Nader, Ralph. (2004). The good fight: Declare your independence & close the democracy gap. New York: Regan Books.
The word corporate Republicans like most is “conservative.” They constantly use it as a fig leaf to hide their true ideology—the supremacy of commercialism over values more spiritual, nurturing, moral, and truly conservative. In no area does marketing madness run roughshod more than in its insidious grip on childhood and children’s traditional sanctuaries. In no area is the distinction between avaricious corporatism and authentic conservatism clearer. For no other age group is it more important for true conservatives to declare their independence and take a stand against these modern day Mammons. No other trends is more subversive of parental authority, more penetrating at an early age of the mind and body of the child, and more deliberative in strategic planning for expanding the violent, addictive and pornographic world of the child.
A New Byrd School
Let’s look at an inner city fifth-grade class to provide a contrast to these forces of greed and profit, and to illuminate the hypocrisy of Bush’s “leave no child behind” policies also embedded within the testing industry. Recently, after speaking to an assembly of students at Columbia University in Chicago, a young fifth-grade teacher, Brian Schultz, gave me a folder describing “Project Citizen” A New Byrd School.” In early December 2003, Schultz asked the 16 African American students in his class to select a project. They chose to study their Robert E. Byrd Academy School, documenting its decrepit condition and launching an initiative for a new school. Since Schultz has these students the entire day, the project became the epicenter for teaching the various core subjects like math, data analysis, politics, economics, reading, and writing. Attendance is at a high for the school—98 percent. Motivation is intense. Discipline problems have almost disappeared. They developed the Action Plan that included, in their words, “researching, petitioning, surveying, writing, photographing, and interviewing people we think can help us fix the policy.” Ranging in age from ten to twelve, and living in low-income Cabrini Green housing projects, the students focused on five major conditions, starting with filthy restrooms (often without soap, paper towels, or garbage cans). “We do not have doors on the stalls and have no privacy. The sinks have bugs in them and water is everywhere. As an example of how bad they are, sinks move and water leaks on the floor. The hot water faucets have cold water.”
New was temperature in the classrooms. “The heat is not turned on. It is really cold in the classrooms,” the students report, adding that they have to put their coats on “during class because it is so cold. They cannot fix it because the pipes are broken. It is uncomfortable and hard to learn. Our hands are cold and we cannot write. This needs to be changed!”
Next came the windows cracked with bullet holes, held together by tape. “We cannot see through the windows and it is dark in the classrooms,” wrote the children, "We can hardly see what we are doing because it is so dark. This is not a good place to learn.”
There is no lunchroom; children eat in a hallway, which is distracting to ongoing classrooms. The school has no gym, no auditorium or stage. The school borrows a gym across a busy street. In their letter to dozens of people, the students plead: “We would like to invite you to see our school for yourself. We do not think you would let your kids come to a school that is falling apart.” Vice-President Richard Cheney responded to the children in a letter supporting a new elementary school. Mr. Cheney, vigorous supporter of wasteful defense budget, did not mention any federal financial support. But the students are not stopping at letters to politicians; they are organizing everyone they can envision helping, including fifth graders from other more fortunate schools and a wide array of persons with various occupations and positions. They circulated a petition and obtained more than 900 signatures. Children are learning citizen skills, maturity, self-reliance, seriousness, dedication, and ingenuity in this classroom and from their most immediate surroundings—their school.
For five months, this project has
become the entire day’s curriculum, Schultz told me. He has the full approval of his principal, and the other teachers
are supportive. He can do this because
his students meet the conventional standards for their grade without having to
go through the rote memorization process that youngsters find so tedious. All this decay and the resurgence of demand
for decent facilities take place in Chicago, whose motto is “The City that
Works”; Chicago, a metropolis gleaming with tax-subsidized office buildings,
undertaxed business executives and companies, gallerias and cultural
institutions. Its schools and clinics
for low-income people are not given comparable attention. This neglected school and its children should
shame and inspire us at the same time.
Each school day the minds of these children expand and they learn to think, not vacuously believe. Tax
dollars are short for teaching needs and facilities, but available for
bureaucratic layers that don’t educate our young. Our country has creative teachers like Schultz and more will come
forward if learning impulses and the innate curiously of youngsters are
accorded priority. (The reflections of
Barbara A. Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher in a Salt Lake City school, in her book
Kids and Social Action also shows what can be done effectively and
inexpensively.)
There is underinvestment in many public school systems. However, regular tax rebellions by residents against school bond issues or tax increases occur because they hear horror stories about what is going wrong and they resent bearing the financial burden. Public schools are part of civil society. They will rise or fall in correlation with the participation of parents, together with boards of education, principals, and teachers who define their success not by fraudulent multiple-choice standardized test results, but by the multiple intelligences that are aroused, and sharpened with the developing minds of their students.