When my parents were in the public school system, they had rigorous standards to meet and were more advanced in every subject then I was at a similar age and level of development. They were educated by the aging Missionary Generation and the GI generation folks. I was educated by the very last of the GI generation and the youngish Boomers. My children are being educated by aging Boomers and compliant Gen-Xer's with a smattering of hippy Millenials. With the new school season upon us, I am not looking forward to spending my nights making sure that historical gaps are filled, historical context is added, explanations of why it rains, why is the sky blue, and that all sentences must be ended with a period (that one is for my 11 year old son who is still working on this).
The other day, my son complained to me that most of what I make him learn at night (yes, even in the summer time) has no relevance with what they are learning in school. What he is really doing is blaming the school rather than his work ethic. However, he correct to an extent. Here is what is on my chest today and this is what will come from the Stoa as well.
In my parent's time, students were taught, mostly, by rote memorization. They knew their math tables backwards and forwards. They knew and understood sentence structure, syntax and grammar. They could name all 48 States (and then the two new ones in 1959) plus their capitals. Sometimes, they would have to list the states and their capitals by alphabetical order, sometimes even in reverse order. Tedious, you bet, but they KNEW them. Knew them cold and can still recite them all these years later. My education was haphazard to say the least. I had a mixture of the Old Guard and the "new" everything. I was not taught phonics because it was thought to stifle creativity. I was not taught syntax and grammar. I was taught "new math" whereby in the last week of school I was still answering questions from chapter one and they "built" on new topics each week/month. All this did was slow down my rate of learning, and what I did learn was not deep enough to get anything better than a general grasp of what it was about, no time for mastery or deeper contemplation. Those Old Guard teachers I remember were beaten down by the new system and were just marking time for retirement. My loss. Most of my education is "self-taught". I have a vast number of books that go back more than 100 years, sometimes before the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. I have school books from the 1880's with subjects such as grammar, rhetoric (you may have to look that word up), and religion. Oh, yes, religion was a big part of our public education in the 19th century. I must thank my Grandmother for allowing me to take a share of the family library when she moved into a smaller home after the death of my grandfather back in 1979. That was the seed that helped me to compare what is in books today vs the 19th and early 20th centuries. Context. I had to teach myself nearly everything because I was so woefully unprepared when I graduated from High School. Don't even get me started about my first year of college.
My children are getting the full effects of this liberal progressive mind-wipe that is called public education. They are taught about the biosphere, the food web (it is not even a chain anymore, I guess), environmentalism, a skewed history, and social activism. Their grasp of history is embarrassing. Reading through their textbooks is like skipping through a book and re-writing history in such a way that you feel that that the United States is responsible for every evil in the world. Picking and sorting through actual history to attempt to prove their points. Shoving it at children who are not capable of critical thinking and simply store the data away for a test. My children are learning two versions of history and political science. There is the school lessons and then the real history. I untwist the context that school offers and explain how things let up to certain events and what happened afterwards (the unintended consequences).
What I'm working towards here is trying to give my children some depth and the tools to think for themselves. My daughter is a bright one. She is "self-teaching" herself without me. Makes a father proud. She regularly researches items and topics that she feels are connected to the back story of a historical event and then discusses those items with me. She is drawing conclusions and then forming a position that can be defended logically. There have been times where she has reminded me of a fact that I had forgotten that forced me to alter my positions. Yes, very proud of her.
Then this leads me to my discussion with my son the other day. Again, he was complaining that I am holding him to a standard beyond that of the school. He gets mostly A's with a few B's (a C in music) and is wondering why his mother and I stay on him (her school system is still like that of my parents' system and she frequently rubs my nose in this point). I attempted to explain to him that getting an A in the subjects they are teaching is relatively meaningless. They are supposed to be grading his comprehension and mastery of progressively more difficult subjects of knowledge. The fact that he has the penmanship of a dying chicken, the spelling of a six year old, and the attention span of a newt means that the school is failing him. He is a very bright boy and I will not let a good mind go to waste. The schools have gone through a long decline of "catering to the lowest denominator" and that if he is getting an "A", then that simply means that he is in the upper third of the class (grade inflation and all that). I had to describe to him what the term "denominator" meant when he was several weeks into studying fractions since the teacher did not feel it an important term to know.
Think back to what Universities used to be. In the late 18th century, they were only for the rich and influential. In the 19th century, they were still for the privileged, though more and more individuals were able to get into them with the rising wealth of the middle class. They were places of rigorous, and I mean rigorous study. If you read the biographies of people from that time you will note the dates of their accomplishments. Climbed such and such place, swam this or that channel, worked in the family business and invented this or that. When you see their university years, it is simply a four year chunk of time that is blank, other than what they did in and for the university (some notable exceptions like Theodore Roosevelt). The point is, they did nothing else but study their butts off, for four straight years, night and day. In secondary school, it was a given that you had mastered the elements of learning. You had learned your math tables, your grammar, your history, your Latin, all the facts dates and figures that give depth to an educated person. Remember, often times people were too busy farming or working to support large families and were unable to complete their secondary schooling. The University was where one learned how to think. Learned how to problem solve. Learned how to LEARN. Most importantly, they learned how to think for themselves and to question everything around them.
The Boomers resented the way they were oppressed in school and sought to lighten thing up a bit and aim for "happy and self-actualized individuals". Too much pressure, too many rules, and too much emphasis on results. The Progressive movement made a resounding comeback with this generation. They knocked God out of the classroom, pushed the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance out as well. God and country have to be eradicated if the Progressive movement is to gain ultimate victory. If one believes in God, then one believes in an absolute right and wrong. If one believes that something is wrong, then it is to be avoided. This ultimately leads to groups of people telling others how to think and be held to a higher standard. Patriotism brings about a belief that your nation or country is somehow singled out for greatness. The concept of Trans-Nationalism is anathema to our Constitutional Republic. So we must eliminate the support of the Flag by burning and defacing the principles upon which we were founded. Self inflicted generational amnesia. The young Americans of today must think in terms of global participation and not the simple nation-state. The Pledge of Allegiance is dangerous and even offensive (not) to the vast number of immigrants in our country. So children, my daughter included, are not permitted to pray during the 9/11 remembrances, there is no flag in their classroom to pledge their patriotism, and there are no pictures of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln to stare at when they are bored.
Hitler knew that you had to grab the children and teach them. Their take over of the nation's collective philosophy would be cemented with them, not the extermination of their parents. Stalin (Lenin) and Mao worked the same angles. The Progressives have done the same things here by dumbing down the educational standards so that our children will simply accept the drivel that is being shoveled at them. They think there is nothing wrong with swapping out light bulbs or forcing people to carry health insurance. They think that forced redistribution of wealth is FAIR and that to complain about it is to place you under suspicion. All of this has happened in my lifetime. I am now old enough to have seen what things were like just before me and now to see what they are doing today.
Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Just because you are aware of yourself does not make you an individual thinker. Think on that and the consequences of failing to teach our young how to think for themselves.
The Stoa is now empty, please teach responsibly.
--Zavost
No comments:
Post a Comment