“Worse, there’s an inverse relationship between school spending and student performance. “
One of the most highly educated and successful businesspeople I have known was a dirt poor farmer’s child educated in a one room schoolhouse in rural NC. There was one teacher who taught all grades. He graduated from that school with an ability to write, a love for books, superior math skills, and a love for his country’s history and government. He continued his education throughout his life reading thousands of books on many subjects. He could down with an Ivy League educated intellectual and discuss intelligently almost any subject. He started a business on a shoestring that provided a middle class lifestyle for his family and a comfortable retirement for he and his wife. Clearly he left that one room schoolhouse with a better education than 99% of the high school graduates of today and probably a high percentage of today’s college graduates.
An outstanding teacher can achieve outstanding results with almost no resources. A student with an inquiring mind, supported with good teaching as well as highly supportive and demanding parents can be an exceptional scholar. Substitute teaching fundamental skills necessary for life (reading writing , arithmetic, and objective history) with modern social justice indoctrination, and no parent involvement, and you get the product of 21st century American primary and secondary schools.
The amount of money spent matters little. The one room school house of 1910 with drafty windows, no air conditioning in the summer, and a single wood fired stove to provide heat in the winter provided as good an environment for learning as a 21st century classroom with projection screens, connections to the internet, and laptops for every child.
Education schools spend no time examining the simple techniques that obtained outstanding achievement in the past. The students they turn out are ignorant propagandists. Why should we expect the ignorant to inspire brilliance and achievement in our children?
My sister has been teaching math to junior high and high school kids for 45 years, the past ten in an inner city Baltimore magnet school that is almost all black. She ignores all the crap dumped on her by the administration and the annual math fads that make things worse. She sticks to the basics she learned almost 50 years ago and really gets results.
“One of the most highly educated and successful businesspeople I have known ...
Oh so true. Thanks for the story.
My aunt taught at a one-room schoolhouse in the’20s and ‘30s. Many of her text books are still on the shelves in the family homestead.
Hubby is a physicist, and he was astounded to see the math (arithmetic) books for elementary grades; they are HARD — beyond what seniors learn now.
Tell them what you are going to teach them.
Actually teach them.
Tell them what you’ve taught them.
Nice post. Was the one room school house circa 1910 as I would guess from your post? I’ve heard from old timers that things in general started to go down hill after WW I.
Ivy League Intellectuals, while hard to impress, are not necessarily that impressive when it comes to intellectual breadth, and they are, so far as I can tell, getting worse in this way. (I speak as the product of a small rural Oregon grade school, and to a lesser but still important extent, Cornell University).