Let me start by stating my philosophy
of public education.
My philosophy of public education, in
brief, is that this critical social need (education) has vested in the schools a
duty to teach the fundamentals and provide a foundation of what a young person
needs to succeed in life. Schools, moreover, need to assure that the
students know that parents and teachers have high expectations of them and that
they can achieve worthy goals.
Schools, we have decreed, need to teach our children, their students, how to read and write and speak clearly; to be given encouragement in critical thinking and communication and to learn how to respect one-another and the adults in their life. Students need to learn to calculate and analyze and respond in appropriate ways to the challenges he or she will face in a complex world. There is also a body of knowledge that needs to be transmitted: of history and government, of geography, of science, of healthy living practices, of literature and of the arts.
Young people need character education (moral and civic) taught by teachers who themselves have high character and the freedom to teach it. Students need a safe and healthy environment to learn and observe these things and teachers who will teach truth and model it. Recognizing that there is dysfunction in many homes and other social institutions, such as government and the entertainment industry, and that there is evil in the world, there needs to be a counterpoint in the example of adults who provide an education for the young. Teachers and adult leaders need to be examples of wholesome living for our young—people who provide opportunity and reinforcement and encouragement for students to express themselves in appropriate ways and then expect students to internalize the rules of civil behavior and emulate their role models who exemplify these qualities.
In light of what is happening to our children in today’s schools (when they are in session) I want to raise a warning voice. In fact, I want to shout a warning voice that the values articulated above are not what is happening in far too many schools in every stratum of society. It is not just the big-city schools that are failing; it is endemic across the board. Many parents, who have recognized this and who can afford it, are pulling their children out of public schools and are placing them in private schools or are home-schooling them. With COVID-19 restrictions and responses by teachers’ union-driven school districts the whole concept of public schooling needs re-evaluation if public schools are to survive and provide the service that is expected of them.
In 1983, the year I was starting to wrap up my studies leading to a doctorate in education, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released its appropriately-titled and timely landmark report A Nation at Risk. Now, nearly forty years later the nation is not just ‘at risk,’ (as are the students) but public education and even college education are in free-fall failure—a failure of focus on principles and performance and consequently of achievement of ‘the American Dream’ for the current generation and for generations to come.
The fault lies in the educational establishment of the last 55 years-- since the late sixties--and in the philosophical direction it has bought into or has been brought into it by self-styled ‘elites’ who have rejected the foundational principles and practices of the pre-progressive era. Just as our Constitution was established by the American people, of the people, and for the people, so were our early structures in education. But they have been forsaken by these ‘elites’ who have focused on money and power and position and philosophies foreign to the guiding and undergirding principles of America’s heritage.
Teachers’ Unions (to which I never belonged) initially and particularly were to blame. They focused not on the children or the substance and quality of what was being taught, but rather as organizations of political action—liberal action--and we are seeing it imposed on our culture like never before. Supporting this reality I would bring to the attention of the reader the shocking revelation of a dedicated Brooklyn, New York, schoolteacher who was the victim of current practices by teachers’ unions and the pressure tactics of the ‘liberal educational’ establishment. (See Paul Rossi, “I Refuse to Stand by While My Students Are Indoctrinated,” Meridian Magazine, April 30, 2021; see also, Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis, March 2021).
The sustained attack in the late sixties and seventies on traditional American values by the teachers’ unions and teacher-training colleges started the devastating decline we are experiencing so greatly now. Again, it was recognized in the eighties by the A Nation at Risk report but it was not heeded and so we are reaping the whirlwind. According to the report, the authors warned: “Secondary school curricula have been homogenized, diluted [dumbed down] and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. In effect, we have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course.”
This sustained Marxist-based, anti-American, and divisiveness-promoting attack is now being experienced not only in education, but in all of our public institutions. It is a serious threat to our entire culture.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. William J. Bennett, under the Reagan administration, noted that “English, history, math, and science gave way to a curriculum lacking substance, coherence, or consistent structure; it was replaced by faddish, trivial, and intellectually shallow courses. Schools became laboratories, and students guinea pigs. If there was a bad idea in the land, often the first place it was tried was in the school. If we had problems of order in the classroom, the solution was an open classroom and no order at all. If our students weren’t learning history, the solution was not to teach them history but . . .often a sloppy amalgam of half-baked, ‘politically correct’ sociological theories” (William J. Bennett, The Devaluing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children).
Increasingly, concerned parents became alienated or disenfranchised from their schools and yielded to the cult of ‘expertise’ and began to be fearful of speaking up on educational, social, and political issues. When serious teachers are asked the single most important improvement that could be made in education, they invariably say greater involvement and cooperation on the part of parents—which means that parents’ concerns would be welcomed and seriously addressed.
And parents would say that the
most important improvement would be that better teachers would count most. They
are both right. I would say that better teachers and better parenting as
a partnership would produce the best results for our children.
We must not forget that the finest education that was had was when traditional American values were respected and taught to our children in the late 19th and first sixty years of the 20th Century and when mothers, especially, were in the home and augmented the teaching in the school by nurturance in the home.
I would further say that in today’s climate, investing total confidence in public (government) schools and relying on them exclusively to teach our children, we have come face-to-face with what some religions have called ‘relying on the arm of flesh’ and is a dangerous folly. In simply throwing money at the problems or relying on pop-psychology or an ideologically-driven, elitist self-proclaimed ‘expert’ to guide curriculum construction, will be to our national detriment. Twenty-five years ago, former Secretary Bennett said, “The fundamental problem with American education today is not lack of money; we do not underspend, we underproduce. A review of some 150 studies shows no correlation between spending and educational achievement.” Not only is the money ‘solution’ still true, but now we are faced with an insidious attack on the fundamental principles upon which an assault on our young is occurring and our very culture is at serious risk.
I am convinced that both the school and the home would do a much better job of educating our children if we wouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things—some lives, books, ideas, and values—are better than others. “Seek ye out of the best books” and learn from history the things that matter most. If the schools don’t promote these things, the home must. It can teach the values of home, family, and country and religion. In the long run, the parent is the child’s most important teacher. Schools have failed and will continue to fail to a greater or lesser degree under current politically-driven ‘leadership’.
But parents must not fail. And children will not fail if they get the support they really need from the home and the school. Remember, there were no public- school systems when this American republic was founded.
Posted by Old Schooler / Scholar (formerly Omnium-gatherum-millermade at 9:56 PM
