"All men by nature desire to know," said Aristotle. Either Aristotle was wrong, or public education is failing to awaken the academic desires of American students.
According to a new Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, only 32 percent of recent high school graduates were qualified to attend a four-year college. In addition, the report showed that the high school graduation rate remains depressingly low at only 70 percent.
For years, American education experts have been alarmed at the growing inability of public school students and graduates to compete academically with peers in other industrialized democratic countries. As Charles Sykes wrote in his revolutionary 1990s book, Dumbing Down our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add , "When the very best American students -- the top one percent -- are measured against the best students of other countries, America's best and brightest finished at the bottom."
While Sykes may have exaggerated the problem, it is true that America's students are average at best.
According to the most recent academic comparison study by the Program for International Student Assessment, of students in 32 developed countries, 14 countries score higher than the U.S. in reading, 13 have better results in science, and 17 score above America in mathematics.
It isn't as though American students aren't scoring first places any more. A survey by the Princeton Testing Service shows that American students rank highest amongst industrialized democracies for amount of time spent watching videos in class. And William Moloney, chairman of the Washington, D.C. based Education Leaders Council -- a coalition of reform minded political and educational leaders -- writes that American students feel better about their math skills that any other country in the free world, while Korean students (who feel worst about their math skills) outscore everyone else in math.
The characteristics of self-esteem-obsessed, video-watching schools are manifested in the frustrations of America's higher education system. According to the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia, more than 40 percent of recent Washington State high school graduates attending community college enrolled in remedial courses to prepare them for college-level work. But a public-school system that transfers responsibility for learning basic knowledge to higher education isn't giving taxpayers and parents a return for their money. More damaging, the failure of elementary schools to prepare students for their future hurts America economically, socially, and intellectually.
Over the past century, public education has devolved from the classical approach of character plus basics (reading, writing, arithmetic, respect, and responsibility), to skills, to psychological-social engineering....
"No, it's not. My kids go to a great school."
Lucky you, then. Most public schools are run down and education is dumb down to the lowest common denominator. And it getting worse, not better.
And unfortunately, most parent are not aware of the problem. Let-alone how to solve the problem. Home schooling helps alot. Are you a teacher, or work in the public school system?
Homeschooling is not the answer for families with two parents working outside the home and it is not the answer for single parents.
Geezz, I total forgot about the working class. Sorry.
(BTW, not all of the parochial schools out there are having moral troubles.)
Yea, but that number is getting smaller, unfortunately!
One good ideal who time has long ago pass is, discipline in the schools.
If I come up with any other idea, I let you know.
I homeschooled through 9th grade, then sent my 15 year old to the local college. We have a great program called dual enrollment, and if they can pass the College Entrance, they can take classes for free that count as college and high school credit.
What state(s) allows this? Never heard of this before.
I don't think education has to be a straight 2 or 3 hours of sitting with someone lecturing. You can let small kids do the grocery shopping --- give them $20 and let them buy dinner --- that helps them learn and subtract, have them help figure how much paint or floor tile --- to learn practical uses for equations such as perimeter and area. Family trips help them learn geography and map reading. They can see parent's working on a budget or income taxes --- be asked to double check figures. Or ask them what they're learning in science and find ways to reinforce some of that or incorporate it into discussions or field trips.
Brit did a stoy that 50% of teh teachers in Philly failed a test by the no child left behind act. I think some of the children did better.
This explains the problem about as well as anything out there, and exactly why more money and more "public input" won't matter. If you google "Delphi Technique" there's some good information on how this crap is effected. No wonder they are all such smug bastards.
Deconstructing Public Education
Diane Alden
July 26, 2002
Public education in America is a mess. No amount of money or fixing is going to turn it around. Humanists, cultural Marxists, the psychologically oriented social engineers and gurus are in charge. Those who seek to deconstruct America, its values, its institutions and its history, as well as its future as a sovereign state, are running the show called American public education.
The Intellectual 'Gods' of the American Educational Wasteland
In order to achieve a temporary teaching certificate back in the late '80s, I experienced what nearly every teacher in the U.S. today has to learn or absorb. Included in my studies were the theories and philosophies of education gurus like Jung, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Adler, William Glasser, John Dewey, Wundt, Pavlov, B.F. Skinner and Watson.
The problem, as I concluded, is that a little valuable information or objective studies were mixed in with junk, the political, the manipulative, psycho-sociological theory.
It is important for a teacher to know at what stage or age a child learns what. But it is even more important that a teacher have something valuable to teach. That is not what is happening in our public schools, high schools or the colleges of education these days.
Rather, feelings, techniques, self actualization and the ever-popular sensitivity training and "project learning" have replaced solid facts and information and workable teaching techniques. You know – the kind of knowledge that children learned in most schools before the radicalized '60s generation captured the culture and the schools.
These are the new totalitarians, who adopted psychological tools that have created the dumbed-down, tuned-out, easily manipulated, irrational people that most public schools turn out by the millions.
As I discovered in much of my course work, the gods of modern education and psychology didn't simply stop with objective studies of child development. They veered into an area where they had no business.
In the mindset of the psycho-social educational guru, the child became an object, human capital, silly putty if you will, for creating a political creature easily manipulated by those who think they know better.
The manipulators are the kind of folks who believe that their collectivist vision is what mankind needs in a collectivized, hive-like world. All this is based on Maslow and Roger's theories, called Third Force psychology. Third Force psychology gave us "stuff" like "values clarification" and the wonders of "mastery learning" and these days it has been recycled into "project learning."
Worse yet, however, is that the "stuff" foisted upon the American educational system has replaced the teaching of absolutes or fact-based learning. Manipulative tools like the Delphi Technique and Saul Alinsky's political tools are used by the radicalized progressives, the left and those who hate American society, Western cultural tradition and its values and underpinnings.
That hatred is called many things, but it is recognizable in gender politics and multicultural, diversity "training," as opposed to teaching individual self-control based on Judeo-Christian ideals of right and wrong, good and bad.
Before the mad '60s, civilized behavior, whether religious-based or not, was the standard if not always the norm. That is not the case today. Today's child has lost his moral moorings thanks to the success of the descendants of Hegel and Marx who have captured our institutions and used psychology to do it.
What replaced cultural standards and civilized norms of behavior and learning is the mushy brand of non-judgmental "tolerance" of behavior that goes against beliefs and traditions that have taken thousands of years to evolve. Fuggedabout learning much of anything that is teacher-directed instead of child-directed.
For at least a hundred years, the psycho-social educrats like John Dewey or B.F. Skinner or Maslow and Rogers looked at the child as a pliable being to be recreated as the new utopian man. This new creature would fit into the brave new world collectivist and God-free social order.
Using whatever theory or fad these experts are pushing, the psychologists, educrats, sociologists, political molders and transformers of society crossed the line.
The experts have successfully convinced vast numbers of people that there are no absolute truths or standards. Psycho-social theories or systems take the place of what we formerly knew as truth, beauty, right and wrong, knowledge and absorbing facts.
Just recently, a college professor informed me that his students were having trouble with concepts like latitude and longitude. Worse yet, they felt put upon when told they had to learn those concepts and apply them to map reading. No one had ever demanded they learn to retain much of anything to memory in any kind of structured fashion.
Mostly he was appalled that they argued with him about having to commit something to memory in order to use it to solve practical or hypothetical problems.
The professor probably knows his students are poorly educated because educrats are pushing something called "project learning." That is learning for the "real" world. As one of the booklets on project-based learning states: "Learners who can see the connection between a project-based task and the real world will be more motivated to understand and solve the problem at hand. ... Project-based Learning has the potential to increase a student's feeling of responsibility for, and control over, his or her own learning ... you and your students engage in a valuable discussion of learning goals, student interests, student and teacher expectations, personal strengths and weaknesses, and problem solving strategies."
Yeah, but do they know what latitude and longitude are? If any of them were adrift in the Pacific Ocean, on their own, would they be able to tell where they were when their "collaborators" were not within easy reach? Probably NOT.
At least 40 percent of American students can't find simple geographical points on a map, like the state or country in which they live. But by gosh, the educrats tell us that "Project-based Learning has the potential to increase a student's feeling of responsibility for, and control over, his or her own learning." God help them if they ever get lost or are asked to plot a course or read a map properly.
It would seem the only facts and truths being promoted or extolled in many schools today are irrational and unstructured theories and "new" socialized versions of math or science. Even taking to memory simple things like latitude and longitude are discouraged. These subjects and concepts carry with them the knowledge of absolutes.
There Are No Such Things as Absolutes
Many modern educrats, feminists and multiculturalists have also managed to turn physics and math into psycho-social political subjects. Feminists have complained that the study of physics is faulty because it is based on patriarchal thinking handed down in Western culture. In other words, what goes up may not come down. That is, unless it has been vetted by Gloria Steinem or Susan Sontag and approved by NOW.
Feminists and the diversity and multicultural proponents of the new and Not-improved education system want to dump Western or American culture, and even physics is taking a bum rap because it evolved out of the thinking of Western white men. How incredibly pathetic for feminists to be so shallow and blind that they have politicized science.
But that has happened across the board. From environmentalism to kindergarten science, it is all about agenda politics these days.
Fact-based solid information that might require memorization or knowledge of absolutes is discouraged unless it serves a reformation or socialization purpose. When science and math are deconstructed because they are considered tools used by white men to control races, classes and women, something is seriously wrong with our intellectual class.
William McDougall states in Academic Questions, Winter 1998-99, "Culture to them is an artificial, malleable construct that is of no intrinsic importance except for its utility in the struggle for liberation."
What is being promoted as educational material worthy of being taught by "facilitators," who used to be called teachers, is a kind of mushy mind pudding of feel-good unstructured information. It is junk information that does not help as a basis for rational thinking.
Project Learning is one technique in handing mind pudding to American children. It is very popular in many school systems nationwide.
Where did we get the educrats discouraging teaching of absolutes or using memorization as a teaching tool? How did mastery or project learning become the implement of choice by the "facilitators" in the classroom? Who are the prime movers in the valueless, fact-free new education system that has created a nation dumbed down to mediocrity?
One of the modern gurus is Dr. William Glasser. To Glasser and his cohorts absolutes and facts are bad. Glasser believes that learning core knowledge promotes individuality, which is bad. He prefers collaborative and cooperative project learning, team playing, whereas a better idea is to promote the collective man, which is a good thing.
To Glasser and others there are no right or wrong answers, but rather many alternatives and right answers. Glasser promotes the no-failure grading system as well as no rankings in superior or outstanding individual achievement. Just this year we witnessed the fruit of that in Massachusetts, where many schools did not have class rankings or valedictorian or salutorian at graduation events.
Thanks to men like Glasser, Maslow, Rogers, Skinner and others, learning in public schools has shifted away from what a student needs to know to what a student decides they want to know.
In his own words, Glasser believes that children are "more comfortable and less bored because it is accepted that they socialize while they work in these situations, while it is not in their regular classes. It is clear that students work and learn best in cooperative groups."
Education critic Lynn Studder has put the new system into perspective. She concludes that educrats like Glasser who promote the Third Force practices of Maslow and Rogers are not doing American children a favor:
"Without factual knowledge, a child has no basis upon which to initiate an informed analytical process resulting in a reasoned conclusion. They can only present an uninformed opinion; they are as computers – 'processors' of information devoid of analytical capability. This is the reality of 'critical thinking.' "
The individual does not need to know or understand facts or absolutes, because he can always depend on his peer in the educational hive to help him through a situation or problem. The individual is out, the hive mentality is in. They call it cooperative and collaborative learning, but some of us call it mob mentality, which we pay for and THEN call it public education. Even a mob is made up of individuals. In the American public school, more often than not, that mob is also a dumb mob.
By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them
William Kilpatrick is a professor in the School of Education at Boston College, where he teaches courses in moral education and adolescent psychology. His thoughts on the modern educrat are sad indeed:
"I believe that many educators in America don't have anything else to teach. They aren't well versed in subject matter. Typically, they've had many courses in education, but relatively few in history, math or science. Typically, American teachers love children, but they don't have a corresponding love of knowledge."
Furthermore, he states: "As a consequence they have very little to pass on. So instead of teaching history, literature, science or geography, the temptation is to sit around in circles with the children and share feelings."
As an indication of our educational freefall into chaos, 43 percent of fourth-graders, 31 percent of eighth-graders and 30 percent of 12th-graders read below "basic" levels, placing them in the illiterate category.
Between 1990 and 1996, statistics show, one-third of the students in grades 4 through 12 could not read and nearly two-thirds of them couldn't read very well.
Achievement levels in history and geography were even worse, and the decline began in 1963.
In today's modern schoolroom, about 41 percent of the school day is devoted to academics. The rest of it is about socialization of some sort.
Sandra Stotsky is a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She wrote "Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason." Her analysis of the state of education concludes that history and civics books used in fifth-grade classes have deep-sixed mention of inventors, explorers, soldiers and all presidents except Abraham Lincoln. Many of the great achievements of Americans is excluded because those Americans were white men.
The Not So Sacred Individual
"Christianity discovers individuality in the sense that it stresses personal conversion," says Bernard McGinn, professor of historical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "This is a crucial contribution to Western Civilization because it releases the individual from the absolute constraints of family and society."
In "Body Snatching," Shirley Correll wrote:
Individualism is one of the first areas to be assaulted and removed. As Outcome Based Education (OBE) is implemented, children are taught and graded as groups. This method is called cooperative learning, and the students are constantly pushed toward group think or collectivism. Individualism is out and collectivism is in. This anti-American concept is one of the most obnoxious of the socialistic leveling devices. It is the individualism of America, carried out in the competitive free enterprise system, which has offered the highest standard of living in the world. However, as one observes OBE, the first thing one will notice is that competition is to be eliminated, along with the rewards of academic excellence. We eliminate programs such as the selection of valedictorians and salutatorians.
And B.K. Eakman wrote, on page 111:
The major part of the groundwork was laid in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, Germany, where experimental laboratories headed by Wilhelm Wundt advanced the then-radical notion of man as a neurochemical machine, a product of genetics and upbringing and not accountable for his conduct, which was said to be caused entirely by forces beyond his control. Wundt's students actually credited him with having divorced the spiritual aspect from his studies. His pupils boasted that, following the establishment of the first psychology laboratory in 1869, psychology had become "a science without a soul."
Thanks to the gurus, the teachers and administrators who have fawned all over the gurus, plus the billions poured into implementing failed theories, we get test scores near the bottom of the international heap.
Our education experts seem to prefer it that way. If we stay at the Bottom, that will require more money to "fix" it. So yet more money is poured into the failed system. The Congress and various administrations have no clue, and the teachers unions are about getting grants or federal money to keep themselves in seminars and conferences and POWER.
The teachers unions have GOT to be the most self-interested bunch of clods that ever walked the face of the earth. Totally in tune with social engineers from hell, they forgot what teachers are supposed to be about.
When teachers and their unions swallow the dimwitted theories, political agenda and manipulative techniques of the psycho-social transformers of American society, as far as I am concerned they are guilty of child abuse AND sedition.
These theories, which came out of Third Force psychology, the human potential movement, and Glasser's "choice" and "reality" programs, are criminal in their failure to educate. But then, after all, the end game is to recreate and change society, not to educate people.
Admitting Failure
Carl Rogers' former partner, Dr. William Coulson, says that out of Third Force psychology came what is better known in colleges and universities and school systems throughout the U.S. as values clarification.
In values clarification there are no absolutes, right or wrong answers. In fact, perception is reality rather than a matter of standards, truths and values as passed on through generations. The name of which he states has been changed to critical thinking, problem solving, or decision making. This is also what Dr. William Glasser has been promoting in his panacea for education.
Toward the ends of their lives the creators of Third Force psychology finally began to understand how much damage these theories had done to society and to children. Too late, though, because these theories and their bastard stepchildren were now enshrined in the way education works in this country. They were adopted to politicize children, the family and the institutions of this nation. Without homeschooling and private schools, the children of this nation would be in worse shape than we already are.
Call it "projects learning, mastery learning, Goals 2000, whatever. It is still 35 years' worth of failure wrapped and rewrapped and recycled into new titles.
The old biblical saying that by your fruits you shall know them holds true in education as in anything else. The fruit of the Third Force and human potential movement, the product of "choice" in regard to what children want to learn or not learn, are failures – but we just throw more money at them and continue to recycle.
Personally, I think public education is beyond reform. Having taught a few years myself, I know that unless a teacher teaches in a system where they ignore the latest in teaching nostrums, the children are going down the education rat hole. As the federal government has become more involved, even at the local level, teachers no longer have the choice or freedom to choose common sense over educational mind sludge.
Many teachers know this and hate it but are so afraid of losing their jobs they just bite the bullet and go on with it.
Anyone who thinks it can be reformed is living in virtual reality. Education is beyond reform. Reform takes too long. The only alternative for parents is to yank their children by the millions from public schools and maybe, just maybe, the educrats and federal government might get the message.
Frankly, I would not count on it. Like all bureaucracies, as well as those who "own" the failed ideas and policies, these people will never learn from failure, they do what they do no matter what.
To admit failure would be to rock their world, and a lifetime of passing on garbage would have to be admitted. That would indeed destroy their self-esteem. But rather that than to keep on destroying America's children.
Check out my Web site at www.aldenchronicles.com. To get in touch with me, please contact me at
alden@newsmax.com.
They tested the teachers --- and they did poorly --- but what would testing of the parents show? These kids have poor quality teachers and parents --- but if the parents are hard working and responsible then the kids will do well --- with or without the teachers.
Boring the kids is not the goal, nor is preventing any from going beyond expectations. Boredom is an accepted byproduct, just so long as the kids do do not get disruptive when they are faced with it. Have you seen the percentage of kids now in "need" of medication?
Do you think that teacher qualifies as the best one you had? He knew you could meet the standard to pass his class & let you do what you wanted during the time you were in his class, just as long as you didn't disrupt any of your fellow students.
If your teacher had been interested in helping you go as far as you could go, do you think you could have been offered more difficult work during your time in that class? Bet your teacher never considered even offering it to you, as he was a product of the same system you were.
Two entire classes (grades) of the small school my kids went to were structured around my middle son. His third grade teacher pre-tested the class before each of chapers in their math book & any student who aced the test was given a different project while the rest of the class did the chapter. My son skipped every chapter in the book. The following year he was bumped a grade in math, so he became a member of two different grades. Skipping 4th grade math meant he had missed learning how to do long division. I taught him how to do it at home in a couple of nights. In order to pull it off when his "older grade" hit middle school, he was bumped in science as well. In 8th grade he was bumped up to the high school for half of his day & the school provided most of the transportation, though not all of it.
The HS fits an 8 hour schedule into a 7 hour day, so scheduling for him had to be creative, but they juggle & figured & pulled it off.
His math Olympics coach was a math professor, teaching college kids & she told me my son understood math in different ways, came up with strategies to go after problems better than any student she had ever worked with. She was a trip & a half. Her son finished school 2 years early. During a gifted & talented parent/teacher committee meeting, she was complaining about doing all of her son's map coloring, cuz she could not see how the school could waste his time on such foolishness. Bet her complaining got louder when she was doing even more of it when he got to high school. lol
Now the downside to all of the juggling, my kid was *done* with any kind of math after his sophomore year. He ran away from home at the end of his junior year & by luck was caught by a an Iowa State Trooper as he was heading for California & freedom. He hated school, hated it. Once again, we did some creative schedule juggling & he finished HS after one more semester, but it meant he had all 8 hours filled with classes & that meant he had no study hall.
Mandatory attendance is bad for education. Learning stopped being a privilege & instead became something inflicted upon the unwilling.
As you said, in previous generations most students never finished high school. It's nothing new, though expectations have changed. The new social order requires us to infantilize our young people.
Bet every one of my sons could have passed the test to get a GED by the end of 8th grade.
I had a similar experience. I went to parent/teacher conferences and looked at the grade book. My daughhter had A+'s on every homework assignment, and F's on every test. I asked the teacher and she told me not to worry because with the weighting she used my little darling would pass the class with a "C".
Seems that at the start of class, the students would place their "homework" on the corner of their desks and the teacher would observe if there was any work on the paper. If there were math problems, instant "A". Net result, both teacher and student were very upset that I could be so unreasonable about such a "minor" problem.