Education Then and Now
It’s September again and most of the kids are going back to school, or going for the first time. But it isn’t like it used to be. Not by a long shot.
When I went to school from the late ‘40s thru the early ‘60s (I know. I’m dating myself.), the object was to learn. And learn we did. Instead of kindergarten and pre-kindergarten …which is now preceded by various forms of child care when the kid presumably learns to relate to his or her peers and be part of a group… we started school in the first grade.
If a child didn’t know how to read before he got to school, he started learning right away. Not just reading but spelling, the multiplication tables, arithmetic and how to tell time. They were even taught penmanship. You know, how to hold your pen or pencil and write clearly? How many people today do you know whose scrawl rivals that of doctors? And when it comes to the way they hold their pens….
As for learning to get along with their peers, that was a natural progression of teacher influence and playground interaction. It also didn’t hurt that most parents were exactly that. Parents. They taught their children to behave, have respect for authority and not talk back to their teachers.
Way back when, report cards were totally different from what they are today. First of all, you had to earn your grade. There was no such thing as social promotion. Even more shocking was that at least half the report card was devoted to…Shock! Amazement!.. something called Citizenship. You were actually graded on citizenship. Areas of concern included Courtesy, Cooperation, Obedience, Industry, Effort, Thrift, Dependability, Health, Neatness, Orderliness and Self-reliance.
If a child was frequently sick or severely underweight, it wasn’t reported to the Child Protective Service. The teacher or principal talked to the parents and/or accepted a note from the doctor and the word of the parent.
Good thing, too. I was the sickly kid in the crowd, due to major chest surgery when I was five. I was in school barely more than I was out and couldn’t gain weight if you handed me an anvil. Despite the fact I was blessed with good parents, CPS would’ve put me in protective custody and investigated my parents for child abuse. To give you an idea of just how scrawny, when I graduated from the 8th grade, I was 5’4” and weighed 78 pounds. Today I’m
6’1” and weigh about 189.
Being absent so much wasn’t a detriment to me. Thanks to my parents and, I suppose, a fairly decent level of intelligence, I had no problem keeping up with my classes. I was using a telephone and reading before I was three, knew the multiplication tables and how to tell time before starting school. I also had a full-blown set of adult encyclopedias that I used to satisfy my curiosity. It didn’t hurt that my mother, when I asked a question, didn’t say “go look it up.” Instead she said “Let’s go look it up.”
According to the teacher, I was reading on a 6th grade level when I started 1st grade, but the truth was that I could pretty well read anything you put in front of me by that time.
For practical purposes, I was partially home schooled before home schooling existed as an industry. Between that and an insatiable curiosity that drives self-education, I’ve wound up with an education substantially beyond the GED that I can claim on a formal level.
But it isn’t that way for a lot of kids today. Education has been dumbed down and many schools are little more than prisons with the teachers acting as wardens. If you doubt that, spend some time on the internet to find out how many schools have metal detectors and the number of weapons they’ve confiscated. School security guards routinely patrol student parking lots to spot weapons that the students forgot they had or didn’t hide sufficiently.
High School graduates can barely read on an 8th grade level. In Texas there’s a test called TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) that students must pass at specific points. Since teachers are evaluated in part on how many of their students pass the TAKS …or more accurately, how many fail it… they wind up teaching to the test and not bothering to teach anything not directly related to it. Other problems that teachers have to deal with are students who cannot speak English and are still required to take the TAKS, even though they will most likely fail it. Finally, special ed students are now being mainstreamed into classes, even though they are not capable of performing at grade level.
But the problems go even deeper. For example, a member of my family is a history teacher in what are called AP classes…and no, that doesn’t stand for Associated Press. It is a very rigorous international program called Advanced Placement. While all students have to pass the TAKS to graduate from high school, those who complete the AP class and make a certain score or higher on the AP test qualify for college credit.
This year, they wound up 40 books short, but not according to the administration. Their logic is that the teachers somehow lost 40 books when the truth is that 40 additional students enrolled. So, you have the same number of books as last year but 40 more students. But will 40 more books be ordered to replace the ones the teachers ‘lost’? Your guess is as good as mine.
Public education today is a lost cause in many parts of the country. Teachers and the better educators are fighting a valiant rear guard action, but it’s essentially a losing proposition. Federal regulation, federal funding, fantasyland promises of free college education for every child, escalating costs and a general dumbing down of the curriculum offered is destroying what’s left of quality education and preventing its revival in most instances.
What’s left? Self-education, home schooling, Christian schools, private schools and internet-based schools. None of these answers are perfect, but they do work and work well.
No matter how you slice it, all of the choices just listed are far and away better than the public option.
Regards,
Richard Marmo
September 14, 2009
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Mr. Marmo;
Your article is well taken and your next article should be how public education is a waste from an economic model, and results model. If we could make the change to more homeschool, internet schools, and since we have high unemployment we might as well have parents being teachers. The main reason we have schools is for kids to have a place to go while their parents work.
Paledude,
Thanks much for your informative comment. Your suggestion for a future article would be a natural follow-on. I’ll see what I can do.
You’re correct in that the majority of public schools today (there is the occasional quality exception) are little more than expensive child care centers supported by local taxes…or job training centers that could be better replaced by targeted trade schools.
Richard Marmo
Hey Richard:
Thoroughly enjoyed your article. We’re approximately the same vintage and your comments brought back many fond memories. I wonder if any child today would use the word “fond.” From what I can tell, they all get passed-on to the next grade because, heaven-for-fend their little self-esteems might be hurt. I always thought you had to earn self-esteem, but what do I know? Looking forward to your follow-on article.
Cheers, Tex
RICHARD, you wretch! You stole my toy! Great article, buddy, and as a friend of many years I’m here to attest that your level of erudition is at least what one would expect from a fellow with a pair of Masters. All of the education I have that I’m really proud of I got on my own. I think it is that way with most of us who value knowledge. Shooters, what he doesn’t know about airplanes, for just one example, isn’t worth knowing or hasn’t happened yet. LBT
Thank-you for your diatribe.
I was very fortunate to attend the very best public schools in Chevy Chase MD during the 50′s to early 70′s and to then go on to a very academically rigorous college. Just as I was entering Bethesda Chevy Chase HS in 1969 at the height of the antiwar drug culture wave it had been identified as in the top 10 high schools across the country including private! By the time I graduated in 1972 you could hear the newly “trained” (meaning indoctrinated) school administrators at the Montgomery County School District Offices saying “ohhh don’t give Johnny failing grades. Just because he sat around the hallways and didn’t go to class at all, smoked pot, and failed all his test. It would hurt is sense of self worth. And; after all; who are we to judge? This is howJohnny is learning what is relevant about the world around us; aren’t you Johnny?”
“Yeah man! It’s all cool.”
And the above is not fiction. I personally witnessed this exchange between a teacher insensed over having to allow Johnny to pass to the next grade and some person with an “advanced” degree from central office. Four years later upon returning to visit with my teachers they (those who were left) all agreed that the new wave of students had serious psychiatric problems and many were overtly uncontrolable because they had little upbringing or discipline in earlier grades. They had actually opened a trade school to accomodate these students! The percent going off to college dropped of dramatically and it took another 15 years before the school began to graduate a fair number of students even half prepared for what, in my day would be college but in their day would be 13th through 16th grade in extended day care…I mean highschool.
Have a good day.
Gus
And not only that, you’re using my coffee cup again!
What coffee cup?
Hello Gus,
Thank you for your own diatribe and confirmation of the deterioration in the public educational system. There are still quality public schools left, but we’re rapidly losing them.
Incidentally, another factor in this decline is the constantly increasing numbers of students identified as having ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder), with the possessor of these newly identified problems being put on Ritalin. Do some children legitimately have these disorders? I won’t argue that because those problems are real. But in many…if not most… cases, it’s because the child is either bored, hasn’t been properly raised by their parents or is simply being a kid. Ritalin in forced on them by the authorities as a means of controlling their behaviour in the classroom.
Regards,
Richard Marmo
Nice Response #8, Richard. You’re using my brandy snifter and coffee cup picture and I don’t even know if Gary rinsed them out, first! Hugs, Linda
I agree with your analysis on education system. I attended high school in United States, but my primary education was un Czech Republic(Czechoslovakia back then), and that is how the system works there. We started school at the age 6 (no preschool or kindergarten), and we actually took real subjects,unlike in US. Since day one we learned about history(each year a different century), geometry, algebra, chemistry, physics, sociology(communist’s take on it unfortunatelly), czech, russian(hated it), arts, competative sports, botany, geography and so on. Secondary schools were specialized on the field that you’d like to go into and past that was college education. I learned more in the 8 years that most American children learn in 12 years. America was a leader in technology and science in your time, because it was tought in your classes, it’s not anymore. Government cannot control an educated person. We need to privatize schools, otherwise we’re all doomed.
Mirka,
Good to hear from someone with an overseas perspective. Not only are you correct in all of your observations, I would suggest that it’s now at the point where your 8 years in a Czech school system could easily rival 16 years in the U.S.
Only a few years ago, I went to dinner with a college professor and he told me point blank that it was to my advantage not to have attended college. Why? Because, he said, colleges had become nothing more than job training centers. It used to be that students went to college to “find themselves” and frequently didn’t have any idea as to what they wanted to major in or even do for a living until their second or third year. Not so any more.
Worse is the fact that colleges no longer taught students to think. Instead, they teach them how to solve problem the way the teacher wants them to do it and forget all other methods…EVEN IF THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. As I’m sure you know, that type of approach destroys analytical thinking along with creativity. And we wonder why we’re falling behind in science and technology?
Again, thanks for your very illuminating comments.
Richard Marmo
Dear Richard and Mirka: My son was in a self-contained “gifted” class for four years, then moved to the next grade where only one hour a day was available. The teacher actually said condescendingly that she “didn’t teach the kids ‘factoids,’ she taught them how to think.” Oh? Thinking is the art of imposing order on data and drawing conclusions. You can’t DO it without “factoids.” Wish I had had your opportunities, Mirka. LBT
Linda,
I agree with you. Learning to think REQUIRES factoids. Thinking doesn’t occur in a vacuum. What that teacher didn’t realize…or decided to ignore…was that in order to think, you have to have something to think ABOUT.
Mirka, I also wish I had had your educational opportunities.
Richard
Dear Richard: It is never too late, but you will always do better–as you, personally, have done–finding out for yourself. Hugs, L.