Quilette has an article on the challenges facing public education.
This past May, my community sought to fill four open school board seats.... It quickly became apparent that nearly all of the candidate platforms fit neatly into one of two distorted worldviews: either that of the MSNBC viewer or the Fox News viewer.... each platform simply revealed how little was understood about the real challenges facing public education and youth culture more broadly.
Last week we had a runoff election for the school board locally which mirrored this concern exactly. These are officially nonpartisan positions. Nevertheless, one candidate ran on rainbows and talk of 'equity' and 'school safety,' and she was backed by the local Democratic Party. The other one said nothing much about education, but a lot about Jesus. She was backed by the Republicans.
Rainbow lady won, but because she's the incumbent that means nothing will change. Recent graduates I know personally can't do math and lack basic English skills such as knowing the difference between "your" and "you're." The institution is an embarrassing failure.
The Quilette piece suggests the problem is one of mental health among the youth. Maybe that's part of it; but part of it is the need to burn this institution of American public education to the ground, so that something more fertile can be grown upon its ashes.
8 comments:
We might start by igniting the football stadiums.
Sports are vital to developing character. The business of sports as we've institutionalized it has distorted the character of our "education" system.
Fixing "mental health among youth" is an example of a "boil the ocean" type of project. For something that is actually executable in a reasonable timeframe, the thing that stands out is: stop requiring teachers to put up with disruptive (or even outright violent) students in their classrooms. This would both improve learning directly and also contribute to the retention of the right kind of teachers.
Any serious professional association or union would support the elimination of chaos, disruption, and thuggery in their workplaces; unfortunately, the American teachers' unions are only concerned with what they get and not with the actual results of teaching work.
And Biden wants to bring back race-based discipline quotas, absolutely guaranteed to make the problem worse.
Too bad they don't make school principals like Dr. Chuck Stallings any more. He was the principal of Cullowhee High School back in the day. Students wanted to be disruptive and fight, he would take them to the gym and put boxing gloves on them.
Sometime in the 80's, Cullowhee High School was absorbed into Sylva Webster High School, changing it's name to Smokey Mountain High School.
Yes, that's the very crap-hole school I was thinking of, Mike. It produces graduates with no education. Some of the teachers are ok; but as an institution, it's beyond worthless.
We used to do the boxing gloves thing when I was young also. As far as I know there's no better solution to the problem of young men wanting to fight, as young bucks fight, than to set up a fair and respectable fight. No ambushes, no foul play, no ganging up, and both winner and loser are shown respect at the end of the process by everyone who observed.
Hard to believe education has gotten that bad there. When I graduated from Cullowhee in '76, in our graduation class of 45 students, we had three or four acceptances to military academies, as well as about 15 or so to first tier colleges like Princeton
, Duke and Stanford, ect.
Schools are about as good as they always have been, which is terrible. They taught me a lot of crap in the 60s, in one of the highest-ranked schools in a state that is usually at the top of the SAT and other testing measures. They don't much matter for academics. They might matter some for character and habits. Keeping kids safe enough to learn something is good.
The simpler you can keep things, the better - for the students, the faculty, the administrators. These are the basic things we want to teach you. These are the basic expectations behaviorally. We are neutral on whether you enjoy the experience or not. When administration, faculty, school boards, and towns start getting more and more grandiose, the more time is wasted in the diffusion of energy.
Kendall Qualls at The Federalist agrees:
Public Schools Are Cesspools Of Wokeness And There’s No Bringing Them Back
Vouchers.
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