When a civic organization asked me to speak during its weekly luncheon, my ego being what it is, I accepted. The man who introduced me, a retired bank president, was once a student in my college composition courses. I mentioned this to the audience, and commented on changes in classrooms of today and those during his college years.
Back then I felt challenged, not only because incoming freshmen had been well taught, but also because most of them possessed strong work ethics that disallowed ignoring homework. I had to be on my toes and know the curriculum because they were well prepared and asked questions that could not be dismissed with equivocating, evasive answers.
That challenging, competitive learning environment has diminished dramatically in today’s classrooms, and the reasons are obvious. Perhaps the primary culprit is political correctness — an oxymoron of the first order. Nothing political is correct, unless corruption is correct.
Add to political correctness such dysfunctional social engineering strategies as inclusion, secularism, progressivism, diversity, multiculturalism, and transgenderism, and the academic competition that once generated winner-take-all individuality has been replaced by a curriculum-be-damned environment whose primary focus is maintaining acceptable comfort zones for millennials, snowflakes, and assorted socialist wannabes who have no desire to step outside mediocrity’s bounds. Such an educational system is totally opposite from the one that spawned generations of young adults who went on to make America the greatest country on earth.
I agree with poet Robert Frost, who said,
“The best things and the best people rise out of their separateness.
I am against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”
Intelligent, hard-working, achievement-oriented youngsters cannot attain their peak potential in educational systems that reduce grade scales, allow such outrageous practices as social promotion, and provide “safe spaces” for wimps who cannot tolerate even the slightest stressful stimuli.
When two students whose mother home-schooled them enrolled in one of my composition courses, the most noticeable difference in their performance and that of their classmates was their superior ability to articulate. Whereas others relied on vague, repetitive, all-inclusive phrases and words such as “thing,” “like,” “you know,” and “whatever,” those two kids were conversant on a wide range of subjects, and could paint with words: They could articulate.
When one of their classmates who believed that just showing up was good enough asked me where she stood in the course, I explained that her abysmal performance prior to the semester’s eleventh hour rendered a numerical average that was impossible to boost to a passing grade, she inarticulately blurted out for the whole class to hear, “Hell no, you just can’t give me an F in this course.” My articulate answer left her speechless: “I do not ‘give’ grades; they are earned.”
Has learning in order to earn become an unacceptable concept? Is it blasphemous to tell students that whatever is worth having is worth struggling for? If so, public education has become what those who hate this country hope it is: America’s Achilles Heel.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
When a civic organization asked me to speak during its weekly luncheon, my ego being what it is, I accepted. The man who introduced me, a retired bank president, was once a student in my college composition courses. I mentioned this to the audience, and commented on changes in classrooms of today and those during his college years.
Back then I felt challenged, not only because incoming freshmen had been well taught, but also because most of them possessed strong work ethics that disallowed ignoring homework. I had to be on my toes and know the curriculum because they were well prepared and asked questions that could not be dismissed with equivocating, evasive answers. 
