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The Agricultural Revolution Came The Cultural Revolution Came The Industrial Revolution Came The Technology Revolution Arrived The Information Revolution Is Here And the Schools Remained The Same? |
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With a few notable exceptions, today’s schools have the same basic structure as those of the early Agricultural Age. The one-room schoolhouse (now being hailed as a new idea) is gone. Today we have everything from video projectors to television and the Internet in the classroom. These new technologies, however, are being used with the teaching methods and philosophies of two hundred years ago. I had occasion to spend some time with a group of what I consider “average” teenagers at a local high school. These are middle class students, in what is supposed to be one of the better schools in the area. I am appalled by their lack of knowledge of things they will need when they hit the real world. Here is what I found in my little unscientific survey of randomly chosen students, in grades 10-12:
This is just a sampling of the people who will be attempting to enter the job market in a few years. It’s not the student's fault! It’s the agricultural age structure of the school
system, and the accompanying bureaucracy. The system is not just sick,
it is terminally ill. First . . . the Parents
My kids went through a middle school of about 800 students. The turnout at the PTA meetings was usually 20 to 30 people. During the meetings, there were half a dozen or so administrative types, skulking around talking on walkie-talkies like undercover spies. These self-important people were at the vice-principal level, the very people that needed to be participating, not playing James Bond on our time. During most of the meetings that I attended, education was never mentioned. The hot topics were. Now this last item was a noble effort, but if they got rid of just one of the walkie-talkie types they could fund the library for five years. This very brief discussion of new books was followed up by an hour long, heated discussion of which books were no longer appropriate for the school library, and should be removed. Among those mentioned were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It seems that these are blatantly racist. Here's a novel idea --Why not FEATURE these books, as the center of a student discussion of how attitudes have, or have not, changed since they were written. I’ll tell you why not -- it makes too much sense! I was quickly silenced. Funding The Schools When additional money is given to a school system, it is usually used to hire another junior deputy assistant to the senior deputy assistant to the secretary to the vice-principal for the 10th. grade. More bureaucrats and paperwork, and less for the one person who needs it most, the classroom teacher. The entire school system must exist as a support mechanism for the classroom teacher. Teachers must be at the top of the educational food chain, not excrement on the bottom as they are treated in many areas. Teachers should receive the respect and the remuneration due a person who has had at least five years of specialized education. The Teachers Responsibility Along with the new respect that teachers would receive, there will be responsibility -- not to the system which signs their check, but to the entire planet. The world depends on each successive crop of graduates being just a bit more prepared than the last. Unfortunately we are regressing. Of course, there are dedicated teachers who are outstanding, primarily by their scarcity. They make the substandard teachers even more obvious by comparison. Can you believe that one state recently ruled . . . "If a student is assigned a substandard teacher in any grade, they must be assigned a competent teacher in the two years after." I have a better idea Today’s classroom teacher is quite possibly the one profession on which our future depends more than any other. We don’t need better cops, salespeople or even doctors. We need better teachers. We need a system that rewards rather than discourages excellence! When the quality of early education is improved, the cops, salespeople, lawyers and doctors will automatically follow. Teachers must be held accountable for their performance, and until the teacher’s unions and politicians are no longer at the center of the process, this can’t happen. Freedom of Choice Here’s a touchy subject, privatization of schools and school vouchers. In some areas it costs five to over ten thousand dollars per student, for a year of substandard public education. Many excellent private schools provide a better quality of education at half the cost. Why do we continue to reward our public schools for substandard performance? There is only one place that we can hit them, in their pocketbooks and bank accounts. If a school knew that if a student were moved to another school, the money would follow, they would certainly go the extra mile to hold onto those students. So people will whine about the inner city schools that will have to close. GOOD! Of course, these same people are slow to pick up on the fact that those schools just might decide to fight for their survival. How would they do that? By providing a better quality of service to the community, and attracting students rather than driving them away. How Should the Information Age This time, rather than offering up problems that most of us know exist, I will propose some solutions. Some of these you may not like, others you may, but if this gets you thinking, good! Yes, I’ll admit that some of your tax money would be used to send Catholic kids to Catholic school, Jewish kids to Hebrew school, and the like. This is a fine constitutional line which, I am afraid, has been drawn in the sand. We have been dared to cross it. The consequences for crossing it are largely academic. (no pun intended). If, however, these schools can turn out a better educated student, prepared to contribute towards the bogus social security fund that you will never see, why not? We need to light the competitive fires under our status-quo system, and continuing to give them our money after we throw in the towel is not the way. If you don’t want your taxes funding religious pursuits, you are in for a rude awakening. That Cathedral or Synagogue sitting on the best piece of prime real-estate on Main Street pays no taxes. You are subsidizing them, along with the one room church in Appalachia, and the tent revival that just went up at the fairgrounds. The volunteer fire department can’t get people to come to it’s fund-raising casino night, possibly because some bureaucrat calls it gambling. More likely, however, every Bingo player in town is over at The First Church of Really Big Business, contributing to the new roof for the pastor’s (priest, rabbi, shaman, etc.) house, and ignoring the poor box at the entrance. Frankly, I would not send my child to a religious school, but I don’t care if you do. The Constitution guarantees you the right to raise your family as you see fit. I’ll even feel better if I know that my tax money is going to provide a good education for a child. This will hold true whether that child is Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic or atheist. Lets get our priorities in order folks. What breaks my heart is when children graduate with diplomas in political correctness that they can’t read without help, and can't understand after you read it to them. The School Term For the most part, the family farm is dead. They have been foreclosed into easy prey for the big conglomerates. The need for a National Summer Vacation is gone. Most children don’t have to plant and harvest. (In fact, most wouldn’t know how.) Would you like to increase available classroom and lab space by 25% immediately? --- Year Round Schools!. Even if a vacation is given, keep the buildings open all year. We’re paying for them, let’s use them. Rotate classes in and out over the year, after all, 25% of the school year is “off time.” The School Day Every hour (or in many cases, less) everyone in the school gets up and moves. This is not just inefficient, it’s plain stupid. By the time a kid gets to class, sits down, gets prepared, socializes and settles into what can only be described as a learning mode, 10 to 15 minutes have passed. (From 15 to 25% of an hour long class.) Ten minutes or so before the class ends, the student's minds begin to wander toward the forthcoming bell, and the next class. (Another 15% of an hour long class.) What this means is that 30% to 40% of the classroom time is wasted. By having two hour classes, an immediate gain of 20 to 25 minutes would be realized. Multiply this by three, two-hour classes per day, and we have just added 60 to 75 minutes of teacher contact hours to the day. The Curriculum No one denies that a solid core curriculum, firmly grounded in real world skills is a necessity. The way that curriculum is defined and delivered, however, has to change. There is too much emphasis on rote memorization of obscure facts that will only come in handy should the student be a contestant on Jeopardy. Who cares that the battle of Hastings was in 1066. Around the year 1000 is probably close enough. What is truly important is to be able to place history into a coherent time-line of cause and effect. How many of you could tell me the exact dates of the US Civil War. Isn’t “Eighteen Sixtyish” good enough? Why is learning so much fun on The Discovery Channel, and such a task in the classroom? It’s because The Learning Channel and similar media, make this stuff interesting by exposing what really matters, the reasons, politics and sociology behind an event. Even the Bible, Koran and Torah all take on a new interest when presented as literature -- collections of short stories, rather than as gospel. Even more so when placed into historical perspective. Holistic Education When the history class is studying Medieval Europe, why isn’t geography there as well? Math and science classes could be studying the challenge of building a catapult, and actually using it, calculating trajectories and the like. That’s when you bring in computers as advanced computational tools, to make life easier only after the basic math skills are learned. (More on this later in the Computer Labs Section.) Other classes should be studying the arts, science and music of the same period. Yes, this creates a huge coordination problem. These problems, however, are just solutions that have yet to be uncovered. There are a few progressive schools breaking new ground in this area, but they are far from mainstream. Real World Education How about a single, one week, full day class, Skills for Living. Here students do their taxes, balance a checkbook, build a mailing list, or maybe “buy” a house or car. In the home buying exercise, they would have to fill out a credit application, negotiate a deal, understand the contract, figure the interest and deal with the lawyers. Students would take turns being buyers, sellers, bankers and lawyers. These are skills that will serve them, and society well. Banks, business, real-estate agents and even used car dealers would love to volunteer resources for this sort of venture. Yes, some schools are attempting this now, but only as far as it fits into the "existing system.” If the existing system does not permit easy integration of this type of “spot learning”, then the system is the problem, and must be replaced, not repaired. Computer Labs Now don’t get me wrong, strong computer skills are an absolute necessity today. Most school systems, however, treat computers as an end unto themselves. The average graduating student has no concept about how these tools are used on the job. Don’t teach BASIC programming, teach spreadsheet macros. Don’t teach computers, teach word processing. A disturbing number of schools still use the old IBM selectric as their typing tool of choice. Sure, introduce them to the students. It is still important that you know how to slip a 3 x 5 card into the old Underwood, but this can be taught in an hour or so. In my high school typing class, we didn’t spend half the year learning how the typewriter worked, or the history of typing, we learned how to use them. That’s why they have both drivers education, and auto mechanics. One is for the end users, the other for the fixers and builders. The computer is a tool, a means to an end, and nothing else. Please stop teaching kids to write BASIC programs on old computers. Teach them instead, to install and use a spreadsheet or project organizer. If a student wants to go into computer science, then teach them the internals of computing. Make sure, however, that the teacher is qualified. “I hear Bill has a computer at home, we’ll let him run the computer lab.” So Bill does the best he can, and teaches outdated folklore as absolute truth. When a kid hits a computer on the job, they are lost. (Unless they go to work testing arcade games.) We tend to THINK all kids are techno-guru’s. That’s probably because the few that are even marginally conversant with computers are spectacular compared to much of the over 40 set. It Won’t Go Away In fact, it just keeps getting more absurd. “Ebonics” was that combination of Ebony and Phonics used by the powers that be to further widen the division between the races a few years back. Basically, Oakland California schools will stop correcting children when they speak (and eventually, I assume, spell) in the American Black Dialect. “Say hey bro, what it be goin down?” will be treated as perfectly acceptable English. We need to take this absurd idea to it’s equally absurd conclusion. There are more “hillbillys” in the US than there are Blacks, and “southern” is considered a valid dialect. So let’s stop correcting those poor southern children when they say something like, “Y’all git over tada odder side o’ dat crick fer I hasta whump you rat good!” A mind IS a terrible thing to waste, but what good is a mind if it can’t communicate. We must continue to stress proper enunciation to our poor southern children because, “language is the window through which the world sees your light.” Do our Ebony brothers and sisters deserve any less? "The success of Ebonics will achieve what the Klan has tried to do for 40 years, the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. We now have separate but equal." William A. Manly I realize that I have raised more questions than I have answered. Not the least of which are how to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers, and evaluate student performance in a subjective rather than objective environment. But we have to start somewhere. I won’t even go into the preschooler expelled as a drug dealer for bringing in his parent’s pager, the girl punished as a drug dealer for sharing a Midol, or even the little boy charged with sexual harassment for stealing a peck on the cheek. These are just small symptoms of a much larger sickness infecting all society. But That's Another Rant . . .
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