Required Reading

[unixronin]

Or, in which a blogger you've never heard of calls the educational establishment to task for sixty years of abject failure.

Comments

[robhansen]

This is a remarkable blog post, probably the best I’ve read all year. I’ve forwarded it on to Instapundit: here’s hoping she gets Instalanched by morning.

[ganainm]

While I agree that education in this country has been the pits for half a century (and like the blogger have memories to prove it), what he's doing is like blaming the recession on bank managers and tellers.

School administrators and teachers are only the tip of the spear. Behind them are local school boards (elected by the same ignoramuses that elect everyone else), state legislators (ditto), state and county superintendents (ditto), and a host of strident advocates for more physical education, more art, more hard science, more history, more civics, more literature, more music, more sex ed (but abstinence-only!) . . . oh, and more indoctrination, that is, the cultivation of patriotism. Teachers and administrators are expected to serve up a balance that satisfies this whole squabbling mob and offends no one on budgets so crippled that most teachers end up buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets and working more hours than they're paid for.

Plus there's the pernicious institution of "normal schools" -- built on the long-standing belief that grade-school teaching is a great career for those who can't make it at the best universities.

So we systematically encourage those with mediocre intelligence to become teachers, make them buy their own supplies, pay them like soda jerks, and wonder why we have such crappy schools? Teachers are not the only ones showing a lack of intelligence here.

[unixronin]

You're entirely correct that a major part of the problem is our treatment of our schools almost as red-headed stepchildren. Above all else, school is where people learn how to learn effectively. We're doing a shockingly poor job of conveying that knowledge.

Athletic leagues and pep rallies, though? Football scholarships? Honestly, that stuff is fluff. Kids need exercise, sure. But maintaining a winning sports team is really not a school's job.

The writer is dead on the mark about the litany of apology for Western civilization, not to mention the fashion for dismissal of the Founders as "dead white males" as though that invalidates any of the things they did or said. Our schools are not effectively teaching how our society, our economy, or our government works, at least in part because many of those doing the teaching are ashamed of them, and are certain that Utopia lies just around the corner if people would only listen to them. The fact that their ideas have demonstrably repeatedly failed to work elsewhere in the world is a mere technicality that simply means the implementers were not sufficiently ideologically pure, or some other such guff.

"the litany of apology for Western civilization"

[ganainm]

Umm...wait a minute. I live in Berkeley, and my kids attended Berkeley's public schools. And my wife and I observed and volunteered many hours in classrooms. If what you describe was going on to the degree that you imply generally, it would have been going on to an extreme degree here in the People's Republic of Berzerkeley, and I can tell you it isn't. I'd like to know how many teachers you've actually observed displaying shame for our economy, society, or government. (Critical views of shameful events, e.g. the Japanese-American internments during World War II, don't count.)

Re: "the litany of apology for Western civilization"

[unixronin]

Maybe Berkeley teachers rebelled in the other direction ;)

Seriously though, if I had a dollar for every time I've heard some liberal academic dismiss the Constitution as a dead document written by dead white males, of only historical interest if even that, with both "white" and "male" spoken in tones of evident distaste...

Re: "the litany of apology for Western civilization"

[ganainm]

Actually, Berkeley's teachers are diverse in their outlooks, though the town's leftward bias skews the distribution.

I'm curious about this liberal academic dismissal of the Constitution. I've never heard it, and I've hung out with plenty of liberal academics. Even on the local Pacifica station, KPFA, which is to the left even of Berkeley, I've never heard anyone, academic or otherwise, dismiss the Constitution like that. On the contrary, the government is regularly excoriated for violating the Constitution.

The most dismissive quote I'm aware of is "[it's] just a piece of paper," attributed to George W. Bush.

[ithildae]

For me, the outrage is that we don't even teach the American history that I learned anymore. We have substituted American folklore with stuff from Africa and Asia. Between the American colonies, native Americans, French trappers and the WWWest, we should have enough folklore for years of classes. We don't even get a couple of weeks in elementary school. Those are our spiritual roots, the essence of our national identity, and we are ignoring it.

[unixronin]

Indeed. That is part of the same syndrome. We're spending so much time bending over backwards to be "sensitive" to other cultures that we're forgetting our own.

[ithildae]

Precisely. Part of apologizing for America instead of seeing it's strengths.