I finished Michele Bachmann's Core of Conviction: My Story.
In the Appendix to this book, "Goals 2000 in the Context of a Global
Power Grab", Bachmann criticizes Goals 2000 and also provides the text
for the National Education Goals that were a part of that program. She
discusses in that appendix her concern about world government, which
made me wonder what the John Birch Society thinks about her, since it
has long had a similar concern. According to this article on
the John Birch Society's web site, Michele Bachmann was the second most
consistent advocate for liberty among the Republicans running for
President in 2012 (next to Ron Paul), yet she has problematic positions
on such issues as the Patriot Act, war, foreign aid, and other issues.
The
Appendix on Goals 2000 reminded me of an earlier passage in Bachmann's
book. I was going to write about it in a write-up, but I forgot to do
so, so I'll do that now. On page 119, Bachmann discusses the Minnesota
Profile of Learning curriculum that she opposed. She states:
"Yet
it was not just a power grab of our schools, but a power grab of our
whole way of life as free Americans. Students were now to be seen for
their value to the economy, for their usefulness to a future employer.
No parent sees his or her child only in such utilitarian concerns, but
central planners do----and that was the problem. Embedded in the
Profile was a vision of top-down control in which children became mere
cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine."
This reminded me of a class
that I took at Harvard Divinity School years ago. The class was about
religion in public schools, and one of the books that we read concerned
attempts to subordinate public education to the marketplace. This book
criticized charter schools and also Channel One, a news program that was
sponsored by a corporation. Schools that accepted Channel One gave the
corporation the opportunity to provide them with televisions, which
helped the schools. But a question that the book was raising was this:
At what price? Was education becoming subjected to the
marketplace, with its dehumanizing focus on the bottom-line? And did
that compromise public schools' status as a place of democracy,
equality, and diversity----one of the few such places in the world?
I'll
admit that it's been a while since I read this book, and so I'm a
little fuzzy about its overall argument. But I do remember my professor
for that course making a point that has stayed with me. She said that
there are different views about what the role for education should be,
and one view is that it should be to train people for the marketplace.
Students
in my class equated that particular view----about education's primary
role being to train people for the marketplace----with the right-wing,
which supports capitalism. But, as you can see from what Michele
Bachmann says in the quote above, things are more complex than that, for
Bachmann is opposed to seeing students primarily in terms of their
usefulness to the economy. Moreover, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly was an opponent of Channel One. It's
ironic that Bachmann, who defends the free market for page after page
in this book, should be critical of the public schools focusing on
making students into reliable cogs in a dehumanizing capitalistic
economy. But she probably would say that she's not against capitalism
but the corporatist union of government and business, or that she's in
favor of balancing out the free market with other things, such as
family.
I'll stop here. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I
still don't particularly care for Michele Bachmann's worldview,
especially how she criticizes people for receiving government handouts
when she herself has been a beneficiary of the government, and how she
is part of a movement (the religious right) that (in my opinion) tries to shove
conservative Christian ideas down people's throats in the public square
(though she'd probably say that it's the secular left that tries to
shove its views down people's throats, and she'd have a point there).
Her criticism of taxes, even as she supports taxes for the middle-class,
also irks me. But I feel as if I know her a little better after
reading this book, and I've enjoyed reading her story.