Education is key to maintaining a productive, vibrant society. Wonder what's going on with our public (aka government) education system? Read a nice summary of the issues we are faced with here in the United States.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. - Albert Einstein
America's Crumbling Education System
An excerpt taken from a Faith and Freedom article about teachers who choose to misteach.
How well are California schools educating children? View the data reported at the Assessment of Student Performance and Progress.There was a time when American education led the world.
One of the most abiding concerns of the earliest Christian settlers in this country was education---not just the education of the children of the elite, as was the custom in Europe, but everyone's child. These Christians brought us our first printing press, our country's first 126 colleges, including the very first---Harvard.
While visiting Harvard some years ago I noticed this inscription, which remained on the wall by the old iron gate at the main entrance to the campus:
"After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided our necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers lie in the dust."
So what can we do to improve today's education system? Seven concrete things come immediately to mind.
- Remove politics from the classroom. We understand Ms Elementary School Teacher, you want to create fellow activists out of the children that have been placed in your care. Well guess what? Many parents aren't interested in having their kids indoctrinated by you. That's not what you're being payed to do. So cut it out.
- Use the marketplace to promote success. The marketplace, when left unfettered, does a great job of weeding out bad ideas while encouraging good ones. It's high time that we took advantage of this to get rid of schools and teachers that are not producing excellence. The teachers union has turned the public education system into their own lucrative monopoly, to the detriment of students, parents, and tax payers. Break that open and watch what happens.
- Get to reading. As a number of educators have pointed out, if you have trouble reading, you have trouble learning. We should make sure that grades K thru 3 (and even preschool) have the resources they need to ensure that every student in those classrooms knows how to read well.
- Stop making this about money. According to a paper at the California Policy center, data for 2019 had the state of California paying an average of $12,143 per pupil, making California 20th in terms of state spending. So our students show up in the top half of scholastic achievement, right? Uh, no. Not even close. For 2019, US News reported California's pre-K thru 12 state ranking at 40th. How could that be? Clearly, this is about something other than the money being spent.
- Have educators be more involved in education policy. Politicians have not been in th classroom trenches, so they don't know what's needed and how to prioritize those needs. For the system to change in any significantly possitive way, that change will have to come from those who have operated in classrooms.
- Get rid of bad teathers. One would think this would be a no-brainer. Sadly, the teachers union has made it next to impossible for bad teachers to be let go. Students know which teathers are bad. Parents know which teachers are bad. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to weed out thise bad teachers?
- Revisit the school calendar question. Educators, especially those involved in teaching in the lower grades, understand that one of the biggest challenges they have to deal with is the so-called "summer slide", where their kids forget a good portion of what they were taught in the previous year. It makes no sense for schools in our urban centers to shut down for summer. There are no fields to be worked in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, etc. It's high time we made our school calendar fit with our educational objectives.
Slides concerning the American School Counselor Association
Source: Courage is a Habit
There are a bunch more things that could be done, but those are the ones we might start with..
The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Public Education
In her three part paper entitled The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Public Education, author Keri Ingraham delves into the radical ideas which have taken root in our public education system. Every parent should read this outstanding three part article, as it lays out why what's been taking place in our public school classrooms should be of concern to every mom (and dad).
- Part 1: Gender Redefinition & Self-Selection
- Part 2: Civics & History
- Part 3: Critical Race Theory & Woke Academics
A quote from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:
If you ask, "Who's the most likely to take this republic down?" It would be the teachers unions, and the filth that they're teaching our kids, and the fact that they don't know math and reading or writing,
If our kids don't grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we're done. If they think it's an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project and we were founded on a racist idea -- if those are the things people entering the seventh grade [have] deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it's difficult to understand how Xi Jinping's claim that America is in decline won't prove true.