One day during social studies, her class started to learn about work. The lesson was about people’s different occupations. My daughter’s teacher was a kind and well-intentioned person who wanted her students to achieve. The long hours she worked preparing, teaching and evaluating curriculum were proof of that.

Later that night, my daughter’s homework assignment was to read a chapter from the textbook, then answer a series of questions. She asked me a question about the reading, and I tried to answer it after browsing through the pages. Work is something everybody does every day, I found. Cheery illustrations showed workers of all backgrounds delivering goods, treating patients, typing letters and so forth. However, I answered her question based not on the reading but my life experience.

Why? My work life and those of fellow workers has included precarious employment and tyrannical bosses. Such information was absent in her book. Admittedly, my daughter’s assignment was a simplification. But to be so utterly unlike the real world?

Plus there was no hint on the pages that finding a job is a challenge. Nor was there a clue that keeping a job is perhaps a bigger challenge. The not-so-subtle message was that a job is a job—a ticket to the good life. One would never know from my daughter’s textbook that our socioeconomic system doesn’t provide jobs for all who want to work. Never has, in fact, provided full employment. Insignificant details?

In my daughter’s text, employers appeared generous and humane. They were in harmony with workers. One large and laughing family at work. Compare this mythic depiction with the realistic situation most people live most of the time under bosses that could charitably be called benevolent dictators. People spend a third of their lives working.

Okay, you say, but aren’t such ideas a bit much to teach elementary school kids? Aren’t they’re too young? Well, I think elementary school is a fine time for students (tomorrow’s workers) to begin thinking critically about the class system. Working for others is a central part of life that deserves to be dealt with openly and honestly.

Interestingly, the social studies my daughter was exposed to resembled what I learned during the late 1960s. Then, the counterculture was supposedly felling the walls of traditional education. Standards were sliding. American society was suffering. So the story is spun to this day by those with the money to tell such fables to a wide audience, perhaps unaware of different accounts.

Cut to today. Elites discuss and debate academic standards around America. It’s more than a cottage industry. Students’ standardized test scores are front-page news. The stakes are high, but not in the sense intended. Let me explain.

I think that the focus on test scores is misplaced. Testing is one way to prevent the public from questioning classroom curriculum. Why and how does it assume what needs to be explained? Such questions that shine light on the conventional wisdom need to be voiced by parents, students and teachers.

We owe it to our children, politically powerless and thoroughly vulnerable, to support classroom curriculum that encourages critical thinking.

Education or indoctrination? The choice is ours. We have the power.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper. He can be reached at ssandron@hotmail.com.

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