education has been brought into the foreground in recent weeks by the hundreds of thousands of students who have been demonstrating and sitting-in at colleges and universities from Berkeley to Belgrade. Their enemy, wether the story has revealed it to them or not, is capitalism, and with it, the Governments subservient to big business' profit-based ideals.

My own exposure to the war against public education lies in Oakland, California. At the "low-performing" public elementary school, my daughter attends, we are now 3-months into the school year and still do not have a Vice-principal. We also have no music teacher. No arts teacher. No gym teacher. It's all math, English and testing. But the teachers are fantastic, and life goes on.

Today I just wanted to put a shout out for one woman who's truth has been buried. A woman we can thank for putting up a critical fight for free, public education. This person was of world renown in her life time at the turn of the last century. Her name has subsequently been kept alive mostly by word and mouth. Her story was deliberately removed from encyclopedias and history lessons in the post war period.

In 1903 Mother Jones led the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds of children crippled in America’s factories, some as young as 5-years-old, marched on the White House. Their slogan was “We want to go to School!” At this time only some 6% of 18-year olds were in school. Between 1880 and 1900, during America’s most intense period of industrialization, children’s enrollment in schools had actually decreased. The struggle for public schools for children was intimately bound up with big business' struggle to keep children in their factories. Mother Jones, in her 70s at this point, was a virulant anti-capitalist and an organizer with the Miners’ Union. The Federal Government feeling the heat, then passed a weak child labor law, but under pressure from big business, the Supreme Court struck it down as “violating the child’s right to contract his work.”

Over the following 30 years big business fought any curbs on child labor or taxation for public schools. Finally in 1938 child labor was banned federally, by which time public schools were commonplace.

Big business is now attempting to turn the clocks back. They are spending hundreds of millions to promote school privatization and increased business penetration of our schools’ daily lives. If unopposed, big business will eventually turn public education into a business. The city and state-run colleges and universities are an example of how further education has been transformed from a virtually free right into a costly debt-burden for young people. Capitalism's first step to destroying public education is removing the word "free" from its association with public education.

Thanks go out Today for Mother Jones. For her fight to get children out of factories and into schools. For the birth of free, public education. For the real human drama of life and struggle of working people. And for the discovery of the truth, however deep it is buried.
Rob