A Bill of Rights for Students 2020

Search the Internet for anything related to "student rights" and you'll find lots of standard left-wing agitprop. The ACLU trolls for new plaintiffs with this pitch: "While the Constitution protects the rights of students at school, many school officials are unaware of students' legal protections, or simply ignore them. When heading back to school this year, make sure to know your rights and ensure that your school treats every student fairly and equally." K-12 students seem to be a new proletariat, a peasant population, that needs to be radicalized. Here in effect is the Party line: children are entitled to everything they want and all too often they are not getting it. They must be taught anger and indignation, and encouraged to riot and rebel.

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K-12 students seem to be a new proletariat, a peasant population, that needs to be radicalized

The National Student Bill of Rights has compiled a long list of rights: Right to Free Public Transportation; Right to Physical Activity; Right to Safe & Secure Public Schools; Right to Free Health Care; Right to High Quality Food; Right to a Job; Right to Free Day Care for Children; Right to Free College; Right to Safe & Secure Housing; and others.

Another site demands: "It's rare when students get to inform education policy decisions…Many decisions are made for us, and asking what we think is often an afterthought. The new Student Bill of Rights is working to change that. If student rights are to be truly authentic and learner-driven, those rights must come from students…." This site presents yet another cluster of rights. 

In every case, it's as if a bunch of Saul Alinskys got together and asked this question: How do we make students angry and thoroughly alienated from the process of being educated?

But what about the rights of students to have a really good education? Why are academic activities and goals hardly mentioned?

What's needed is a Bill of Rights that focuses on reasonable academic goals for all schools.

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A Bill of Rights for Students 2020

SINCE THE TIME OF SOCIALIST JOHN DEWEY, many schools have been obsessed with social engineering, and indifferent to what might be called intellectual or academic engineering. This mistake in emphasis needs to be corrected. The goal of education is not indoctrination but to take each child as far as each child can go. 

Only when children acquire knowledge and master essential skills can we speak of education that will make children college-and career-ready.

This BILL OF RIGHTS states the need for a knowledge-based classroom. Throughout most of human history, and in good schools everywhere today, this sort of education is the goal and the essence of what real educators seek to do. Given the many counterproductive ideas that sweep through education, given all the endless, murky debates conducted in our media, it is helpful for the American people to focus on what, at a minimum, young people are entitled to in our schools:

1. THE RIGHT TO LEARN TO READ All progress in education depends on literacy. It is imperative that children learn the alphabet and the sounds early, and that they are reading in the first grade.

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2. THE RIGHT TO MASTER BASIC ARITHMETIC As fads have undermined effective teaching for many decades, millions of children never learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. These are such basic skills--easy enough to teach, easy to test. If administrators don't ensure that all children can do these essential things, find other administrators.

3. THE RIGHT TO WRITE, IN BOTH SENSES One essential goal in the first years of schooling is to be able to write a small essay or a letter to grandmother, signed with a real signature. Cursive handwriting, according to many experts, is an indispensable assist in learning to read, write, and spell. 

4. THE RIGHT TO KNOW CORRECT SPELLING Very quickly children need to know that there is a right and wrong way to spell words, just as there are right and wrong ways to compose and punctuate sentences. Correctness and precision are birthrights that children are entitled to. Fuzziness and guessing are detrimental.

5. THE RIGHT TO GEOGRAPHY Children have a right to know the names of their city, state, and neighboring states. During the first eight years of school, one reasonable project is to learn the names of the 50 states. A parallel project is to learn the names of the 25 countries most often mentioned in the news. Without basic geography, children cannot understand history, literature, environmental science, current events, etc.  

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6. THE RIGHT TO LITERATURE Children need to experience the rich legacy of their own language--nursery rhymes, poetry, fairy tales, scenes from Shakespeare, popular songs, limericks, novels, anything that shows children what the cleverest people have done with English through the centuries. 

7. THE RIGHT TO HISTORY Children need a sense of history and time. They understand when people talk about Colonial Times, the Middle Ages, Greco-Roman Civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Ancient History. They should learn first about their own culture, and then the world. 

8. THE RIGHT TO SCIENCE Children need to know how the world works. What, for example, is snow? What is a moon? Kids should start learning General Science in their first years of school. This leads by easy steps to biology, chemistry, physics, math, etc. Studying the physical reality around us is the obvious introduction to scientific thinking and a systematic approach to solving problems. 

9. THE RIGHT TO MEMORIZATION Children have a right to know things in a permanent and intimate way, as they know the memories of their own life. A child learns facts, names, and dates, because all of these together make history, and all other subjects, more meaningful and three-dimensional.

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10. THE RIGHT TO REAL CRITICAL THINKING First, children learn the facts of history, science, etc, and then they learn to sift and analyze those facts. Additionally, they study Aesop's fables, famous quotes, and maxims. Critical thinking, independent thinking--these are possible only when children have knowledge and are able to reach new answers about it.

This manifesto has been in development for several years. A somewhat longer version can be found here: A Bill of Rights for Students 2020.

Please send to local schools with a note: This is what we want at a minimum.

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