Problems in K-12, that’s my beat. I write a lot of articles and see a lot of comments. Many are depressing. Last week I saw the saddest yet: “The kids have given up.”
That shocked me. So confident, so sweeping. The speaker doesn’t mean a few kids, but lots of kids, maybe the great majority.
What Progressives, socialists, and communists are trained to do: Destroy the opposition and take control
I published an article claiming our Education Establishment had expropriated the whole K-12 system This is what progressives, socialists, and communists are trained to do: destroy the opposition and take control. I believe that’s the only way to explain why public schools have declined uniformly across our vast country. This cannot be a natural phenomenon. It's the result of a small group of ideologues successfully engaged in command-and-control at the highest level.
Was my criticism fair? Frankly, I don't mind slightly overstating a position so I can provoke discussion. However, an experienced teacher left a comment that validated what I said and raised the discussion to another level. Here is the comment as it appeared on a major forum:
“I retired a year ago after 30+ years in the belly of the beast. I still sub at my local jr/sr hi. Even in the two years since I retired things have changed drastically. So much more is done online, even in the regular classrooms. The junior high math teacher, one of the holdovers from when I was in the classroom, commiserated with me that the kids have given up. It isn't that they can't do the work, they just don't want to even try.
“She (and the rest of us old fogies) is very worried about what is happening….We (the old fogies) like what the net can do, but we already know how to think and write and research and then put it all together. BUT, the kids don't know this. They aren't learning to think. They can't string three words together to make a sentence, much less a paragraph. They don't know anything of any relevance outside their own immediate concerns. They know all this, but they don't care. They think it's funny. They think anything worthwhile can be looked up on the net and, of course, if it's on the net, it must be true, especially if it shows up on FB, snapchat, instagram, pinterest, etc.….
“It is sad. But, lest anyone think they have given up in despair of ever ‘getting it,’ not so. They have given up because they don't see the need... and don't want to either. They are too busy poo-pooing anything and everything you try to teach them…..I, personally, fear it is too late for most of the kids. Not all of them, but most of them.”
Too late?? That is tragic. “The kids have given up.” I doubt anyone could’ve put those words together ten years ago.
This is not strictly an academic matter, nor a character matter (the two aspects I write about most). This is a spiritual dimension. The schools have figured out how to suck the souls from millions of young people, so they give up. The only hope is that everyone be indignant about the sickness infecting K-12.
Nothing academic is easy or fun anymore
Here very quickly is what the schools have been doing. Nothing academic is easy or fun anymore, as school sometimes used to be. Professors of education have added a second and third layer to EVERYTHING. The students have to work through those unnecessary layers before they can experience the stuff that most people think is fun. Three examples:
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Example 1: students have to learn many hundreds of sight-words, a task that takes years, before they can read in even the lowest sense of the word. Why would you be interested in Geography or History or General Science if you can’t understand any of the strange names you see on the page?
Example 2: Reform and Common Core Math teach children difficult and cumbersome procedures. Every step is a struggle. Children aren’t given problems anymore; now they must solve nasty little riddles. Meanwhile, parents can’t do these riddles. Children see this. Naturally they lose respect for the whole business. Let’s say you’re eight or nine years old. Are you going to beat yourself up for failing at something your 40-year-old parents can’t do? Heck no, you are going to walk away, in your soul at any rate.
Example 3: Constructivism (a plague in every part of K-12) dictates that teachers can’t teach directly, and students must scrounge for knowledge on their own. But everyone sees the lie. The teacher, although knowing interesting things the students might enjoy learning, is unable to speak. The students know they will spend most of their time hunting for simple facts they should learn in the classroom. Why bother? If the school doesn’t have the brains or decency to teach stuff while everyone is gathered together in the classroom, then obviously these people are too weird to work with. As the difficulty is mainly contrived, students would be fools to struggle with it.
QED: the teacher’s comment indicated that students have turned away from school. But the schools turned away first. Everyone should understand this and put blame where it belongs, the Education Establishment.
[Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book is “Saving K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?”]
