There are two schools that operate 1,000 miles away from each other. One is on the east, the other on the west. Both of these schools do well for their respective areas. The various success rates — grades, graduations, sports, and more — are all quite high. The parents sending their kids to each of these schools are pleased, and, for the most part, the students — as much as students can be — are generally happy with the institutions in which they learn.
Additionally, the teachers and other various staff members find their respective schools to be satisfactory places in which to work, and the principals and other authority figures within each school are content and pleased with what their duties entail.
Unfortunately, it all eventually falls apart.
The school in the west becomes privy to the fact that the school in the east, the one 1,000 miles away, does not conduct their business in the same way that they do. The curriculum is different, so are the classroom presentations, the teachers teach in different forms and styles, and even the many of the subject matters, including what’s focused more heavily on, does not align perfectly with how they do things. Now, there are certainly some similarities. Teaching and learning has its carry-overs, no matter how far away one place of learning is from the other. But, in the case of these two particular schools, the overall environments are vastly different.
The school that’s become aware of this difference is at first offended by the lack of similarities. Then, they become worried, anxious even. And finally, the leaders of this school develop within themselves a militant spirit — a spirit of activism. These disparities must no longer exist, something must be done.
Centered almost exactly in between these two schools exists an entity that houses a committee. The committee’s purpose is often fought over and no real clarity has been established as to what its duties are and should be, and yet it contains a great amount of power, which makes it the perfect place for these school authorities now turned activists to appeal to. But first they must create and bring over to their side more activists from other various schools, because it’s now become a numbers game; the more schools they have behind their mission, the more likely their appeal will be adhered to by the committee.
And so this is exactly what happens. The offended school tugs upon the heart strings of the schools it attempts to recruit to their side. In very basic terms, the conversion talking points they use are things like: “look at how they teach their students in a way that’s no longer socially acceptable,” or, “they can’t get away with not focusing on this certain subject, it’ll set their children behind for generations.” Many of these other schools will come to agree, not wanting to be complicit in the fraudulent teaching and bringing up of the next generation.
Eventually then, the numbers become enough, and the appeal is made. The committee sees the appeal, sees the numbers, and sees that they have no choice but to act. If they don’t act, their seats on the committee will be lost, and they’ll be out of a job. Therefore, the committee enacts new rules and regulations, ones the offending school must abide by, and ones the offended school has already been abiding by because they’re the ones who set them in place.
Finally, the school in the west is now happy, the uniformity they so diligently sought after, through some necessary activism, has been attained. Maintaining the uniformity, however, could require a bit of force. That’s the committee’s job now though, and the school in the west sees nothing wrong with that and will be quite content as long as the committee continues to do its job, which has suddenly become more clear now — at least to the school in the west that is.
The school in the east is not at all content. They feel they’ve been cheated, disenfranchised, not listened to. When they first became aware of the attempts to change their environment, they posited their defense in the mold of explaining their differences as necessary for their particular value systems, cultural beliefs, and traditions. It was all in vain, however, and now they have to prepare to change.
With the change also comes demise. The thriving success the school had become accustomed to is stifled, and the students suffer. This of course leads to the parents becoming frustrated, leading them to blaming the teachers for their kid’s growing lack of interest in learning and the increasing amount of poor performances all around. The teachers, stressed from the pressure coming from the parents, as well as from the perception they were failing at their jobs, also become frustrated and begin to point the collective finger toward their superiors, blaming them for a lack of support and for giving in to the demands of the school 1,000 miles away.
Not wanting to see the school driven completely into the ground and becoming motivated by the blame for the failures of the school climbing all the way up to them, the leaders of the school decide that something must be done. And so, within them a militant spirit begins to activate. Their first order of duty: get the numbers on their side.
~ I’m fully aware that my thought experiment is quite susceptible to having holes poked in it. However, my point was not to create an impenetrable case study, but rather to get one to think about and consider the possibility that mass democracy — this thing that’s for several weeks now been shoved down our throats as sacred — is quite penetrable itself. In fact, in a country as large as ours and containing as many people as it does, mass and centralized democracy is enabling a system in which the majority gets to oppress the minority — the 51% telling the 49% what to do and how to live.
It’ll be pointed out, and accurately so, that in my illustration there would not be a 100% approval or satisfactory rate in each of the given schools, and nor is there ever a 100% lean to the Right or the Left in any given State. But in many of the deep Red or Blue States you can often find 60/40 splits, which is obviously much more of a consensus than what we see in what’s referred to as our general election every four years.
Furthermore, within the schools and within individual States, you’ve obviously got more cultural and traditional awareness, which can allow for more open and purposeful dialogue in regards to the organizational/political discourse.
Finally, greater decentralization would allow for a greater political consensus within each State to organically develop through intra-country migration; you would see more people moving away from the places that don’t fit their values and to the places that do.
Full disclosure, my own personal preference is to decentralize even more than what I’ve attempted to create in this experiment. However, I’m aware that the majority of the country is not yet ready to have the particular discussion I’ve hoped to stimulate with this post, let alone the one that I’d eventually like to get to. But perhaps this post can lead some to at least begin considering the plausibility and possibilities of further decentralization.
Now, perhaps you don’t even want to read my illustration as an advocacy of decentralization as far as the country goes and would rather read it as a criticism of the Department of Education and an endorsement of schooling being led at a more localized level. This is something that I’ll absolutely allow (you can read about my own own views on any kind of government schooling here). In any case, thank you so much for reading. ~
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Great post!