Posted on 03/21/2019 5:51:34 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
(Summary: In many ways, public schools seem deliberately organized to diminish intellect, not to enlarge it.)
An acquaintance sent this note: “My sister tells of teaching math to college freshmen. The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y? And no one could answer!”
Remember, these students have been admitted to a community college. Presumably, many studied Algebra around the ninth grade. The teacher is an experienced veteran who knows mathematics. How can anyone explain this anecdote?
You would surely conclude that public schools did a terrible job. But the situation seems more ominous than even this summary suggests. These students have been made dumber at 19 than they probably were at 12. They can’t understand a simple idea, even when it’s explained to them for days. It’s almost as if someone had performed a long, slow lobotomy on these young brains.
How do the public schools achieve this diminishment?
Suppose you were serious about achieving exactly that goal. There are techniques you would automatically use. Books could be written on each technique, and probably have. But I’ll be brief. It’s the totality of the effect that we need to contemplate, not the details.
1) You ensure a general disorderliness, with lots of interruptions and chatter from loudspeakers. Discipline is slack. Ideally, unmanageable students are kept in the classroom. If children feel insecure and frightened, that’s helpful.
2) You curtail or eliminate recess and physical activity. You want the children confined and lethargic, or bored and restless.
3) You divide students into small groups. They are graded as a group, praised as a group, and addressed as a growth. They learn not to trust their own thinking.
4) You keep children constantly engaged in trivial “activities.” They sing a song or talk about their favorite day of the week. What matters is that the activities have no academic content.
5) You ensure that the classroom does not contain maps, especially of the US or the world. Geographical details are rarely mentioned.
6) You make sure that teachers think of themselves as facilitators. They do not communicate information to the students. Teachers emphasize that facts need not be memorized. History and science are skimmed, not taught.
7) Literacy is constantly referenced; and the classroom is filled with books. However, the methods used to teach reading are designed not to be effective. (The central sophistry is to teach English, a phonetic language, as if it’s a hieroglyphic language.)
8) Math is referenced every day. However, the methods used to teach arithmetic are designed to be ineffective. New topics are introduced helter-skelter. Often these topics are exotic and complicated. Weird techniques are taught. Even in the sixth grade, most children can’t multiply and divide, and don’t understand decimals and fractions. They are dependent on calculators. As college students, they don’t know what 7×8 is.
9) You insist that grammar and spelling are obsolete; cursive is a waste of time; kids shouldn’t learn a second language. Anything rigorous and logical is dismissed as “inappropriate for our children.” It’s important to create an atmosphere where deadlines don’t matter, tests are soft, grades are inflated, everyone is promoted, and students learn that little is expected of them.
10) The goal is that most students feel at once overwhelmed and empty. They know they are ignorant and barely literate. Whatever education is, they didn’t get any. Many have been told they are dyslexic or have ADHD. Many have received tutoring, counseling, or sedation. Many pretend to be sick so they can stay home.
11) All educational failure is blamed on factors the school can’t control. Children are said to be not ready, not smart, or neurotic in some way. Parents are said to be not involved, not helpful, or hostile to the educational process. The schools constantly praise their own wisdom and performance.
The totality of these techniques, kept in play month after month, virtually guarantees that no education takes place. If some students are stubborn and insist on acquiring information on their own, they are labeled “gifted” and removed from the general population.
The whole process is carefully anti-educational and anti-intellectual. Whatever a real school would do, you do the opposite. A remarkable thing happens. The children grow physically; they age before your eyes. But what they know at 10 or even 15 is not distinguishable from what they knew at 8. What they know as high school graduates can be measured in smidges. They arrive in community college able to drink, drive, vote, serve in the military, or marry, but unable to grasp that if Z+5 equals 10, Z must be 5. Much more than we would like to thank, the K-12 experience is a lobotomy performed in slow motion.
McKinsey & Company, the famous consulting firm, put it this way in 2009: “The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform.”
(©Bruce Deitrick Price)
It’s kind of a two-tiered system: the kids of motivated parents are boosted ahead, with enrichment and tutoring and sports and test-prep classes and AP classes and internships. From day one. A few emerge from this with a genuine love of learning intact. Others are just tired, burnt-out, and hoping this will result in a respectable career somehow.
The other kids have curricula which is not nearly as challenging, and they have social lives which are not as conducive to deep thought (vaping in the park, or whatever). They are as burnt out on school as the over-acheivers, but have less to show for it. Not many will ever catch up.
It actually goes back to John Dewey, in the early 1900s, who intended to turn America into a socialist nation via education. His work infiltrated all the colleges of education beginning with Columbia. The early 1920s was when they began to change the way children are taught to read by deemphasizing phonics. By the 60s enough teachers had been trained to begin their real socialist work.
They did all their experimentation in the inner city schools because inner city parents don't complain like suburban parents do. But now the suburban schools are getting the programs that were "practiced" on the inner city kids. That is how we got Common Core. Teaching kids without really teaching them so they end up as adults who cannot think to save their lives.
I knew of this before any of my children were old enough to go to school. None of my kids went to public school. I either paid for private/parochial school or I homeschooled. Any school my kids went to I made sure the teachers had the same ideas of education as I did. My kids can think. All of them went to college and none of them are politically stupid. Amen and Amen.
I was taking algebra for the first time. The class I had before my algebra class was swimming which was at the complete opposite end of the school. So I had 10 minutes to dry off, put my clothes back on and make a mad dash to algebra. I would usually arrive at class just after the bell rang which made me chronically tardy. The teacher made no bones about not liking me. I would raise my hand to ask a question and she would say, "What a stupid question. Any idiot would know the answer to that." I managed to get out of her class just a few weeks after catching a whiff of her hatred. But, all my desire to really learn algebra left me. I homeschooled my kids until they had to do algebra. I did not want any of my negativity to rub off on them.
You sound like a peach of a teacher.
The more I learn, the more I believe in GOD. The universe is not an accident.
There is no such thing such as a stupid question. We learn by asking questions. Your teacher was an a$$. I love it when a student will ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to give them. Many of the math formulas that I’ve created, and discovered is because of students questions. Any teacher who won’t answer a question, is not a real teacher.
If you asked them “how much you would have to steal from your parents if a bag of drugs costs $100 but you only have $50,” they would get the answer in a millisecond.
Those who question authority (i.e., those enforcing the socialist system) must be removed from the general population and reconditioned until they either can be made to cease this questioning...or else.
If you had been running a private school in our area I would have been eager to have enrolled my children.
Solution: Begin the process of privatizing all education from Pre-K through to university graduate school.
In the first grade, on the walk to and from the school, I would scream and chant as loudly as I possibly could, I HATE SCHOOL!!!!” I would do this at other times, as well.
My mother would ask me to stop doing this but I continued throughout the school year. As I moved into second grade I had stopped. By then, I had gone through all the stages of grief. I was in a state of numb and depressed acceptance.
What you describe is the broader context for the recent cheating scandal. I think cheating has been epidemic for maybe 50 years. I don’t mean everyone does it but a great number. Also, add in the fact that you can buy essays on the Internet. So millions of kids are really helpless at this point.
The school obviously is not trying to stop cheating. So students are very surprised when you complain. Don’t cheat? What a weird idea.
Terrible.
I didn’t do that so nobody knew. When I wasn’t stressed about a test, the walking-to-school time was part of my daydreaming down time.
Amazing I had enough situational awareness to survive the journey!
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