We do however, also need to figure out why our students are doing so poorly. I don't think it has to do with funding. I think it has to do with the teachers & to some degree the parents. I had some great & not so great teachers. So did our kids & grandkids. We always encouraged the kids to do their very best & we helped as much as we could-and still do.
The problem with our education rests nowhere else but the very core of our education system. I went to school. I did... ok. I went to a decent college on a 1580 (800 math, 780 verbal) SAT score and once again did... ok. I didn't do well. I struggled through it because the sheer awfulness of most of my teachers and professors made listening to them terminally boring. Have you, Sunchaser, ever picked up the massive paper frauds perpetuated on the tax payers and college students of our great nation, referred to euphemistically as a "textbook."
These pieces of fecal matter in paper form have to be the most insulting, atrocious, and disgusting thing I have ever seen. I bought many of my high school books from my school at the end of the year. Why? Because I wanted the satisfaction of taking these things, making a bonfire, and showing them my opinion.
They are not so much instruments of learning as instruments for the writers to show how much more they know than the student reading them. They take the simplest of concepts and make them more complex then they really are. It is up to the teacher to take this garbage and feed it into the head of a student in such a way that he sifts out the trash and retrieves the valuable information buried in deep in it.
The intelligent students quickly become angry and disheartened by the simple fact that teachers fall into two main categories: those who are not capable of doing the above (it requires considerably more competence than the job should require!), and those who don't care enough to bother. The teachers that do care and have the competence are very rare and also usually fall afoul of the diplomatic politics that tend to infect school districts.
On top of that, the students that have the mental capability to understand the information presented to them in this convoluted form have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while the teacher attempts to cram the other 95% of the students with the information they need to do well on "standardized tests". Because they have already assimilated the information and sit longing for the teacher to expound on it with something, anything.
Now, as I said, teachers exist who care and have the competence to help students. The problem is that by the time most students have reached a teacher who cares, the student has become completely turned off to school. Not because they are stupid. Not because they don't want to learn. Because they can't bring themselves to place importance on what is so obviously a gigantic farce.
As I said, I went to school, went to college, got my degrees. And I will tell you that almost everything I know is self taught. Because in order to learn, I had to ignore school. I became an educated person in spite of the school system I was in, not because of it.
No student left behind? The moment I heard that, I felt a dropping feeling in the pit of my stomach. Because at that moment, I realized that the American school system is doomed. A child must be individually evaluated. Each person has their own talents. They need to be taught to the full benefit of their particular strengths.
Dr. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, through his character, Sherlock Holmes, postulated that the head is like a closet, and if overcrowded it becomes cluttered. A more misunderstood principle is rare. Its not that the mind has limited capacity. Few people will ever reach even a hundredth of their minds capacity for thought, or knowledge. But, few people are ever capable of organizing what they know in such a way that heavy utilization of that mind can be done.
Someone whose strength is highly in one area is ruined when you force them to learn in great detail things that they will never be particularly good at. Oh, yes, every person needs to know the basics of history, simple arithmetic, how to read, write, and form language. It is for the historians to learn detailed history, the mathematicians to learn calculus, the writers to learn the greatest depths of language, poetry, and prose.
A carpenter, a master craftsman, does not need to know the details of Socrates or quantum physics. He doesn't need to know this information. Carrying it around is a burden he is better off without.
Of course, there are people who are very talented, who have exceptionally orderly minds. We call them gifted. They are the ones who would WANT to learn all of this extra information. And they can.
To use our students, our children, to the best of their ability, they need to be prompted to perform to the fullest extent in the area in which they excel. Attempting to turn every person into a Renaissance man is our greatest failure in logic. It leaves them lost and confused. They have to know information they don't understand, never will understand. It is not their calling to understand these things.
My gift has always been a very orderly mind. I can never dream of building a beautiful desk, of painting a beautiful picture, of using great gobs of physical strength. I can't well play sports, or socialize with people, or dance. I remain in my mind.
If we continue to believe that one basic curriculum is the guiding point for all of our students, our schools will continue to fail. Task them with the impossible, expect bad results.
