When it comes to achieving genuine education reform, conservatives live in a fog regarding what it takes to win in the political arena. Here is my favorite writer on education issues, Bruce Deitrick Price:
K-12 should be a boot camp. Students become knowledgeable, resourceful, independent, able to navigate successfully through life.
Instead, our public schools prepare children to be incompetent or, even worse, frightened snowflakes. Typically, students learn little. They are kept in a bubble of low expectations.
Martin Luther King summed it up: “Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” What an odd outcome. Many of our students end up with neither intelligence nor character.
While the decline in academics is obvious, there is a more subtle sort of decline. Instead of precision, students learn that vagueness and wrong answers are acceptable. Instead of interesting challenges, students become accustomed to gimme questions and permissive grading. Instead of trying harder, students learn to cut corners. It’s almost as if the Education Establishment wants to create mediocre students and incapable adults.
Keen Babbage, a Kentucky teacher, wrote a book explaining his conclusions after 30 years:
I just think we have done our students a real disservice by making school way too easy. Students are less willing to read, to study, to do homework, to behave, to follow rules, to be polite, so we are told to make adjustments and be sure that every student feels good about himself or herself. Well, a student who refuses to learn and who uses awful language and never works should not feel good about any of that[.] … I think schools got sidetracked with some misguided social engineering or political correctness or bad psychology. I’m for hard work and strict rules because those work. I think we owe our students the truth and we owe them honesty. Life requires hard work and obeying rules.
Children are in school about 1,000 hours each year. A great deal could be accomplished during all those hours. Instead, K-12 classrooms seem to be incoherent, anxiety-filled, and finally unproductive. Schools can’t be bothered to teach practical wisdom, and not just the obvious wisdom of who Napoleon is and where Japan is. Children are often deprived of commonsense preparation for resourceful living. For example, do they learn how many quarts are in a gallon? What MPH is and what a cc is? What is a moon? Are they learning to read charts, maps, and blueprints?
Read more: American Thinker
