POLITICIZED HIGH SCHOOLS

"I became sensitized to these issues by what was going on in my own daughter’s private school, where it seems a majority of the teachers have a left-wing agenda. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture made me aware of how 90% of college instructors also have left-wing political views and how that affects education in this country. Just before mock presidential elections at my daughter’s school, the pupils were given Time Magazine for Kids to read an article, Leader of the Pack: John Kerry. It discussed Kerry’s views on terrorism and education in a very slanted and positive way, while President Bush’s agenda and policies were all presented negatively. I passed this same article among seven or eight adults of different political viewpoints at my home, and all of them agreed the article was biased. The students were all told to read that one article and then vote. If you only give an eighth grader one point of view to read, with no balance, what are you going to get? My daughter said Kerry won, hands down.

During a parent-teacher evening at her school, my daughter’s history teacher, who seemed like a nice enough man, told all the parents “We’re going to show America, warts and all.� I asked him why he didn’t say he was going to show some of the great things America has done as well as some mistakes America may have made in the past. It was almost as if he had the perception that the parents would be glad he brought up the “warts� of America. I’m not saying that we should blindly be taught something in an uneducated manner, but when something is slanted this way...."

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AMERICAN TEACHING IS NOT A PROFESSION

And it is certainly not a science

"A profession has a knowledge base that serves as a way for the field to improve its own practices. The knowledge base is a body of specialized knowledge that is generated both by researchers and practitioners in the field. People contribute to it, it grows over time, and new practitioners draw on it to define the standard practices in the field. That's what makes it a profession.

For example, what makes medicine a profession is that there's a knowledge base where improved techniques are shared among the members of the medical community. If somebody invents a new way to do surgery, they are able to put it into the knowledge base to inform other members of the profession. As a result of that process, practices within the profession are improved over time.

Without a professional knowledge base, one surgeon might develop several improved techniques but there would be no way to share that knowledge with other surgeons. Under those circumstances, you would have one very clever surgeon, but surgery wouldn't be a profession. I think it's a very analogous situation in teaching. For the most part, teaching in this country has not been based on a knowledge base. If a teacher develops a new method for teaching some subject, there's no mechanism for sharing that method with other practitioners and improving practices in the field as a whole."

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CIVILIZATION LOST

Mass education no longer educates. Only an elite are now really educated

Have we not made a society in which the educated very few must quietly regard the enstupidated many with disdain? I for one cannot listen to anchors on the news without thinking of arboreal primates swinging from tree to tree. Benightedness need not be the fate of so many. I studied long ago in a small Southern college for boys (Hampden-Sydney) with modest entrance standards. I believe the average SATs were something like 1100. The prevailing philosophy at H-S was, first, that the reasonably intelligent could be cultivated; second, that adults knew better than school boys what school boys should study; and third, that a liberal education produced a civilized citizenry. It was assumed, incidentally, that freshmen read fluently and knew algebra cold. There were no remedial courses. A college was a college, it was held, and not a repair shop for the proven academically hopeless who had no business on campus.....

And so the student left college having, with some variation, a grasp of history ancient and modern, languages including his own, literature, philosophy, the sciences, and the Old and New Testaments. (It was a Presbyterian college. The civilization being Christian, one can grasp neither the arts, music, nor literature without knowledge of the Bible.) We were civilized, to the extent that young males can be civilized. We knew where we were in place and time, and where we came from. We knew what we knew and what we did not know, and how to learn anything else that interested us. (Go to a library.) So much has changed. Then as now, many in the nation had neither the intellectual wherewithal nor the interest to acquire much of an education. Yet until at least the midpoint of the last century, it was thought that those who went to college, and therefore would end in positions of responsibility, should be schooled. Today we craft a society in which a very few are truly educated, though many have the trappings....

Perhaps five years ago I went to a middle school in Arlington County, just outside of Washington, D.C. Arlington is not the ghetto. On the wall I saw a student's project, intended no doubt to celebrate diversity. In large orange letters it spoke of Enrico Fermi's contributions to, so help me, "Nucler Physicts." In the schools of small town Alabama in 1957, where I was a student, such invertebracy would not have been tolerated in an exercise, much less put on the wall. We have come a long way.

The schools remain a cultural slum, a dark night of the mind. As my daughters passed through these dismal moors, I saw misspelled handouts from teachers, heard of a teacher being reprimanded for correcting a student's grammar, saw endless propaganda disguised as history. How does one recognize the onset of a dark age. What have we done? And what now? Once the chain is broken, once no one any longer remembers how to write a sentence, much less the uses of the subjunctive, once Coleridge is forgotten and Milton and indeed everything beyond the mall, how can we recover what has been lost? I don't think we can.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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