Money Is Not the Issue, Part 2

It is starting to cause me physical pain to see people bickering about education funding.  It has come up again because President Obama wants a lot of the money in the stimulus package dedicated to public schools.

Spend more money.  Spend all the money you want.  Public schools, charter schools, vouchers... spend spend spend.  Forget the fact that we, as a nation, already spend more per pupil than every other country in the world on education save one (I think it's Norway) and dump dollars into the system.  It won't help.  The other side will continue to howl that parents don't value education enough, but that ignores the fact that there are plenty of things within the system that we do control and can change to make it work better.  

Our school system is set on a destructive foundation that dehumanizes all involved, and until it changes, all the money in the world won't help.  Until students are treated as something more than products turned out on an assembly line, they will continue to fail.  Until we treat their minds as something more than receptacles for facts that the teachers insert, they will fail.  Until teachers are no longer burdened with the responsibility of forcing or coercing students to learn, turning them into entertainers, babysitters, or tyrants, they will continue to fail.  Throw all the money you want at the problem, but our educational house is built on sand.  Until we restore healthy and proper relationships to a central place in our system, students will continue to learn to hate learning, equating it with the dehumanizing practices of the current system.  Teachers will continue to burn out and turn over.  We will continue to lag behind the rest of the world in test scores, as if that were what this were about.  Until the governing philosophy is changed, we will fail entire generations of children.