Tag: education

If this progressive argument against homeschooling doesn’t convince you to keep your children out of public school, your IQ is probably even lower than the average public school teacher’s:

“[m]any people, liberal and conservative alike, are deeply offended by critiques of compulsory schooling.” I suppose I am one of them. I benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States. My father, stepmother, stepfather, and grandfather are or were public school educators. As an education journalist, I’ve admired many public schools that use culturally relevant, high-standards curricula to engage even the most disadvantaged students. These schools are sustained by the talents of impossibly hard-working teachers who want to partner with parents and kids, not oppress them.

Despite our conflicting perspectives, I agree with Taylor that school ought to be more engaging, more intellectually challenging, and less obsessed with testing. But government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

The last sentence perfectly summarizes the progressive argument in a nutshell. The prime directive is to make sure everyone is under government control. Once that’s accomplished, then we can debate what’s to be done with them.

The fact of the matter is that the public schools are doomed thanks to the combination of declining societal wealth, an increasingly diverse population with correspondingly lower average IQ, and improving technology. And progressive attempts to shame parents back into the schools isn’t going to work because those who are most susceptible to progressive arguments, such as they are, are the least likely to have children.

I think providing this public school experience is going to be a real challenge for most homeschooling parents:

A Los Angeles elementary school teacher was charged with committing lewd acts against nearly two dozen students after a film processor gave authorities bondage-style photographs showing children in blindfolds with their mouths taped, and some with cockroaches on their faces, authorities said Tuesday.

Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday at his Torrance home and remained jailed on $2.3 million bail, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department statement. The charges involve 23 boys and girls ages 7 to 10 between 2008 and 2010

In fairness to Mr. Berndt, the combination of cockroaches and prepubescent boys is pretty hard to resist… sweet Kinsey, but even the Marquis de Sade would probably be inclined to look at the guy askance and wonder what was wrong with him. Anyhow, I would be deeply skeptical of any man who voluntarily chooses to work as an elementary school teacher under the current public school regime. These days, I’d probably be more surprised to learn a male elementary school teacher didn’t have some sort of abnormal sexual orientation.

“Daddy, what animal are you most scared of?”

“The platypus.”

“The platypus? I thought you were scared of meerkats.”

“Everyone is scared of meerkats.”

“They are? But they’re so cute!”

“That’s just what the meerkats want you to think. They don’t call them the Piranha of the Serengeti for nothing, you know. Even lions are scared of them. They can strip a grown lion to bones in just two minutes.”

“I bet meerkats would be scared of the real piranha, though, in the rivers.”

“Sure. On the land, the meerkats would win. In the water, the piranha would. But the platypus would beat them both, by land, sea, or air.”

“PLATYPUS CAN FLY?”

“Sure, that’s why they’re so scary. They have little jets in their hind legs.”

“But they’re so fat!”

“It’s all muscle.”

Those who put their faith in government control of society always turn to the same solution when it is pointed out that people simply don’t follow government dictates because their behavior has been dictated. But regulation never creates compliance unless it is backed up by the use of consistent and inordinate force, which is why it consistently fails. Consider the way in which English school employees are resisting being held accountable for their failing educational products:

A report published in the Times Educational Supplement on Friday outlines a number of tactics used by schools to outwit official inspectors. It was based on a TES internet forum that received 110 submissions from anonymous teachers in a month.

Cases highlighted included:

• Certain poor teachers being told to go off sick when Ofsted was due in;

• Schools sending badly behaved pupils on a trip – or telling them to take the day off – to hide them from inspectors;

• Pupils being required to learn decent lessons by heart and perform them in front of Ofsted officials;

• Top teachers from a school being put “on standby” to pose as staff at neighbouring schools “at 45 minutes’ notice”.

In 2010, a leading supply teacher, Tom Trust, told the Commons education select committee that he had been asked to take the place of teachers who had trouble controlling “terrible classes” during an inspection.

And in 2004, a secondary school in Hull was criticised after sending nine pupils on a week-long course and drafting in four teachers from another school to coincide with an Ofsted visit.

The lesson is that you can’t take a fundamentally bad concept and fix it by regulations and inspections. As Charles Murray has pointed out for years, the majority of the population doesn’t benefit from, isn’t interested in, and really isn’t capable of learning for learning’s sake. Instead of admitting this and allowing parents to have free rein in deciding what, and if, their children learn anything, the government engages in a vast and expensive system that is riddled with fraud and pretense from start to finish.

The concept of mass schooling is more than 100 years out of date. The shift from an industrial society to an information society rendered it not only irrelevant, but counterproductive. There is simply no reason for children to sit in classrooms with thirty other children staring at a teacher and a blackboard for eight hours a day; it’s not even effective propaganda anymore. They would learn more and get equally indoctrinated by spending an hour each day reading the New York Times and watching CNN.

Jeff Jacoby spells out the obvious consequences of affirmative action in education:

The inability of racial preferences to vault more minority students into high scholastic achievement shouldn’t come as a surprise. When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

This is the cruelty of affirmative-action “mismatch’’ — the steering of minorities to schools where they are less likely to succeed.

I saw this happening to quite a few black students at my university. Because I was a 100m sprinter, I was in the track team’s sprinter/jumper/hurdler group, which did all of its training and ate most of its evening meals together. It was probably the most racially mixed group in a predominantly white university. And it was really disturbing to see what a difficult time many of my black teammates had with collegiate academics, despite the fact that they were very diligent and hit the books extremely hard.

This wasn’t true of all the blacks on campus. One of my friends from the soccer team was also black, but he was a very smart guy, a doctor’s son who had attended an elite prep school. He was not the beneficiary of affirmative action, had no academic trouble, and went on to graduate from med school and become a doctor.

Affirmative action is disastrous because it doesn’t help people, but rather, sets them up to fail.

One would imagine that the logic behind sending children to public school because otherwise they won’t learn how to read or do math would demand revisiting given the failure of one of the basic premises:

“The remedial numbers are staggering, given that the Cal State system admits only freshmen who graduated in the top one-third of their high-school class. About 27,300 freshmen in the 2010 entering class of about 42,700 needed remedial work in math, English or both.”

Note that this would tend to indicate 88 percent of the California high school seniors are graduating without reaching what is considered a high school graduate’s level of reading and/or mathematics.

It’s not quite as dumb as buying a lottery ticket, but I’d be disinclined to hire someone who went and got a master’s degree instead of working because it reveals both a lack of foresight and an inability to understand basic economics:

I advise my own students, employees and relations to think carefully before signing up for expensive masters’ degrees. Most of the successful journalists, NGO leaders and authors I run across don’t have masters’ degrees and when the subject comes up they don’t recommend them to young people interested in these fields. There are exceptions where top teachers who are also leading people in a given field can become your mentor and help you enter a challenging and rewarding profession, but you have to look hard to find these.

I’m sure there must be some published authors with fancy literary degrees, but the strange thing is that barely any of the actual authors I know studied any form of writing in college whereas none of the English majors with advanced degrees I know have actually published anything.

And of the hundreds of guys I know in the game industry, I can’t think of a single one who has one of those ridiculous game development-related degrees.

Then there is this: “About one-third of people with master’s degrees make less money on average than a typical bachelor’s degree holder, said Stephen J. Rose, a labor economist with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, citing U.S. Census data.”

I’m about as cynical about the basic concept of public schooling as it is possible to be. And yet, the American “education” system still regularly manages to surprise me to the downside:

A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch. The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision.

“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said.

Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week.

“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’” said his mother.

Lynch described a phone call she received from the school explaining that the case will be treated like sexual harassment, due to what it considers inappropriate touching.

“‘Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment,’” Lynch said the school told her.

Apparently the schools wish parents to teach their children to die when they are being choked. Or something. In any event, it does suggest an alternative strategy for kids who are being bullied. The moment that a bully lays so much as a finger on you, charge him with sexual harassment. That should keep him and his parents busy for the next few weeks… and if he dares to say anything about it later, it’s a simple trip down to the counselor’s office to lay a second charge.

Of course, if you’re a parent, what on Earth are you thinking to leave your children in what has clearly become a complete madhouse? I know, I know, your school is different. The teachers are excellent. Your kids are more than fine. And you know absolutely everything that goes on inside their school building for 36 hours every week, right?

Parents of kids in public school are almost uniformly idiots, at least in this one regard. They always claim to know everything about their children’s schools, and yet I’ve never met a single one who could even tell me the ratio of teachers to administrative staff or the average number of children in a classroom. Most of them can’t even tell me what classes their kid has, let alone his daily schedule. Yeah, you totally know what’s going on there.