RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

In our society there is an on going battle between two past proponents of each other, who have become bitter rivals.  These combatants are called the community and the educational system.  Both are blaming each other for their failures and neither will take responsibility for their inability to work together for the greater good of all concerned.  For the record they are both right about each others failures and they are both wrong about the amount of responsibility placed on the other.  The truth is, it is both their jobs, to develop a working relationship based on a common goal of shared responsibility and resources. 

                                              

But, before they can do this they must find understanding and resolve to the following conflicting issues: the educational system believes that the community is doing a poor job of raising their youth and are allowing them to attend school unprepared to learn; the community believes that the educational system is doing a poor job of teaching their youth and preparing them for the future; the educational system says that the community is lazy and not capable of solving their own problems; the community states that the educational system believes that they have all the answers and is unconcerned about hearing suggestions from them, about solving their joint issues; the educational system states that the community is illiterate and functionally literate, because they do not choose to take advantage of the vast amount of free and accessible knowledge that is available for those who want it; the community says that the educational system lack understanding of their unique problems and are both condescending and uncaring of their needs and there conditions; the educational system says that the community is uncooperative and unreliable, when attempts are made to include them in research projects that will be used to enhance their quality of life; the community states that the educational community is only using them to make more money, gain notoriety and that to often their concerns are given to researchers who promise them the world, use their information and are never to be seen again except on television bragging about what they have accomplished.  They never make any positive reference of the community and those that help to make their efforts successful. 

All of these concerns carry a certain amount of validity but they both lack understanding of the issues that govern each other’s actions.  How did two entities so dependent on the support of each other, for their future growth and survival, get to this point?  For this to be answered we must give a brief synopsis of their shared past, in order to obtain a well examined and positive solution.

In the beginning it was the adult family members’ job to prepare each youth for their place in the tribal community.  As time passed and the population grew, hunting accidents and armed conflict with neighboring tribes began a steady depletion of the male population.  To insure that the young males were properly prepared for adulthood, alternative measures had to be initiated.  It became the duty of tribal elders to prepare the youth of the community for their place as an adult member.  This was not only the beginning of formal Mentorship Programs but also formal Education.  At that time a mentor and a teacher were synonymous with each other.  As time passed families became more mobile, wars were a common occurrence and different races and religions were in constant contact.  Suddenly there was a need for experts, while specialization became the norm and economic achievement became the priority.  The education of youth ceased to be the responsibility of the community and became a division of the state.  State and federal mandated regulations determined who would be qualified to be a teacher and where they were to be placed.  Thus, began the division between teacher and mentor.  Teachers found themselves in communities and in charge of children that they knew little or nothing about and had no vested interest in.  With the addition of curriculum, time restraints and stress to obtain additional degrees some teachers began to see their occupation as more of a job than a responsibility.  They were forced not to be concerned about the welfare of the total child, but only of the child’s performance in their class.  With the detachment of vested interest by the one entity that joined the educational system and the community, came a separation of interest by both groups in ideology and actions.  


The educational system began to court the support of the political and corporate entities to create their on identity outside of the influence of the community.  No longer were they to be seen as having a one dimensional purpose of relaying information gathered and created by others without any input on their part.  A movement and a strategy was developed to promote the importance of the educational system creating information and promoting ideas that changed the way people and organizations thought and operate on a day to day basis.  In the space of a century the educational system went from legitimizing the thoughts and actions of the community to dictating the thoughts and action of the total society.  Along the way they ceased being concerned about how the community felt or thought about an issue or whether they understood the issue in question.  Suddenly it was the educational system that developed policy and if you did not understand, then it was your fault.  


A new and constantly changing language was created by the educational community that only they understood.  Old words that the community was familiar with were replaced with new ones that only educators understood and if the community did not recognize them then they were made to feel less intelligent and inadequate.  This gave rise to words such as illiterate and functional literate.  In many cases it was not that the community did not know and/or understood the subject but that they did not know it by the words that were and are being used by educators.  The separation of community and educational system has caused a separate and unequal relationship that can be best described at this point as “Reconcilable Differences.”  This is a condition that must be corrected as soon as possible, for the sake of all concerned.

In today’s climate of accessing more and more information through the internet, print/news media and public television, you would think that the masses would be growing in literacy rather than shrinking.  Educators, Political Leaders and Corporate America are now learning that having access does not translate to having the ability to access, knowing what you have accessed and/or the will or perceived need to access.  Their initial conclusion is that our communities are both illiterate and/or functionally literate, while reading at a tenth grade level but comprehending at a seventh or eighth grade level.  Recognizing the failures in their earlier prediction that the advent of more access to information would bring about a steady rise in literacy, Educators have set out to fix the problem by attempting to use research to gain more reliable solutions.  Their early findings have been largely inconclusive due to faulty data gained through quantitative research errors and the uncooperativeness of the community to be involved in research projects.  This uncooperativeness can be traced to the negative past experiences between the community and researchers and the inability of researchers to find the proper channels to get their message across.  In short, they have lost their ability to communicate with the community, due to a lack of shared points of understanding.  


If Educators expect to gain the attention and support of the poor and working class community they must change their approach to soliciting their cooperation.  They must realize that their ways and the ways of upper middle and upper class citizens are totally foreign to working class and poor people.