Bored of education flap

The poor performance of America’s schools is front and center on just about every politician’s agenda. And whenever there are politicians involved, there is always demagoguery. The solution for almost all of them is throwing more government money at it. Of course, all money comes with strings attached and with government, you can be sure that the strings will result in accomplishing precisely the opposite of what it’s supposed to.

I’m from a generation that had the highest average SAT scores on record. I went to Catholic grammar school, public high school and private college. I’ve concluded that most, if not all, social and economic problems stem from either an obstruction to freedom or an abrogation of responsibility, at some point. You have to look back to the beginning of the process to and trace it forward to find it out but if you look long and hard enough, you will find it. The results are like an error in astronomy. A mistake of even a fraction of a degree will result in missing the target by light years. Education is no exception. So let’s look at it from the beginning.

A man and a woman get together and have a child (Now, don’t any wise guys out there bring up test tube babies and surrogate mothers, etc. Children still are overwhelmingly born through sexual actions between two people, a man and a woman). They have taken the action to bring a child into the world. They are the responsible parties. That responsibility includes the feeding, housing, clothing, health care and education of that child.

Education is one of the first functions that a family delegates to others. Throughout history, this has usually been entrusted to religious authorities. In biblical times, a man was not considered educated unless he knew the scriptures. Indeed, the gospels tell the story of how Jesus impressed the elders at the temple with his knowledge of the scriptures. This continued until very recently when education became the province of government. There is no doubt that had it not been for the tedious work of thousands of monks after the fall of the Roman Empire, much of the great works of antiquity would have been lost.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments began to dabble in the arenas that were traditionally the province of the religious bodies. This was part and parcel of the age of a human centered secularism, secular humanism, if you will. One of those arenas was education. The first experiment in The United States in government-sponsored education was in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Even as public education spread, though, it retained a quasi-religious atmosphere complete with prayers and even bible studies. Various civil liberties organizations, most notably The American Civil Liberties Union, have succeeded in eliminating anything religious from public education. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to outlaw school prayer in the 1962 Engel vs. Vitale decision. Interestingly, it was in 1963 that average SAT scores hit their highest point and began their long slide to where they are today. It may not be coincidental.

Of course, once government gets into anything, politics follows. Education has been no exception. Schools have become flashpoints for all types of social experiments, including integration, sex education, tolerance (whatever that means) and myriad others. This, that or the other group decides that it wants its agenda pushed in the schools. Squabbles result and are resolved either in the courts or through political pressure. In either case, a school committee administers the decisions. The pitiful results we have today confirm the old barb that the camel was a horse designed by committee.

Consequently, we have had the expenditure of, at this point, billions of dollars to enforce various agendas, some admirable, others less so. These are precious resources that should have been spent on educating our youth rather than in pointless squabbles but that’s always the way when government and politics get involved.

And all the education in the world doesn’t help society much if it produces students without some type of moral compass. Suppose we educated a generation of Charles Mansons? Now it might be possible to have a moral society without the concept of God or some higher authority to whom we are all obligated but history has not been especially encouraging in this regard. Man and state centered societies have given us the Germany of National Socialism, the Italy of Fascism and the Soviet Union, Red China and Cuba of International Revolutionary Socialism. That’s not an especially sanguine omen.

There are those who will argue that we must set standards for performance in the schools. In fact, that is the position of this Bush administration. But, whose standards? That is the exact argument that many blacks and other minorities have had over the years. They claim that the performance tests are culturally biased and maybe they are. And how do you inculcate values? And, once again, whose values do we inculcate? Yours, mine, his, society’s? Who’s to say that one set of values or one orientation is better than any other?

How about a market solution? I’m Catholic. For years, it was the policy of the Church that Catholic children should be educated in a Catholic system. The Church authorities acquiesced under the onslaught of secular education, only continuing to require that Catholic children obtain doctrinal training as a condition for the sacrament of Confirmation. As it turns out, it was a mistake for the Church to cave in. These are forces that you cannot compromise with. What is wrong with a child being educated with a Catholic understanding as a foundation for learning? It was done for centuries. For that matter, what is wrong with having children learn from a Jewish, Baptist, Episcopal or any other perspective? Who’s to say that one is right and another wrong?

Certainly, there are people who might not want their children to learn from a religious perspective. That would be fine too. Let them get together with others of their persuasion and organize secular schools accordingly. And if some blacks desire that their children be steeped in an Afro-centric tradition, then amen. It’s their responsibility.

The answer to the question of which system is the most valid will be answered when the children go out into the world and seek jobs. Would some get left behind? Undoubtedly, but many are being left behind now. Could the results be much worse than they are now? And even if some improvement in the current system occurs, as seems to be happening, there’s no doubt that the politicians will decide to intervene again and mess it up. Political systems have political results.

The first mistake, the Original Sin if you will, is the assumption by the state of parental responsibility. It’s like the error at the source that misses its target by light years. It is also the very first skirmish in the battle to replace family, God and religion with state, Man, and government.

Private and religious education have produced some awesome results over history. Even today, Catholic colleges like Notre Dame, Georgetown and Providence have acquired formidable academic reputations, rivaling the very best secular institutions (PLEASE forgive us results like Bill Clinton. Any system will have its disasters.) There are thousands of religious colleges and schools across the country that are competing successfully, on minimal budgets, because of the huge siphon that government education represents. There can be no doubt that the reservoir of resources that would become available to the private sphere would unleash a creative explosion in approaches to education that would boggle the imagination.

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Literacy tests dumbed down too

Grammar and spelling mistakes? No problem! Now the literacy tests are "a measure of students' ability to participate in the community". I guess even an armed robber "participates in the community", though

The international OECD test cited as proof that Australian students have one of the highest literacy rates in the world does not test spelling and grammar. The Program for International Student Assessment of 15-year-old students in more than 40 countries assesses their ability to understand written texts and apply that knowledge but fails to examine correct use of language.

"The concept of literacy used in PISA is much broader than the historical notion of the ability to read and write," the report says. "It is measured on a continuum, not as something that an individual either does or does not have. A literate person has a range of competencies and there is no precise dividing line between a person who is fully literate and one who is not." Head of the Australian Council for Educational Research Professor Geoff Masters, which leads the consortium that runs PISA, said the test was a measure of students' reading, not writing.

But reader in English and head of humanities at the Australian National University Simon Haines said a solid foundation in reading implied "a foundation of knowledge of what words and sentences are". "Spelling and grammar are part of this knowledge of what a word fundamentally is, what written construction fundamentally is," he said. "Relatively trivial one-off spelling and grammatical errors probably shouldn't be marked down, but repeated errors of the same type, or errors indicating more fundamental misunderstandings, probably should be. "This is part of teaching students how to use language."

The PISA reading literacy test is conducted every three years, with the first held in 2000. In that test, the best of Australian students scored second to Finland. The study defines reading literacy as "understanding, using and reflecting on written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential and to participate in society". In its analysis of students' answers, the report says that spelling mistakes were very common but incorrect spelling had no bearing on the marking. "Answers with mistakes in grammar and/or spelling were not penalised as long as the correct point was made," it says.

Professor Masters said the definition of literacy had changed over time and once meant an inability to write one's name. But PISA took a broader attitude, saying literacy was a skill developed over a lifetime and a measure of students' ability to participate in the community.

The study also found that Australian students performed relatively poorly in their comprehension of continuous texts, such as narratives, and coped better with non-continuous texts, such as diagrams and maps. Boys in particular struggled with continuous texts, and were generally outperformed by girls. Professor Masters said the results indicated that teachers should make sure students read continuous texts such as books.

Literacy expert Bill Louden, head of the graduate school of education at the University of Western Australia, said PISA tested reading comprehension and was not a writing task, so "spelling and grammar errors don't come into it". "It wouldn't do in an English classroom, where you have continuous long works that needs to score kids on their capacity to write grammatically, write coherently and spell correctly," Professor Louden said.

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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.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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