B72-DES36
The Education ‘Crisis’
Copyright © by Dan Schneider,
10/13/02
Since the
dawn of my existence I have been aware of this rudimentary fact- at least every
election season: that American schools are a disaster, are in crisis,
are in need of more funding, that the next generation is in ‘jeopardy’,
etc. Oddly, politicians & parents only focus on this ‘issue’ during the
fall elections. Why? Well, probably because the ‘crisis’ does not exist.
Does anyone
think, for a nanosecond, that if our education system were in crisis, that the
taxpaying public would not fund whatever is needed? Of course. But Right Wingers
like to scream ‘crisis’ as an excuse to divert money away from a public
education system that they see as Godless, humanistic, & plain-old evil. The
fact that the public school system harbors a growing percentage of minorities,
foreigners, & poor ‘white trash’, is just happenstance. The tacit
assumption is that Social Darwinism- via AIDS, ODs, drive-by shootings, etc.-
will weed out those dregs anyway. & their Left Wing counterparts are no
better. They scream for more funding because they envision schools not as merely
places for education, but to be all-purpose entities that build self-esteem, an
awareness of all nature, politically correct indoctrination, & other things
schools were never designed to do.
In truth, the
public school system, generally & nationwide, has never been better.
Children today are far more wise & educated in the basics- math &
language skills (not to mention ‘softer’ social skills)- as well as
computerese, plus knowing & understanding far more of the realities of the
world- politically & sexually- than they are given credit for. If you were
to go backward in quarter-century increments & take representative samples
of the child populations, & compare their skills, in every instance you
would see growth from the founding of this nation & earlier.
HOLD THE HELL
ON THERE, PARDNER! you scream. When I was a kid we knew this & that.
Today’s kids are dolts! This is known as the Good Old Days Syndrome. It’s
simply not true. BUT THEY HAVE STATISTICS THAT SHOW A TERRIBLE DECLINE! Yes,
but- again- not true. Statistics, before 1980, never showed a complete picture
of the child population’s education. The only kids charted were white middle
class kids in big cities & suburbs. Minority & poor white kids,
especially in the MidWest, South, & other rural areas, were rarely or never
included. This TERRIBLY skews the figures. Do you really believe the John-Boy
Waltons (of the Depression Era) knew more than your average ‘gifted kid’ of
today? Puh-leeze! Recall that even the more well-to-do section of the child
population routinely had their educations include such challenging subjects as
penmanship, citizenship, & home economics.
& anytime
you put up the marks of a group selected for their economic & sociologic
advantages, & weigh them against a truly demotic group, you will see the
Chosen group fare far better.
More money is
not needed for public education- just a wiser spending of it. The Radical Right
rails against teachers unions, & expects teachers to work for sheer
altruism, yet wants the absolute BEST- even as they declaim that the only way to
run a corporation well is to pay HANDSOMELY for the best out there. I went to
public school in New York City’s Dark Ages of the 1970s & early 1980s.
Teacher’s wages were shit- I know, because me & my pals had access to the
school’s computer system & saw what they were paid. & believe me, the
system got what they paid for- the teachers WERE terrible 4th raters.
All the good prospects left for private industry. Less bureaucracy & BETTER-
not MORE- teachers are needed. A good teacher can effectively bring good results
from a class of 40 whereas a bad teacher cannot make achievers from a class of
12 or 15. Period!
But, the
Loony Left is just as bad. Let’s face it, they care more about producing
smiling, narcotized, self-satisfied morons than intelligent, educated,
free-thinking (if sometimes- & hopefully- irascible) malcontents. Just where
did these PC Elitists get the idea that it’s a school’s job to tell a 12
year old girl it’s more important to ignore Madison Avenue than to know who
the hell the street was named for (James- Prez # 4- BTW)? & all this demand
for more money for ‘Special Education’. Since when did every kid become
special? I’m 37 & I recall schooling with mostly morons & schlubs. My
parents recalled the same. & if I look around, there are precious few
‘special kids' out there. Granted, they are smarter than the bands of
nincompoops that came in earlier generations- but, hey, as a whole the lot
ain’t sporting Blue Ribbons. & recall this bit of logic- if every kid is
‘Special’ then no kid is “Special’. Yes, every child is unique to the
100th %. But it’s that last 1-2% that’s the differentiator- not
the 98-99% commonalities. The problem is that in telling these kids that they
are all special you are logically telling them they are all the same- there is
no emphasis on the unique skills each kid owns. How many a mom has ruined a fat
daughter’s trust in her by lying to her that she’s ‘beautiful’ (on the
inside) & all those boys who have wallflowered her are just missing out?
& how many a Little League dad has berated, & riled Oedipal hatred in,
his grease-monkey destined son for bringing home a hard-studied-for (&
best-he-could-do) C+, by expecting no less than A’s & Law School? Well,
that’s a thing of the past, as now the Left wants teachers to do the lying for
the parents.
But, get
this, because the Fascists (er-Right Wing) want to decimate teachers unions, the
people left to motivate & inspire these deluded young’ns are the dregs of
the prior generations. Yippee. So, we are liable to end up with the worst
possible scenario, right? Well, no. Fortunately, despite alternating crisis
modes, the youth of today are inundated with more information than kids even
12-15 years ago could have conceived of. The human mind is plastic & attunes
to this by getting larger. The information frenzy feeds on itself. Yes, the
majority is crap- but the purview of information is so far more expansive than
it was in days past that a young brain that devotes itself to using only 15-20%
of its capacity for learning will still dredge more knowledge than a 100% used
brain of days yore. More kids today are multilingual, have computer skills, know
more of sex, drugs, & pop culture, as well as more of math, science, &
language. Yes, the average kid will not know the capital of Montana, whether a
cursive m has 2 or 3 humps, or Archimedes’ claim to fame- but they can tell
you that a black hole is a star that has collapsed, that the Civil War was
really about slavery, & that dinosaurs did not share the earth with mankind.
Such a crisis. Given that, I’ll take more ‘kids in crisis’ (as the
Leftists would cry!) who write like chicken scratch!
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