J. Gray

February 17, 2019

Modern Day Education = Modern Day Dystopia

            When I say modern day education, I actually mean modern day charter schools. Charter schools, like the one I actually work in, were created on the basis of giving every student an equal chance at a valuable education. However, as we’ve learned from many texts that seem to want to build the perfect and equal community, they actually turn dystopian, and fast. Through my years working in the charter school sphere, my first-hand account is that these schools are in fact dystopian and create an even more segregated school system than the inclusive one they were aiming for.

            The ultimate goal many of these schools were pushing for was to be more inclusive, model this new thought, and then hopefully sway all public schools to transition into similar pedagogical methods. Charter schools started with the notion that they could create a system further away from bureaucracy. However, “many [of these schools] have been gobbled up by the corporate sector” (Knopp). Not only that, but as these schools gained some traction from public education, they also gained similar attention from these said bureaucrats. Instead of becoming inclusive and sharing the best pedagogical practices, instead, they created “mind-numbing standardized curriculum, and stifling and militaristic climates” due to the No Child Left Behind legislation (Knopp). In my current school system, students are forced to sit up straight, tuck their shirts in, wear a belt, and even have clean-shaved faces, and if they do not abide, they are penalized through a demerit system that forces them to assimilate, or, metaphorically, die.

            The students served in a charter school system are often from low-income, minority families, thus leading schools to believe, that for some reason, they need to pick up the slack of the students prior-attended public school by going full authoritarian. This then leads to harsh methods such as “cutting out subjects not relevant to testing, spending an extraordinary amount of time on test preparation . . . demanding silence and conformity reminiscent of boot camps, and so on” (Bruenig). These ideas presented sound frighteningly common to that of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, where “sharing and brotherhood” were more important than actual progress (Cox). Just like within charter schools, students are unable to find true identity by foregoing art, personal expression, and even access to technology, sounds unwaveringly similar to Equality 7-2521’s inability to discover his true self until he breaks free from the system. In the same stance, a student from a charter school leaves the system to attend college, only to realize that their educational system stood on the bureaucratic system rather than a system that actually prepared them for the real world. While these systems claim to help bridge the poverty wealth gap, they actually end up segregating them where the low-income students “must go to hellish-sounding bootcamp . . . while the rich kids go to much more relaxed schools with greater subject diversity and freedom” (Bruenig).

            Let’s look at a real-life example of a famous charter school system: IDEA public schools. Laying the claim on their website’s blog, where everyone is boasting their IDEA colored polo with the same saying on it: No excuses, that “100% of the class of 2019 have been accepted to college” (Thorne). Not only is this claim, sure, true, they actually embed this statement of No Excuses from the minute they walk into school, and “instill in them the expectation that they will go to college” (IDEA). However, they cut out all arts courses from the minute students enter pre-k, including music and art. They are only to learn the four main subjects. Dr. Ed Fuller did some research into this, showing that even though their information is in truth, factual—all kids do go to or enroll in a university, their “report fails to report publicly available data on the performance of students in four-year universities” (Fuller). Bruenig ties these ideas together, claiming that in reality, these charter schools are a dystopian society that doesn’t help liberate kids from a social wealth gap, but in reality, keeps them in the same poverty level by forcing them to follow a utopian-like set of standards. He claims that charter schools actually follow something called the Poor Method in which schools with more wealth would actually “never tolerate schooling methods like that,” and that “indeed, schools rich children go to do not use these methods” thus pushing a conservative agenda, rather than a liberal one that most charter schools are often tied to. IDEA might be a great utopian-like ‘society’; however, it ends up dystopian and “cease[s] to be a location of great egalitarian hope, but instead become quite clearly an inegalitarian hellscape, an almost surreal daily performance of brutal social stratification” (Bruenig).

Works Cited

Bruenig, Matt. An Education Dystopia. April 24, 2015. https://www.demos.org/blog/4/24/15/education-dystopia. Accessed 17 February 2019.

Cox, Stephen. Ayn Rand’s Anthem: An Appreciation. July 7, 2010,            https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/3832-ayn-rand-s-anthem-an- appreciation. Accessed 17 February 2019.

Fuller, Dr. Ed. Why is a 43% Failure Rate in College Considered College-Prep?, December 16, 2012. https://fullerlook.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/idea_charter_college_failures/. Accessed 17 February 2019.

Knopp, Sarah. International Socialist Review. Issue 62, November-December 2008, http://www.isreview.org/issues/62/feat-charterschools.shtml. Accessed 17 February 2019.

Thorne, Cavett. IDEA Public Schools Achieves 100 Percent College Acceptance for 13 Consecutive Years. February 11, 2019, https://www.ideapublicschools.org/news-events/idea-public-schools-achieves-100-percent-college-acceptance-for-thirteen-consecutive-years. Accessed 17 February 2019.