As MacBeth says in the eponymous play:

Life is…a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Reminds me of the education debate. For the high school kids reading my blog right now, here’s what I mean – there’s a lot of talk, and no action.

I just finished reading Valerie Strauss’ commentary on Obama’s revised education plan on The Washington Post’s site.

Then, as I often do, I started to read some of the responses.

Then, as usually happens, I realized I was wasting precious life, reading regurgitated doctrine from people who have been programmed to spew it out.

So I stopped, and started writing this.

My good friend Kwame Brown recently posted a blog entry with a similar set of questions as those raised by Valerie, and by an inquiry into education in our country.

In his post Education and the Tribe, he asks several good questions:
1. Why are citizens of the US (who are taxpayers) reticent to increase taxes (even minimally) to help pay for education?
2. What is happening within our education system, and what are the alternatives?
3. If funding is created, what should it be used for?

Kwame has some answers, and his readers have others.

My interest is in a deeper current.

The question I would pose is this – why is education in the state it is in today?

In order to change it, we need to know how it got to the state it is in. Some people advocate for activism, period. But I think that is misguided. Without understanding the background of the situation, you can easily waste time and effort, and potentially have disastrous results, opposite to those you hoped for.

Consider the case of a person who goes to a doctor with a problem. If the doctor does not interview the patient and try to find the possible cause of the problem, the doctor is merely treating the symptom – and may in fact hurt the patient even further.

Once we know how and why education is in the state it is in (and there are many many reasons – from personal to community to regional and national factors, and on to international factors, from marketing and consumerization/productization to cultural influences), we must then ask what is at stake for the people who brought education to the place it is now.

Again, there will be at least a few key stakeholders (I’m thinking of groups like Federal government, industry/business, state government, regional authorities, county authorities, and then parents, teachers and students, and others), and each group will have its own agenda, outcome and strategy.

What is at stake for each of these groups? What are their desires, fears, and needs?

When we find those, we can find the intersections, or “win/win” arguments to support our agenda (once that, itself, has been defined).

This, I think, is the way to make change. Yes, action can be organized and orchestrated now, and can be incredibly effective, but it must have its foundation in an understanding of the source of the problem, and a clear idea or proposal for the desired state.

Otherwise it’s all sound and fury…and will end up signifying nothing.