If you are, you won’t understand this post, wo why am writing to “you”?
*heh*
I had a chance to play “Doctor Bullshit” with a group of college students yesterday. First interesting thing: most of them were fairly bright. Second interesting thing: most of them were woefully subliterate.
One of the kids told me he was changing his major to English because he wants to be a writer. I cautioned against it. Almost all the good writers I know are experienced and expert in some field not influenced by English departments… the worst contemporary traitors, depoilers of the language. He further expressed some doubt about his future as a writer because “nobody reads anymore.” *heh*
He has a point. Today, while reading an Alfred Bester dystopian view of some unspecified future (written in 1975), I ran across this lil bit:
“We picked up a couple of girls who claimed they were coeds and might well have been; one of them could recite the alphabet all the way to L.” [emphasis added]
Indeed… not quite there—yet—but getting closer.
*sigh*
One of the problems is that high school students are not really being pushed to what they can do; more emphasis is on what I call “Kumbaya Studies”(touchy-feelie, it-takes-a-village, blah, blah…) than on the basics of literacy and mathematics. Students are allowed to fail; enforcing discipline is considered mean and hurtful. I see college students with spelling problems that would have gotten corrected at the third grade level when I was younger.
Just my opinion.
Yes, Bob, that is one of the problems. One. All the time wasted in material designed to create dumbasses (read: easily manipulated sheeple) would be better spent in basics (which I would take to include an hour of music instruction each and every day from kindergarten through sixth grade–and yes, there is plenty of sound research to indicate that good music instruction would even make stupid kids smarter, enhance reading and math and reasoning abilities, etc. Heck, even deaf kids could benefit… )
But schools aren’t even teaching kids to read, really. I’m fully on board with a modification of Jerry Pournelle’s approach to teaching reading. Apart from strongly encouraging schools to use instructional material that is PROVEN to work instead of experimenting on kids, first grade teachers with more than one (or perhaps two) child(ren) who cannot read should be placed on notice and fined. The next time it happens: the door.
Seriously.
Then, burn all the video-based instructional material and ban movies from schools. Information? READ!
My most serious expansion on the Pournelle proposal (and I’ve already modified it a great deal in my paraphrase above :-)) would be to have parents of children who weren’t reading by the end of second grade publicly flogged.
Oh, and vouchers.
After that, chain gangs for ALL public school administratotrs, state and feddle educraps, etc. Let the school secretaries do the admin wotk. ANY feddle politician who proposed education legislation? Public flogging, tarring, feathering and a long trip off a short pier. ALL pub-ed policy decisions eventually devolved to the local level. Eventually, cos it’d take a long time to wean pubschools from the feddle teat.
OMG, you guys are breaking my heart.
To wit: My EX!
She is purportedly an excellent middle school science teacher — has the awards to prove it. She is also a space cadet, totally wrapped up in the NASA teacher program.
Oh, heck, why didn’t I stay in one place long enough for her to qualify for the teacher space program rather then Christy MacAuliff (sp?)?
As a teacher her spelling was atrocious, and her sentence/paragraph construction worse. At the time she was getting her MA I was the better typist. Of course, in this case I was also editor.
Don’t know that she could have gotten through grad school if I hadn’t “wrote” her papers for her. She would give me her “final” draft and it needed soooo much correction! Her ideas and what she wanted to say in the paper were good, but she couldn’t write worth a sh*t.
As it turned out she had been in an experimental class in grade school using new teaching techniques. The move back to illiteracy in govt. schools began in the ’50s–yes, even here in the South.
I may not remember the proper “education” terms, but it had to do with learning the whole word concept & memorization, rather than learning how to spell and pronounce new words by syllable.
No matter how much I worked with her, she refused to learn. She was a “certified teacher.”
Two of my non-favorites:
1) If she gave me a grocery list and on it was toilet paper. It was always spelled “towlet.” No matter how many times I talked with her about it, she simply refused to learn how to spell the word “toilet.”
2) When teaching about the six simple tools (is that the correct term?) — whatever, she could not give a simple/practical explanation of their use.
When our children were of that age I’d take them to the kitchen and show them the practical use of levers, wedges, wheels, etc. She simply could not understand, nor explain it, at that level.
Then as they were older, I’d attempt to explain their use as the basics of automobile operation, etc. It all went over her head, AND, she was a science teacher!
I write all this to say (& this is personal experience) multiply her by a few million. What do we have for teachers today?
It started with experimental classrooms in the ’50s.
Well, in some senses it started with experimenting on kids i n the 50s, but from Horace Mann (early 19th century) on, pubed has been experimental, for good or for ill, aiming at modifying the American public.
I was also subjected to “whole word” and “new math” experiences, but fortunately, by the time “whole word” came around where I was (in Texas/Oklahoma gradeschools), I was already a voracious reader (at an early age–was bored through ALL of grade school, most of junior high and almost all of high school). Math? Yeh, damaged almost beyond repair until I met a high school geometry teacher who taught for the sheer pleasure of it (she was independently wealthy–family money–but LIKED teaching. My mom worked for a time in the h.s. supervisors’ office and told me of a problem they had with her: too many uncashed paychecks… she apparently just didn’t think about those sorts of things). Took her classes two years and very nearly erased the effects of “new math” damages by the time I exited her Stats class. Coasted through calculus in college on the strength of her senior year maths class.
Few teachers like that, though. In fact, through grade school, high school, college and seminary, I can count teachers of her quality (and classes of the quality she taught) on the fingers of one hand. Three of them were in seminary. Two in college. NO other teachers in pubschool were within an order of magnitude as good as this one math teacher who _nearly_ made me love math.
She was not a particularly pretty woman (maybe “handsome” or “striking” would do ;-)), but I think I was in love with her by the end of the first year I had classes with her. 🙂
But experimental education starting in the 50s? Sadly, no. Pubschool has been a social experiment all along. Its intellectual (and even sadder, moral) bankruptcy has only become obvious in the last 50 years or so.
Yes, David, I hear you. I was responding in terms of last 60 years. Most folks, I think, don’t pay much attention more than last 20.
…And some don’t even pay attention to yesterday. There’s a reason the homeschool movement is not just expanding but exploding. I think if we figured in all the parents who teach at home even though their kids attend school outside (Yak – guilty as charged) the numbers would be astronomical. David’s dead on, though – it’s not that the state doesn’t realize its methods don’t enable students to learn – it’s that the state knows darn well that educated people are likely to point out the deficiencies in the system – and require positive change. Educated people are (among other things) notoriously difficult to control, and people who are taught to think…well, let’s just say they have an annoying habit of thinking. And we just can’t have that ….