Education in America

Every once in a while my well-meaning, conservative cousin in Florida sends me a posting about the terrible educational system in America. Why, in 1890, teachers were paragons of virtue (and provided their own firewood or coal), and students knew how many rods were in a mile, how many pecks in a bushel, and how many acres in a hectare -- or vice versa. I'm sure students did know these things, and in many ways they learned more while they were in school. Of course, well over 50 per cent of them dropped out before they finished high school. As a teacher (who spent a good portion of my salary on school supplies for students in lieu of wood or coal for the furnace), I was more than a little irritated to receive these postings because what kids needed to know in 1890 just isn't relevant today.

On the other hand, she made a point, albeit unknowingly.

Students enrolled in school then may well have had more practical knowledge then than they have now. In 1890 teachers had control of their classrooms. The legislature and the president didn't impose curricula on teachers, they didn't send out scripts for every day in the classroom that imposed the same design on students who range from much challenged and bored to exceptionally gifted and bored. And they didn't require class time for days of standardized tests and days of preparation for the tests, days that eat up weeks of instuctional time. Nor did the legislatures interrupt the school year with specious holidays so that very few five-day weeks are available for continuity of instruction.

As teachers, we like sheep have gone astray by not standing up for ourselves and saying, "I am a professional educator, not a tall child." Good teachers (and we should not hire and keep ones who are not!) can design clear curricula and teach their students what they need to know in ways that are meaningful to them. And reading is the key. Teachers do not need to have more administrators per teacher than teachers per child. Nor do they need constant interruptions in the school year. Teachers need the support of the community, especially parents.

Parents have an obligation to their children. They must read to them and read in front of them. They must teach them how to behave alone and in groups, and how get along with other people. They must back their children's teachers and perhaps occasionally bite their tongues. They and their children must learn to expect no preferential treatment because they are rich or because they are poor, because they are black or because they are white, because they are smart or because they are not.

But most of all, teachers must be allowed to teach, to find the great joy in their profession and experience the love of their charges. Without the micromanagement of their "superiors."