Posted on 10/10/2014 3:18:27 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Local newspapers in the US don't cover education in any depth. Maybe they’ll tell you superficial and trivial stuff (for example, that a superintendent was hired or fired, that there will be a meeting next month of the school board). But you won’t find anything about the nuts and bolts that determine whether you child learns to read, or learns anything at all.
At first glance, this non-coverage can seem to be a mystery. Everybody's interested in education, especially parents and grandparents with kids in K-12. Probably one of the most valuable things that you could tell these people is how to help their children do better in school.
So, why not cover education more thoroughly?
But look deeper and the mystery goes away.
American public schools are full of failed theories and dysfunctional schemes. In a phrase, there is a lot of bunk and junk. For example, Rudolf Flesch wrote a famous book in 1955 explaining why Johnny can’t read if you teach him with sight-words. But here we are 60 years later and children in elementary schools are being taught in that same way. Think about that for a moment.
New Math, which the country laughed into oblivion around 1965, came back with multiple variations under the heading Reform Math and now Common Core Math. The common denominator is inefficiency. In short, the Education Establishment has a total affection for clunkers.
And now in almost every classroom, the dominant teaching method is called Constructivism, which dictates that teacher shouldn't teach and children should forage in the intellectual forest for themselves. With teachers not teaching, you will surely get a lot less learning.
That’s just three of many bogus theories and methods. Cynics would say that there are almost no good ideas in the public schools. Our Education Establishment has systematically purged them.
In sum, our public schools are absolutely awash with bad ideas. Apparently the smartest people in the Education Establishment make their bones, as the Mafia guys say, by coming up with creaky, unworkable curricula.
Aha.
Now you're seeing the truth. If newspaper started explaining what’s really going on in the public schools, there would be such an outcry. The peasants might even be in a mood to revolt.
Irate parents would show up to argue with teachers and principals. Administrators might be stalked on the street. School boards would have to deal with endless complaints. Professors at the nearby ed school would find themselves despised. Publishers of useless textbooks would get hate mail. If the truth brought improvement, most tutors and remediation people would be out of work. Shrinks and manufacturers of Ritalin would find their business way down. And what would Sylvan and Kumon do if the school stopped crippling children intellectually?
In short, newspapers do not want all those people mad at them. Better not to rock the boat. Don’t anybody say a word. Better to let the kids be dumbed down.
This sounds pathetic and pusillanimous. And it is. But consider that the editors and publishers of the newspapers are merely human. Probably they are friends with the local NEA bosses, union officials, and big shots from the federal government. They want to stay friends. They don’t want all these parents coming down to the schools every day shouting, “Look what it says here in the paper,” because those shouts will reverberate in their own lives.
So it’s a lot simpler just to leave the kids ignorant, let the parents puzzle on in silence.
Education is a big trough and it seems that everybody has a place at the trough, except maybe kids and parents.
Eric Hoffer, the philosopher, said that every great cause— and here one might think of public education—“begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
———-
end article
The media would not know the truth if it came up and bit them on the a$$.
My husband is a teacher as well & refuses to send our kids to school. Homeschooling is not easy and I am tempted to at least send our oldest back to school, but he sees what goes on both academically and socially and will not subject our kids to that.
He feels like a rebel or missionary within the system, but curriculum and requirements are set by others so there is only so much that teachers can do.
The one good thing I will say about inner city schools is that they are so desperate for teachers who can keep the kids in the rooms and not running through the halls vandalizing stuff is that they leave curriculum pretty much up to the teacher. In English, anyway. I choose the books and movies we cover. I have to teach them the “skills” the District wants, but that’s fine. As long as I get to choose the books and movies.
They have been doing group work at least since my oldest children were in elementary school. That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. It doesn’t seem to have destroyed their ability to think and learn. Amazingly, they can read after being taught sight words AND phonics. All of my children read well.
I have a lot of issues with the current methods for teaching. But I have noticed that children continue learning in spite of the curriculum. They are human. They have natural tendencies to seek knowledge.
My second oldest son is in college now, and he does group work in his computer classes. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. He is happy that he is in the smartest group in one of the classes. They just happened to be sitting near one another the day the groups were made. My son has learned from others and vice versa. My husband is a programmer, and they do a lot of group work as well as individual work. He has learned a lot of valuable information from working with others in groups.
My son in computer classes has been subjected to group work all his life. He was invariably the smartest person in his groups. (Except when he was taking Spanish. He was grouped with native Spanish speakers. He let them do all the work.) Son worked better in groups because he had pressure to actually do the work or his friends would make bad grades. If he had assignments that he had to do alone, he wouldn’t do them. He would take a bad grade. He would even do other student’s homework for them and not turn in the very same assignment for himself. He was an infuriating child.
We live in a small town in the Midwest so it’s very different here.
When in the history of humankind has it been possible to reform a monopoly that is fundamentally a price-fixed, government-run, union-controlled, compulsory-use, compulsory-funded and socialist-entitlement?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.