K-12 should be a boot camp. Students become
knowledgeable, resourceful, independent, able to navigate successfully
through life.
Instead,
our public schools prepare children to be incompetent or, even
worse, frightened snowflakes. Typically, students learn little.
They are kept in a bubble of low expectations.
Martin Luther King summed it
up: "Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true
education." What an odd outcome. Many of our students end up
with neither intelligence nor character.
While
the decline in academics is obvious, there is a more subtle sort of decline.
Instead of precision, students learn that vagueness and wrong answers are
acceptable. Instead of interesting challenges, students become
accustomed to gimme questions and permissive grading. Instead of trying
harder, students learn to cut corners. It's almost as if the Education
Establishment wants to create mediocre students and incapable
adults.
Keen
Babbage, a Kentucky teacher, wrote a book explaining his conclusions after 30
years:
I
just think we have done our students a real disservice by making school way too
easy. Students are less willing to read, to study, to do homework, to behave,
to follow rules, to be polite, so we are told to make adjustments and be sure
that every student feels good about himself or herself. Well, a student who
refuses to learn and who uses awful language and never works should not feel
good about any of that[.] ... I think schools got sidetracked with some
misguided social engineering or political correctness or bad psychology. I'm
for hard work and strict rules because those work. I think we owe our students
the truth and we owe them honesty. Life requires hard work and obeying rules.
Children
are in school about 1,000 hours each year. A great deal could be
accomplished during all those hours. Instead, K-12 classrooms seem to beincoherent, anxiety-filled, and finally unproductive.
Schools can't be bothered to teach practical wisdom, and not just the obvious
wisdom of who Napoleon is and where Japan is. Children are often deprived
of commonsense preparation for resourceful living. For example, do they
learn how many quarts are in a gallon? What MPH is and what a cc is?
What is a moon? Are they learning to read charts, maps, and
blueprints?
All
of these comments should prompt us to wonder: what should be happening in
schools? I submit that it would be easy to make a list of 1,000 pieces of
information that every citizen is better off knowing – how many hours in a day,
the names of the oceans and planets, the differences among animal, vegetable,
and mineral. Once you get started, you see that there are a lot of things
that ordinary children could easily learn, just as they now learn football
teams and movie titles.
K-12
education seems to be the equivalent of two weeks of basic training, and then
you're sent off to the front lines. Rookies, poorly prepared, will most
likely be killed first. They'll be clumsy in what is, after all,
a difficult mental and physical challenge. You prepare people for
dealing with challenges by giving them challenges to deal with.
The
Education Establishment has deliberately thinned education as a way of making
children more pliable and cooperative. Liberal social engineers think
this is a good trade-off. That's why these people shouldn't be
allowed near a school.
An
interesting feature of American history is how many famous people are
chronicled as having "only an eighth-grade education." We
marvel that people with so little education can be a big success. A
century ago, however, an eighth-grade education was something like a high
school education today but better because rigorous. Public schools used
to push children as far as they could be pushed. That's obviously what
should be happening now.
You
can almost make the generalization that every feature of today's public
schools is designed to get bad results. For example, this title perfectly
illustrates the whole scam: "The Decline of Play and Rise in Children's Mental Disorders."
Many
schools entirely eliminated recess. Don't you automatically predict
that children will be more anxious and need more Ritalin?
Reform
Math has aggressively claimed for decades that mastering basic arithmetic is
really a waste of time. Children are moved quickly to total dependence
on calculators. This practice is an abdication of responsibility to the
children to give them mastery of simple math. What will happen if the
grid is down or people are trapped in a survival situation? Will they be
able to figure out which way is north?
A
new gimmick in math classes is to make the content so difficult that only a few students ever
master it. The rest have stomach cramps and bad dreams. It would be
far more beneficial to the students, and the country, if everyone mastered the
basics.
Our
public schools claim to teach critical thinking. In fact, what they
inculcate is the opposite: a sort of blur, where thinking hardly occurs at all.
Everything is relative. Everything is soft and fuzzy, which is a
perfect recipe for failure. Nothing is more worth learning than anything
else.
Too
many public schools and colleges seem dedicated to turning out
lightweights. This is not good for the children or our society.
It's also a waste of the society's wealth. The Education
Establishment is making out like bandits while many children are being trained,
realistically speaking, to go on welfare.
According
to Albert Einstein, "once you stop learning, you start dying."
This process seems to start very early in our schools.
Indeed, if kids hardly start to learn, they are dying almost from the
first day.
There
is no mystery about any of this. Good ideas are everywhere, except in our
public schools. Every day, private schools, Montessori schools, classical
academies, and homeschoolers engage in genuine education. Public
schools should be forced to start doing it right.
McKinsey
and Company, the gigantic consulting firm, observed several years ago that
"the longer students stay in our public schools, the less smart they
become." What sort of leaders would allow such a decline?
Bruce Deitrick Price explains educational theories and
methods on his site, Improve-Education.org.
For info about his four new books, see his literary site, Lit4u.com.
