— by Nestor
What can be done to fix our public education system that has for thirty years become progressively more “anti-American” and “anti-founding-principles” to the point where it is officially undermining the raison d’etat for the United States? Isn’t it currently an across-the-board failure and money pit? At this point, is there a way to fix the public education system? As with all questions of this nature, the answers are never easy.
No doubt, there are some independent-minded and excellent teachers who individually buck the overall system, but, the system has pretty much officially adopted leftist historian Howard Zinn’s historical version of an evil and exploitative America. This systemic viewpoint is far more closely aligned with the 1970s era KGB’s propaganda version of American history than historical reality. Surely, the purpose of a country’s public education system is not to inculcate in its people self-hatred and reasons that the country should be destroyed or re-made into something completely unrecognizable from the noble intellectual and philosophical foundations of its first two centuries.
Teachers and the multiple layers of administrators that govern them all work as tiny cogs in a vast system that monitors and hounds their every move. They are literally told what to do at all turns and their own creative freedom is crushed. The current system is distilled down to a poorly conceived lowest-common-denominator, one-size-fits-all numbers scheme.
No one is allowed to lose or look bad for being a loser. Simultaneously, no one is praised for individual initiative and success. This has become the definition of “No one left behind”. Although qualitative testing of students began in the 1970s, it did not become the nationalized institutional behemoth that it is today until the “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLBA) was enacted during the administration of President George W. Bush. Now, it has become a multi-billion dollar business for the relatively few companies that generate the standardized tests and the educational textbooks, and the literal mountain of materials and services that go along with them. National standardized testing shoved Washington, D.C.’s massive government foot firmly into the door of what had previously been almost entirely run by state and local government. The NCLBA initiative has cost the American taxpayer more than NASA’s Apollo space program to land Americans on the moon, even after adjusting for the Apollo program’s costs in current dollars.
When pressure is exerted upon the state and local governments through the NCLBA by the more liberal base of people who direct the show, from the corridors of Washington, the think tanks, and the boardrooms all the way to the classroom, it is easy to see why performance across a very narrow spectrum of educational goals has become everything. The result is that each student is taught less in terms of useful real world information, but what is taught is done with a political slant and agenda that pleases the higher ups in the particular food chain. Every year, less is taught to students that does not satisfy this agenda.
The sad shape of the American educational system it is not all the fault of NCLBA. However, it is the federal anchor that weighs down all of the current problems. Since the administration of President Barack H. Obama has controlled Washington, D.C. for the past eight years, it purportedly “replaced” the NCLBA with a new system, the “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Yet, despite the name change, it is the exact same heavy-handed federal system. Whether NCLBA or ESSA, the teachers and the students of America have been handed over on a silver platter.
School districts currently spend billions of dollars every year on educational schemes and programs that have been cooked up by the ideologues and the technocrats. Since these schemes and programs are not rooted in reality and human nature, they have not worked, will never work, and will only serve to further dumb down the students. The reason that students have been intellectually debilitated is that, when they become voting adults, they will be even more susceptible to the left’s grand theories and solutions.
In the personal experience of this author, who is nearing retirement age working at a large, urban, public school system, today’s students know less about the world, its history, and how it really functions than ever before. Instead, they are literally being trained to accept the charismatic liberal point of view, as pushed relentlessly by the left, rather than obtaining the necessary equipment for objective, critical thought and for successful performance in life.
One can scream from the top of whatever ivy-covered ivory tower one wants to denounce the massive infiltration of the educational system by collectivist and communist philosophy and how it was accomplished by the intelligentsia of the left. However, they could not have succeeded in radically transforming the American educational system as completely and as boldly as they have without a massive unwitting and pliable army of bureaucrats through which to implement it and a submissive public.
This author was asked by The Cassandra Times not only to diagnose the problems, but also to suggest possible solutions. If one were able to simply wave a magic wand and undo the mistakes of the past, the solutions would be simple. Nevertheless, implementing the following list could, at least, begin to address the problems:
- End all state and federal mandated standardized testing of students, but without allowing the economy or the educational sector to collapse from the loss of the massive revenue stream testing generates for companies. Local control of educational standards is essential. Success on the final exam of a course and on previous intermediate tests and assignments is all the necessary evidence of “mastery” of the subject.
- We must allow students to fail and learn from their failures which is what occasionally happens to adults in the real world. We must institutionally recognize that, despite the aspirational words of the Declaration of Independence, all men are NOT created equal with regards to education. Every student is different, with different academic strengths and weaknesses. We cannot legislate that all students be equally successful.
- We must support the educators who demand success from the students. We must also reward students who succeed in the academic realm. Classroom pacing must no longer need to be aimed at the least capable student in the room.
- Conversely, we must offer alternative training those who fail at academics regardless of the causes for their failures being lack of talent, lack of effort or even lack of desire. Some people just are not meant for academics. The alternative training should not be merely a second-tier diversion for those students who are perceived as “failures”. We should invest in them, providing a course structure that would give them real skills that matter. Providing them with real skills will lead them to gainful employment and they can find happiness making a good, honest living.
- We must bring back and terrifically expand vocational training for all students who are not able or not willing to obtain a classical college education, but want to earn a living with their hands and their dedicated hard work.
- We must glorify dedication and hard work. At the same time, we must return to morally condemning failure and laziness, even if it means through ridicule and moral suasion. Children must understand that, only through personal focus, drive, and hard work, can they achieve acclaim, awards or even basic success. Even in kindergarten, we must drive home the original version of Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Ants eat in winter because they labored in the summer while grasshoppers go hungry because they frittered their time and energies. The moral of the story is not about teaching society compassion for grasshoppers. Rather, it is about teaching our young what they must do to survive and thrive in a hard world.
- We must re-establish English as the official language of the United States and to teach in English all courses except foreign language courses. English is the de facto language of business around the world. Teaching children in hundreds of languages other than English prevents children from acquiring and mastering English. The current system is not compassionate towards them, but condemns them with the soft bigotry of low expectations. We should place children who do not speak English in intensive programs that focus on transitioning them to English even if they are initially taught in their own languages. There should be a hard time frame for transitioning them into mainstream classes in English.
- Beyond creating and publishing a true set of educational standards and setting the bar far higher in all subjects than it is set today, all legal and financial control of public by the federal government must end.
There are dozens of smaller, half-way measures that can be undertaken that would not achieve the objectives. However, the difficulties in implementing the above list of solutions, whether through the unwillingness of government to cede control or to resistance by entrenched parties with ideological or financial interests, shows why the problems of the American public school system will not be fixed any time soon.