(Dr. Larry Arnn is President, Hillsdale College, USA. [email protected])
As in India and much of the world, politics has been turbulent in America for years. Perhaps it is worse here. President Trump has been impeached twice by our House of Representatives, but both times acquitted by the Senate. After all that, he is still front runner for the presidency in an election scheduled for November.
President Biden, showing signs of age for years, performed poorly in a face-off debate with President Trump on June 27. Now he has withdrawn from the race and the Democratic Party must choose a new candidate at its August 19-22 convention, probably incumbent vice president Kamala Harris. That candidate will have just ten weeks to campaign before the election on November 5.
It is a mess.
This election is consequential for every area of policy, including education. I prefer the Republican platform, which supports the wave of decentralisation sweeping across the US. ‘School choice’ is the term we use for it.
It takes several forms, the biggest being charter schools, about which I have written in a previous column. Charter schools are exempt from many of the bureaucratic controls that plague
our system. In contemporary America, more than half the employees in public schools are not teachers. Legions are employed to formulate complex rules about what and how to teach. Little wonder that American students score poorly in reading and math assessment skills. Students of charter schools do better.
Since 2019, public school enrollment in America has fallen 3 percent. On the other hand, charter schools enrolments have risen by 7 percent over the same period. Homeschooling has also become popular across the nation. People are fleeing a system that doesn’t perform.
This trend is important. Schools thrive when authority is located in the school. Learning happens in the soul of each student. Teachers and parents who know the student are the best people to enable and empower. They may not possess the expertise of high-brow intellectuals, but education doesn’t become rocket science until later years. Up to that point, common sense, native intelligence, love, and hard work are sufficient to guide the learning of the young. Just as every puppy is born to bark and wag its tail, every human child is born to learn. Parents are seldom experts in caring for babies. Somehow they have always managed.
In America, government has become larger, relative to everything else, and steadily more centralised for three generations. As this has happened, money has moved farther away from the people who earn and provide it and from their needs. In America, school choice is reversing this trend in education. In India, a very large percentage of students attend private schools. I think this is a healthy development.
Also read: LETTER FROM AMERICA: In praise of charter schools
