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1. Golden Swamp » Education and the internet: the twain connect not:

[...] Society does not included education as a topic. A PajamasMedia blog post this morning titled “A ‘To-Do’ List for the Next Education President” does not mention the Internet. These are astounding disconnects by adults as youngsters in middle [...]

Aug 1, 2008 - 3:06 am 2. Lisa:

I don’t know if differential pay is needed. The truth of the matter is BETTER pay is needed. The districts that can afford to pay better have better teachers.

The other thing you need to keep in mind is that you are comparing apples and oranges. Kids from professional homes are so far ahead of their peers from low income homes that it is difficult to erase the differences. Communities with high percentages of professional families will be able to afford higher wages and have fewer discipline problems.. thus attracting the better teachers.. those who have a choice of position.

The real kicker is that the professional parents may be all for having integration by income/race as long as it doesn’t impact their child’s education. The minute they see a decline in behavior/school performance, the minute they see a drop in academic rigour they will pull their kids out by moving to someplace even more expensive or going to private school. And you know what… I would too.

What is the answer? Low income areas need new facilities, smaller schools, lower class sizes and longer hours. Financial incentives to encourage experienced teachers to take these jobs. It will have to be funded by the Federal Gov’t and should.

Aug 1, 2008 - 5:04 am 3. Robin:

School choice is only an effective option in urban areas. In the midwest, a single school may serve a 500 square mile area. Where else can parents go?

Differential pay for science and math only? What about the importance of teaching reading? I say extra money to those who have the gumption to take five and six year olds and turn them into confident and effective readers. After all, you can read to learn until you learn to read.

The only concern I have about “merit” pay is that teachers can be the focus of blame by parents who are disappointed in their struggling child. They project that the teacher is a bad teacher because their child isn’t making the expected outcomes. I’d hate to think someone’s livelihood could be impacted by a vindictive parent with powerful connections within a school’s administrative structure.

Aug 1, 2008 - 5:32 am 4. Tolbert,:

Lisa,

Thats right, throw more money at it, just like we have for the last 40 years, that’ll solve the problem.

How, about this instead. We take control back from the NEA and while we’re at it make it possible for people with degrees in the sciences (math, chemistry, engineering) to be able to obtain a teaching certificate after a brief six week course.

Education majors score significantly and persistantly lower on the SAT in all areas than Mathmatics or Language and Literature majors.

Tell me why as a taxpayer I should support better pay for a group of people who are organized against my interests and who seem only to exist to promote self esteem, multiculturism and socialism.

Aug 1, 2008 - 6:01 am 5. Lisa:

Tolbert..

We AREN”T throwing more money at schools. In MY state, per pupil funding has decreased in real dollars in the last 15 yrs. Schools need more money… when are textbooks are 10 years old and out of date, we need more funding. When we don’t have usuable science equipment or labs, we need more funding.

Oh and this engineer turned teacher would agree with you on the easy certification for engineer/scientists… however, I’ve seen some pretty terrible teachers who were former scientists.

Last time I checked, self esteem and socialism weren’t in the curriculum. Science, math, history, literature and music are. How is educating students in these areas against your interest?

Aug 1, 2008 - 6:27 am 6. Northern Light:

Look, there will never be positive reforms to the American educational system as long as there are politicians who rely on an ignorant uninformed electorate. As far as I can see, mandatory testing has made things worse because schools are so focussed on getting students to pass the tests that they have stopped trying to teach anything that isn’t on the tests. As to school vouchers, they seem a great idea if you think that the government should be funding schools that teach that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the dinosaurs were killed by God’s great flood.

You Americans really have to do something about this. I don’t mind you creating generation after generation of under-educated people except that some of them will be handling all those nuclear weapons you have. That scares me.

Aug 1, 2008 - 6:49 am 7. Ari:

I have seen some pretty terrible teachers who were *not* former scientists. It’s not clear to me that certification leads to better teaching.

Aug 1, 2008 - 6:57 am 8. Tolbert,:

Lisa,

I live in a suburban area in a low cost region (the southeast). 4 years ago the city (pop 60,000) spent 70 Million!, yes thats right, 70 Million dollars to build a high school that serves approximately 1800 student. Student teacher ratio is 16-1.

Starting salary for a teacher is 46,000. That would be 70% to 80% of the average income for a family of 4. If they were teaching in the math or sciences they would be also receiving a supplement of several thousands a year.

Despite the princely sum that was spent on these facilities and the above average spent on teachers compared to the general population of my state, the academic achievement of these students is still abysmal. They ranked 85th out of 350 schools in a state that has a 50% drop out rate between the 9th and 12th grades.

So you can see why I’m less than enthuastic about spending more money given the current results that are being obtained via those methods.

Aug 1, 2008 - 7:53 am 9. Aureliano:

Last time I checked, self esteem and socialism weren’t in the curriculum. Science, math, history, literature and music are.

Curricula have become political footballs. It’s naive to think that education isn’t overrun with individuals (Democrats) who think it is one of their duties to help engineer society by installing ‘correct’ political ideas into the heads of children.

Science: Where global warming and impending climate disaster are taught as settled science, and that therefore coercive government has the right to control many aspects of our lives to avert the impending disaster (example: socialism). Even though most discoveries have been by males, science textbooks nevertheless apply a gender quota system by noting or highlighting female scientists, largely as asides, in percentages approaching 50% (example: self-esteem).

Math: Where girls are given special attention because the largely female school administration believes girls are being discriminated against (example: self-esteem). As with science textbooks, female mathematicians are noted largely in ‘Did You Know ….” asides in percentages far greater than their actual contributions to mathematics (example: self-esteem).

History: Where American history is taught as nothing more than a series of atrocities. Non-American societies are relatively pure; non-white American sub-cultures are relatively pure; any system outside capitalism is relatively pure. Howard Zinn, a doctrinaire Marxist, wrote a ‘People’s History of the United States’ which is used as a standard textbook in many high schools and is considered top-flight scholarship (example: socialism, multiculturalism). Yet more special notations and emphasis of female historical figures in percentages far beyond their actual importance (example: self-esteem).

Literature: Where the only legitimate literature is written by female non-whites (preferably gay) whose subject matter typically covers such nonsense as the injustice of economic inequality (example: socialism), the depravity of American culture (example: multiculturalism), or how any current difficulties of women or minorities are actually society’s fault, not theirs (example: self-esteem). The literature of dead white males is covered but typically given short-shrift given their talent and the influence they achieved during their era. Shakespeare is considered optional.

Music: Don’t know; don’t care.

And you forgot the ’social studies’ curricula where they conveniently forgot to discuss the foundational principles of limited government (example: socialism), the exceptionalism of the dead white male Founders (example: self-esteem), and the British/European origins of almost all the ideas that shape the best aspects of our society (example: multiculturalism).

Aug 1, 2008 - 8:00 am 10. Jeff:

Average spent per pupil annually ~ $10,000
Average class size ~ 25 students
Each class represents $250,000 annually

Median annual teacher salary ~ $50,000 (maybe $75,000 w/benefits)

Three classes per grade x 7 (K-6) x $175,000 ($250,000 – $75,000) = $3,675,000 to cover annual overhead excluding teachers for an elementary school of 525 students.

Maybe I’m naive, or maybe just ill prepared due to my public school education, but I would think we should be able find a way to properly educate the children with that amount of money.

Aug 1, 2008 - 8:07 am 11. Concerned Citizen:

“Curricula have become political footballs. It’s naive to think that education isn’t overrun with individuals (Democrats) who think it is one of their duties to help engineer society by installing ‘correct’ political ideas into the heads of children.”

Aureliano, you are correct that the curricula has been warped by politics, but it’s up to the parents to instill the values they want to see their offspring directed towards. This is easier to do than many think.

I use real world examples, like having my kids watch Obama give a speech, then having them explain to me what he just said (without me saying a word). This is one worth having adult Obama supporters try as well. I think you’ll be surprised how perceptive your kids are.

Another game I like is “Socialism”. Take your oldest child’s laptop, playstation, cell phone, sports trophies etc. (something near and dear to them), place it on the center of the dining room table and explain to all the kids that since your oldest has something the others don’t have, it isn’t fair and you are going to start running your family on the basis of “fairness”. Ask the oldest if they would give (not share) the item to one of the younger children. Take the dear item and give it randomly to one of the other kids and tell them that until the next meeting it’s theirs. The next meeting might only be about ten minutes away. Repeat for the kids who received the item with one of their dear items. This took my oldest about 3 minutes to understand socialism.

Aug 1, 2008 - 9:07 am 12. TomJW:

Get the government out of (fill in the blank).

The fedral and state mandates are too much for a parent to understand and argue with. The national union, NEA, is too big and powerful to be fought by any parent.

No taxes dedicated to education. Let the NEA compete with private schools. The catholic schools I was taught in didn’t spend nearly the same amount of money as the public schools. If the NEA keeps doing a terrible job of teaching, let it sink to the nothing it teaches kids now. No tears hear.

What started as a noble idea with Thomas Jefferson to provide education to America’s children has turned into a travesty. It is costing us a lot, but my son is going to catholic school now. He needs an education.

Aug 1, 2008 - 9:32 am 13. Jeff:

Concerned Citizen,

I used my daughter’s grades to explain progressive taxation…

All the classes in which you receive an “A” will be dropped 20% and that 20% can be transferred to a student who was failing.

If you got a “B” you lose 10%.

Since you only need to make a “C” or even a “D” to advance to the next grade, you can “afford” it and you’d be helping someone else pass.

I don’t think she cared much for the idea.

Aug 1, 2008 - 9:34 am 14. Aaron:

“Differential pay for science and math only? What about the importance of teaching reading?”

If someone is proficient enough in the areas of mathematics and science to teach those subjects well, then that individual could likely get a job in industry that pays 50-60K with no prior experience. A teacher doesn’t make that much after 10 years.

Meanwhile, someone with a bachelor’s degree in English or History could not hope to get a job that pays much, if any, more than a teaching position. Hence, there is no need to pay them more.

If the education field is going to compete for the best and the brightest, or even the average, then schools will have to pay close to as much as other fields in which a person of similar skill, knowledge and experience could find employment.

Aug 1, 2008 - 12:07 pm 15. Sandra M:

I have been reading about school vouchers for at least 30 years and in all that reading have never learned one useful thing. Perhaps this comment can help a couple of people.

Recently, I have become so bored with the current “Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century” TV series: CSI and HOUSE, MD, that I have been turning off the TV midstory and telling myself the following bedtime story:

A former convent schoolmate of mine — a beautiful, brainless South American heiress who married rich — learns I am sick, hence poor, and since I wrote several of her high school papers decides, for a handsome sum, to dump her young son on me to tutor so she can do the town and find yet another wealthy husband.

Children, especially on Sesame Street and such, are alien to me as in “from another planet.” I have no “inner child” and don’t recall ever being THAT young (neither does anyone who ever knew me). I was 17 at birth and stubbornly remained so for the next half century. This boy and I are kindred spirits. But since I am usually dead tired, I give him some of my few fictional works to read: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and the Sherlock Holmes stories and go back to sleep.

This lad was emotionally damaged by bullying at the elite private school he was enrolled in and wants never to return. As I also hated every day I spent in school, days which i could have spent actually learning something, we conspire to make sure he doesn’t have to return to his detested prep schiool.

I give him Professor Sheridan Baker’s THE PRACTICAL STYLIST to read. It’s a college Freshman text but so clearly written any intelligent child can grasp its principles. I then have him write an essay comparing and contrasting Holmes and Edmond Dantes. I correct the essay and have him do it again and again, a total of 10 times. Then, I have him write in narrative style Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s brilliant work in identifying the cause of Pellagra, a disease characterized by the 3 D’s (dementia, dermatitis and diarrhea) which afflicted poor Southerners in the 1910’s. The narrative also shows how Mill’s inductive methods of agreement (common factor method), difference (controlled experiment) and variations enabled Goldberger (who worked for the Public Health Service) to solve this medical mystery.

My golden child is bi-lingual, so I turn him onto more of Dumas’ novels and after he’s read then for the third time, suggest he read them in the original French, which he proceeds to learn. He is now tri-lingual which means he really understands language I then have him study Italian (useful in studying music and art) and Portugese (for the course credit) and useful should he visit Brazil.

i buy him jigsaw puzzles, on the geography of the United
States, South America, Europe, and the geography of the world.

I also hand him a book I found late in life and have always meant to study but haven’t had the mental energy to go through: John Saxon’s math text. My golden child asks the same question I always asked. Why study math? What for? In answer, I slip the TV series NUMB3RS into the DVD player.

(I once saw a burly Texas high school math teacher weep on 60 minutes, because they were replacing Saxon’s algebra text with another math textbook. (a matter of profit and payola. Textbooks make big money). Interestingly, Saxon is a former Marine. Is there anything the few and the brave don’t do better? Rhetorical question.

Then, we drive to Princeton University where the Educational Testing Service is located and he passes English grammar and composition, 2 years of Spanish, a year of French, a semester of Italian, Portugese, math and introductory logic. He is now a college Sophomore, perhaps a Junior and let the educationists fight that.

GC and I then go to Washington D.C. for the Scripps-Howard spelling bee, with a secondary motive on my part to have him meet other bright kids who he can have as friends without becoming bored. He scores in the top ten, meets several very bright kids, enough to start a debate team in future, welcome news to kids who didn’t win and need a new goal. He meets a young Indian-American boy (as in Hindu) and the two become instant friends. The Indian boy’s mom has a friend who lives and works in DC and arranges for a special tour of the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress and the White House for the boys and their parents. (Immigrants are frequently the most passionate Americans).

The story goes on, but you get the point.

Aug 1, 2008 - 1:01 pm 16. Tolbert,:

Sandra M,

The point being that you have limited narrative skills and that you hit the bong a little hard and too frequently?

Aug 1, 2008 - 1:14 pm 17. uburoisc:

I graduated a few years ago with a double major, summa cum laude, from a respected university. After graduating, I decided I would teach for a few years to pay down my student loans, and because I have a genuine aptitude for it. I lasted less than 2 weeks. Here are a few of my conclusions:

Education majors may be the the dumbest and least able minded students on campus. The urge to teach is, for many people, the surest way to distance themselves from their own cognitive deficiencies.

Teacher certification is a colossal waste of time, energy and resources; it teaches nothing, takes years, and amounts to little more than a jobs programs for educrats. Worse, the departments are run by the same dimwitted education majors who eventually went up the salary ladder by writing gibberish in graduate school (gibberish mostly cribbed from the sociology departments about educational theory and continental lit-crit, gibberish that all-too-often finds it’s way back into the classroom via “educational reform”). The certification programs turn out teachers who are considerably less intelligent than when they went in.

It really does not take very much money to run a good school; in fact, most things that the education lobby claims are indispensable are not. The teachers who endlessly whine about not having enough funds are simply uncritical tools of the educrats and their unions–twin scourges who would throw money off the back of a moving train if they got the chance.

Sandra M is spot on, well-done.

Aug 1, 2008 - 1:53 pm 18. osogrizzly:

Are you sitting down? Good.

ARE TEACHERS REALLY “IDIOTS”?

“In case you missed it in the news, more than half of 2,000 would-be teachers in Massachusetts flunked a literacy test rated at about the EIGHTH-grade level! But it wasn’t just the number of failures as much as how they failed. They misspelled words that 9-year-olds should have known, were unable to differentiate between nouns and verbs, and failed to define words such as “imminent.”

“In the Massachusetts case, Education Commissioner Frank Haydu resigned after he made matters worse by proposing that the state lower the exam’s passing grade to reduce the 60-percent failure rate. (When they DID lower the standard, the failure rate was STILL 44-percent!)”

“Just how important is teacher quality, you ask? Listen to this… in Texas, Harvard researcher Ron Ferguson found teacher quality, as measured by scores on licensing exams and level of education, to be the single strongest predictor of how a child will fare in school!”

Here’s the source document: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/idiots.html

Note that edu-cyberpg.com is a professional site for teachers… And, this information is a decade old. This was a debate long before NCLB..

Sad, really, really sad…

Aug 1, 2008 - 2:34 pm 19. uburoisc:

The education system isn’t just broke at the classroom level, it goes far beyond that; the wreck of our schools owes as much to bad theory as bad teachers and lousy parents. The truly indispensable Richard Mitchell saw the mess we are in a long time ago.

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/

Aug 1, 2008 - 3:07 pm 20. exhelodrvr:

Lisa,
“Low income areas need new facilities, smaller schools, lower class sizes and longer hours.”

Take a look at the amount per student that DC spends. The biggest problem with facilities is mismanagement. The biggest problem with students is the parents, but teachers can also be a significant issue. One bad teacher (5% of the staff) can negatively affect 25% of the students in a medium-sized elementary school.

Aug 1, 2008 - 3:33 pm 21. uburoisc:

Richard Mitchell on why we should oppose vouchers:

“The public schools could provide better education if we gave them more money.” This is false. We give them far too much money. They spend it on gimmicks and gadgets and programs and proposals and whole legions of apparatchiks and uneducated busybodies and Ladies Bountiful manquées. The private schools just don’t have that kind of money. That’s why they’re often so much better. If we were to enrich the private schools, most of them would hire the recently disemployed values clarification facilitators and start offering courses in environmental awareness enhancement and creative expression of self-as-individual-self through collage. In a few years, we would have thousands of private schools just as bad as the public schools are now. Furthermore, bad private schools, unlike bad public schools, can do as they damn well please just as long as they can find buyers for what they choose to sell, and they will care no more for our opinions, or yours, than the mongers of obscene T-shirts care about our quaint canons of taste. The people who run the government schools can at least be ridiculed and humiliated in public.

Aug 1, 2008 - 4:22 pm 22. Sandra M:

Tolbert said:

>>The point being that you have limited narrative skills and that you hit the bong a little hard and too frequently?

The point wasn’t to demonstrate my admittedly rusty “narrative skills”. It was to convey ways to educate a child without waiting for the far-off date when a Dhimmicrat congress will permit vouchers for students.

As to “hitting the bong” I’ve never heard the phrase before but if it means you think I’m hitting the bottle or doing recreational drugs. I’m like this without benefit of either. The only drugs that have ever interested me were “smart drugs” which our FDA forbids.

Let me now give you the non-fiction version of the comment I originally wrote which is virtually guaranteed to further annoy you which I would deem a good thing.

“I am (sob) a “victim of the American educational system”. Who do I sue for educational malpractice?

“I dropped out of high school because after being bored out of my mind by Manhattan’s Marxist Mafia, I was then subjected to nuns on the warpath because of my stubborn adolescent atheism. Interestingly, public and parochial schools don’t share students’ school records with each other; hence, the parochial schools thought me gifted and the public schools not so much.

“I dropped out of college when a course I took in The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle turned out to be 99% Plato, spiritual daddy of most dictators, and Aristotle whose writings on logic, ethics, politics,, aesthetics, biology and physics I had been struggling with on my own was dismissed in the last lecture as a “businessman’s philosopher.” Isn’t that pure educational malpractice? Don’t believe the catalog was the lesson I learned there.

“I dropped out of college again, because in the graduate course on Aristotle I was auditing people were talking pure bullshit and not being called on it.

“Later, I dropped out of graduate school because my fiction, non-fiction and film professors were all hacks, pure “schlockmeisters”. And this at what is considered an elite West Coast university. I had paid zero tuition (graduate fellowship) and that year was worth every cent I paid.

“Industrial beige walls, barred windows, jarring bells, being shunted from classroom to classroom to study a subject unrelated to what one was just studying, overpriced textbooks and boredom, boredom, boredom. That’s what we foist on millions of children and adolescents.

I suffered another instance of educational malpractice when I signed up for a course in astronomy because I wanted to learn more about the solar system. The unemployed scientist who taught the course considered the solar system “geology” and gave me a dirty look when I raised my hand and asked if I would be taught the solar system if I went down the hall to the Geology Department.

I had to suffer through a year of the History of Music when what I wanted was to learn to read music and more about the music of Johannes Sebastian Bach. Similarly, the History of Western Art involved dates and museums but aesthetics? Go ask the philosophy department. Right.

In the film STEALING HEAVEN, we see one of the middle age’s greatest teachers, Peter Abelard teaching students who had come from all over Europe to study with him. The University of Paris had something akin to a voucher system. And the students clearly preferred studying with Abelard and no one else. Similarly Bill Buckley, Jr. and Ayn Rand did more to educate their respective followers than any university does today. The same is probably true of Chomsky and other left-wingers, but I prefer not to dwell on that depressing thought.

If someone wants to file a class action suit against the NEA and AFT and major universities and colleges, sign me up. 17 years of school and I am virtually innumerate. I had to slip off my shoes for the math part of the Mensa entrance exam. Thanks to William Buckley, Jr.(THE LEXICON) I had a vocabulary which enabled me to pass. Unless you’re a feminist nutcase like David Mamet’s OLEANNA, you may find Buckley’s THE LEXICON,” a much more efficient and fun remedy against “racial and gender bias.” than wasting your time in Feminist, Black or Chicano studies, courses which will probably make you permanently angry like Princeton grad, “Princess Ticked-off.”

Aug 1, 2008 - 8:47 pm 23. Sandra M:

Aureliano, in one of the best posts on this topic, mentioned Howard Zinn’s PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES which I first heard of in Matt Damon’s GOOD WILL HUNTING. Good bit of leftist propaganda that. So let me recommend its ideological opposite, Paul Johnson’s superb A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Uborsoic’s felicitous phrase “continental lit crit” is easier to remember than Victor Davis Hanson’s “Foucauldian/Lacanian postmodernist hocus-pocus,” but one should know those names so as to avoid the brain-destroying virus that so afflicts Obama’s more educated followers who were taught that words don’t mean what they seem to mean. They have to be “interpreted” or “explicated.”

Our country will probably be saved by the home-schooled, a group so organized and powerful that when an idiot Congressman trying to curry favor with the educationists blasted home-schooling on the floor of the House, the Congress virtually drowned in angry letters from homeschool families, more mail than they’d ever received on any other issue.

The G.I. Bill was essentially a voucher system. If we adapt it to young children and further empower students and their parents by granting credit for what is learned rather than for courses taken, schools at all levels will have to finally, finally cater to their customers: the students.

Aug 1, 2008 - 9:19 pm 24. Phineas Worthington:

Many districts spend huge proportions of their budgets on special needs children by federal decree. As much as thirty percent of a local school budget here is spent on the tiny minority of 1% of the lowest achieving children.

How about repealing some of the federal laws that mandate spending so much money on children with no academic potential. And instead, more equitably spend some of that money on the top 1% as well.

Aug 1, 2008 - 9:32 pm 25. sigizmund:

The issue is with some fundamental principles, not just pay or quality of liberal ed.
“No child left behind” vs. “no genius left in the middle”. I taught at college level and I felt sorry for them, gifted kids who’d breeze through the math tests with straight A’s, never challenged beyond 16th century math, never given a chance to give us cold fusion, or whatever they had in them.
In the 50’s when we were scared of the Sputnik, we had no place for the mind-numbing egalitarianism in our schools, scientific geniuses were valorized in sci fi, and gifted kids had challenging venues to apply themselves.

Aug 1, 2008 - 10:53 pm 26. Jerry Richardson:

VOUCHERS-VOUCHERS-VOUCHERS-VOUCHERS-VOUCHERS

THE TEACHERS? UNION HAS ONLY BROUGHT ABOUT MORE MEDIOCRITY TO THIS COUNTRY AS IN FORD-GMC AND ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOCIALISM START REWARDING THE TEACHERS FOR WHAT ACHIEVE NOT FOR WHAT THEY DONT ACHIEVE.

UNIONISM IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE WORST WORKER..

Aug 2, 2008 - 8:42 am 27. uburoi:

I think that what Sandra is trying to say, though a bit obliquely, is that as long as we continue to buy into the way the educational system has been structured over the past 100 years, we will continue to undermine our earnest and commendable longing to educate our children. The models we are using can be greatly improved upon, and the REAL challenge to thoughtful Americans isn’t to fix the public schools, but to improvise and innovate, setting up our own models of educational excellence and finding better ways to take advantage of the simply mind-boggling amount of knowledge and wisdom that is all around us if we’d only open our eyes and see it. At no other time in the history of the world has so much been available to the ordinary fellow and at no other time has it been treated with such disinterest.

Oddly, I think the best models are already there, in our past, in the old English and Italian models of the university, the ones we dumped for credentialism and myopic specialization. If you want to know what that model sounds like, go watch Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” or read Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence,” you won’t be disappointed.

It is entirely possibly to engender a profoundly thoughtful young man or women on a shoestring budget, and with virtually no gadgets or audio-visual toys–or any of the other things the educrats and their unions claim are part-and-parcel of the modern classroom.

Old textbooks? Good, introductory Algebra hasn’t changed much in a very long time, the older the better, you can get them cheap and they are probably, no certainly, superior to any of the post-modern crap churned out by the textbook companies. Same goes for most history and literature books, with a few exceptions, you’re much better of with something closer to 1900, than to 2000. Almost all of the fundamentals were covered a long time ago, and what is new can be gleaned from good magazines and single books. Oh, and always, always choose books written by a single author over a textbook; “textbooks” are, by-and-large, crap, a hodge-podge of poorly written, ludicrously overpriced, phony consensus on a subject. Individual authors often have verve and vision, style and argument, a clear and purposeful point of view; textbook bore young minds to distraction and enrich the worst aspects of the education racket. Get a library card and use it; the world of ideas is a few blocks away and will remain an old friend for the rest of the child’s life. One of my great “shivers-down-the-spine” moments was walking into the main branch of the New York Public Library.

I have many highly educated friends and family, but the one friend who really stand out works as a waiter, half the year, in Napa valley, and spend the rest of the year traveling. He reads for the love of ideas, for the sheer joy of better understanding what he considers to be a miraculous universe. He knowledge of everything from Italian Opera (he is a regular at all the great opera houses) to the flora and fauna or northern Alaska (he is an avid outdoorsman and conservationist, living for months at a time in remote deserts and forests), to the history of ancient Jerusalem and Greece, is both compelling and invigorating. He is one of the few men, who, when all incentive is taken out of it, and all compulsion is removed, will read Tolstoy or Stendahl for the nothing more than the personal delight of being in the intimate presence of a fine mind. This humble waiter is a man in full, a civilized man, an educated man with whom older children would undoubtably blossom and flourish. He applied at one of the teacher programs here in Los Angeles; I warned him what he would endure. He lasted one week. He is headed for the French wine country to spend the autumn reading Balzac and Rabelais in the original, you lost LAUSD.

Aug 2, 2008 - 10:52 am 28. Bullfrog:

My personal experience with public education has led me to the conclusion that more often than not, a teacher is like most people in any other job; they want to get paid. I remember a handful of truly passionate people who took a genuine interest in their kids, and I learned more from those few than the rest of the lot. My 12th grade English teacher, on the 1st day of class, informed each of his classes that he didn’t care who passed or failed because he still got his paycheck either way. His mother taught at the same school, so apparently he came from a long line of “teachers”. I am only 1 person, and maybe my view is myopic, but I think unions, vouchers, tenure, and the like only make the situation worse. And more money is not the answer; if a system manages it’s finances badly and creates terrible results, you don’t spend millions more and hope for the best.

Common sense tells me that if left to private enterprise where the best performers are successful, everyone wins. This goes for education as well as any other unnecessarily huge bureaucracy created by the government. We live in a free market society, privatize education completely and watch the quality of education sky rocket.

Aug 2, 2008 - 8:25 pm 29. WR Jonas:

Being the rural product of a one room schoolhouse education I tend to think education is a little overrated . Especially by the educators who wish to enshrine themselves as the noble deliverers of the unwashed masses. They develop a distinct air of superiority when discussing education to the point that their views are supreme.
In fact the sudden rise of reasoned argument against evolution has revealed a very shaky foundation under modern education. The whole fabric of liberal logic and truth is crumbling and appears to be little more than a house of cards . Of course we need education and understanding but more importantly we need the TRUTH.
Bravo Aureliano for a daring and brilliant summary of our modern education system.
We may be getting at something here.

Aug 3, 2008 - 1:49 pm 30. tanstaafl:

Neither a President O or a President McC can undo the fact that we’ve had generations of teachers now who themselves were brought up and “trained” in a declining educational system, their own minds infested by the garbage Aureliano cites.

“Teaching” may seem to many like just passing on that stuff to the captive audience.

Additionally, to the extent that the federal government has infested education with benchmarks, over emphasis on test scores and artificial “performance” measurements tied to funding, public education in America has shot craps.

Aug 3, 2008 - 5:07 pm 31. Ed is Watching » Five Things the Next President Can Do to Advance Education Reform:

[...] Over at Pajamas Media, Greg Forster has a list of five things the next President – whoever it may be – can do to advance education reform: [...]

Aug 4, 2008 - 7:13 am 32. deguello:

Close down the schools of education, make sure teachers have a degree in a real field,such as History, Math,a foreign language, and teach reading using a scripted ,explicit phonics,grammar and vocabulary,as shown by cognitive research(visit the national right to read foundation web site NRRF). It won’t happen, because the plutocracy has a vested interested in keeping people semi literate, under educated,and therefore, docile.

Aug 4, 2008 - 7:40 am 33. Aunt Pity Pat:

Aureliano: Great response. Here is one you will probably be able to add to your list as Communism or I mean Socialism, it’s the new plan in California. This year a Bill, SB 1322, from state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat elected from the state’s 27th District. This bill would actually allow the promotion of communism in public schools.

There is a law on the books now that states school property may not be used by anyone intent on overthrowing the government. SB 1322 would delete the requirement that an individual or organization wanting to use the school property is not a Communist action organization or Communist front organization. The bill would also strike the law that a public school or community college employee may be fired if he or she is a member of the Communist Party, and the bill would also strike the law that prohibits a teacher giving instruction in a school or on public school property from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism.
My source was
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58061

Aug 4, 2008 - 10:59 am 34. deguello:

Aureliano:I wouldn’t worry about it too much;liberals have ruined the schools to mthe point where the kids are almost too ignorant to be indoctrinated. But liberals are nothing if not stupid;you can,t make revolution with the illiterate/ignorant,the plutocrats know this, which is why they hire liberals to run/ruin? the school systems. Look at new york city,where the multibillionaire mayor Bloomberg has turned the schools over tomanifest pedagoguical charlatans.Drop out rates exceed 50 percent. Look up Sol Stern’s articles in City Journal, to see the process in action,its a disgrace and a scandal.

Aug 4, 2008 - 3:54 pm 35. RedneckJD:

The very first thing to be done to improve education in this country is to outlaw the teachers’ unions in public education. Then, abolish the Dept. of Education. Turning contol of local schools back to the locals is vitally important, not only for the schools, but for the community at large. If the locals are invested in the local school, they will be less likely to accept unions and silly agenda driven classes and subjects. If a teacher, who lives locally, knows that they face community condemnation for silly and unpopular notions, they will be less likely to promote gay marriage, or abortion, or overlook teaching abstinence. No unions, and local control is the proper way to bring education under control.

Aug 4, 2008 - 3:55 pm

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