Regardless of your personal schooling experiences, chances are you have heard rhetoric maintaining the stance that public schools are a lost cause or a drain on United States resources.
It can be terribly easy to lean into these dooming ideas, especially if your experiences with U.S. public schools were less than ideal. And in contemporary society, the public school system, something that was once an uncontested universal right, has become a political instrument.
Whether politicians promise to destroy the public education system or nurture it, the message is clear: public education has become a token of leverage in the world of politics.
If we all deem the U.S. school system hopeless, we lose the very machine that propels a just, properly-functioning democracy. We lose community harbors, accessible education and economic opportunities for the communities in which public schools exist.
Aside from the potential loss, in disregarding the U.S. public school system we forget to acknowledge the groundbreaking, critical work that today’s educators are doing with less resources and funding than ever.
An article by T. Jameson Brewer from Learning for Justice looks to the history of public firefighting to shine light on why exactly public schools are considered a “public good” or a “common good.”
Brewer explains that firefighting was once accessible only to those who could pay for private firefighting companies. Eventually, communities came to realize that if an entire town were destroyed by a fire, even the owners of the few remaining homes would be negatively impacted.
Brewer notes that this gave way to the understanding that firefighting should be a public and common good in order to ensure less extensive damage and increase public safety.
If we think about public schools in comparison to the common good of firefighting, it becomes clear that privatizing education would be equivalent to taking a huge step backwards.
Free, equitable and appropriate education for all is a common good for one because it is a common good for all.
Applying this principle of thinking to public education can be a helpful way to think critically about it, apart from the mystified narratives that popular news and media channels extend about public schools.
This analogy is also beneficial to apply to those who wish to privatize schools or for proponents of school choice.
Private and charter schools can bar access from their institutions at will, just as privatized firefighting companies could blatantly ignore a flaming house if it was not insured by them.
So, the historical promise of school as a common good boils down to the necessity of properly-funded, liberally-resourced education for all students.
There is still so much historical racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia to be undone within the U.S. public school system, but deeming it a failure is not the solution.
The solution rests in meeting children’s needs so they can learn powerfully and imagine a better world for themselves and their peers. This cannot rest only on the very teachers that the media and politicians demonize every day — it is work to be shouldered by everyone in the nation.
We must remove our fear from being educated to plant seeds of criticality, curiosity and freedom.
O’Brien can be reached at [email protected].
