One of the topics I have been planning to post something about on this Blog is the poor state of Public Education, which in my view went to hell in the preverbal hand basket around the middle nineteen eighties. Having served as a substitute teacher during the seventies, I ended the practice forever in the early nineties after weighing the danger of being assaulted by an unruly student or being arrested by a disgruntle parent for touching their precious child.
I look back on my own early school life and I do not remember having a teacher who would have been afraid to touch me. The teacher’s paddle was something; I had experienced in the Midwest schools and made it my mission to avoid getting a taste anywhere else. Those were the days when children showed their teacher absolute respect, something that seems to have been lost in today’s schools. The public school then served as the backbone of American culture, values and standards. The trades are no longer taught as a part of the public high school curriculums as it was in my middle school and high school days. One could train to be a carpenter, plumber, secretary or beautician in public high schools free and many chose those as careers. Today’s kids get four years of high school generalist training preparing them to work at a burger joint or franchise and must pay out of pocket thousands of dollars for two more years of what today is being billed as technical school education of which I have my doubts that it is. Some think that this technical school training is a second rehash of what should have been absorbed in high school with the basics of a technical field thrown in a long side. These two-year technical schools sell dreams and stories about an upward mobile latter to success that does not exist for average students. At some point and time one must ask him who sold you on that dream or story was it a slick Madison Avenue advertisement? Or was it a school adviser who was getting a kick back for steering students to this career path?
What is happening to our kids, one may ask after seeing the videos I have included here? The United States like no other country on earth has allowed expectations of school conduct and self-discipline to reach an all time low. Schools have more discipline in the third world countries’ classrooms than in public schools here in the United States. If one expects nothing from students then usually nothing is what one gets. This seems to be the situation of many public school systems in the United States.
However, for all the praise that the desegregation of U.S. public schools has received, the systematic destruction of school discipline was a great price for the African American and low-income white communities to pay. Their blind trust that the state would do right by their children was unfounded and a majority of black male children have paid dearly for it.
But do not get me wrong the public school system is failing everybody, middle class whites as well as in low-income groups force to depend upon today’s public education.
Somewhere a long the way the public schools stopped being places of learning, education and citizenship and became what we have now, training centers for fast food restraint employees. The community must speak out and demand better from local governments. Is the community afraid to point a finger at responsible authorities that seem to care more about their paycheck than their teaching mission? Let us hope not.
To my way of thinking it is going to take a stable environment and high expectation from the community to turn this present public school mess –up around. I have reached the point of believing that self-discipline must be the minimum prerequisite for admission to a Public School. A student should not be allowed to attend until he/she is ready to learn seated in his chair quiet and waiting for instructions from the teacher. A teacher failing to provide the instruction once the children are quiet and attentive should be fired.
Next I think that the question on the community’s lips to its children is what did you learn today in school and what were you given for homework to study? If a child learned something at school he/she should be able to teach it to someone else what was learned.
The issue of improving our public schools cannot be put on the shelf to wait for another time, it must be dealt with first, right now. This is the very foundation of the United States culture and the American dream; we cannot have a people’s republic without educating our kids.
