The COVID-19 pandemic and the political response up-ended nearly every aspect of life. The pandemic blowback has spurred some to call for the eternal destruction of the tax-funded, government-run public school system. But the men of Right Angle see a new hope for actual education. Watch and add your ideas for education reform in the comments.
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35 replies on “Pandemic Blowback: Eternal Destruction of Public Schools or a New Hope for Actual Education?”
We have to be careful with making proclamations…the left is famous for advocating policies that achieve the opposite of what’s intended…We have to be careful not to do the same… Schools with “no windows” are for practical reasons. Modern schools are air conditioned and ‘windows’ allow too much heat in skyrocketing the A/C electricity costs. More windows may mean less textbooks…
Scott – two points on “everyone should have an IEP”
1 – back in the 70s and early 80s when I was in primary and high school, there were only two types of IEP. If you were delayed or advanced. The middle of the bell curve was left alone. This was the start of the so-called “gifted and talented” program. Where those who were on the right side of the curve got individualized attention similar to what those on the left side got. Unsurprisingly, that individual attention led to excellent results for both groups. Also, unsurprisingly those in the middle stayed there.
2 – Good teachers, even today, have an IEP for each of their kids. They may not fill out the forms and send them to a central office, but they work with the kids and parents and figure out how to teach each kid. I know this because my wife was one of those teachers. Just Friday, we bumped into a former student she hadn’t seen for several years. This young woman hugged my wife and then asked if she could call her to talk about some issues she was having.
Good teachers matter and make a difference. Unfortunately bad teachers make a difference, too.
Scott, have you been reading John Taylor Gatto?! 🙂 My experience parallels yours …and my dad went to the all ages in one room School house. THAT was the American School system before the Prussian system was jammed down our throats. As someone who worked his way through High School and paid for my College CASH, I applaud your ideas and pray we can blow this tyrannical system up and free our children’s minds and allow them to grow…at their own rate.!
Ownership? Don’t stop at the school systems. I have worked for the same large multi-national corporation for 45 years and there is no question the lack of ownership concept has migrated its way from the classroom to the board room. No one “owns” anything. I think the products we shove out today are similar to the output of any well established bureaucracy. Mediocre mush. This appears to be the natural devolution of business when mentoring, talent, aptitude and ability are replace by head counts and powerpoint pie charts. Ownership? Nah. Ownership might imply responsibility and we can’t have that.
One of the best “got you” moments, that has happened to me, involved teacher raises. A group of concerned citizens, not teachers, where passing around a petition to support teacher raises through increased taxes. While listening to their information, I asked one simple question, “How much are the teachers getting paid right now?”. The total blank stare, does not compute, deer in the headlights look, was priceless. These people where blindly putting forth, their time and effort for something, they had not idea about. They could not even tell me ballpark figures for these, poor overworked teachers salaries/benefits. I asked them if they knew where the teachers lived in their town? Then pointed out these “poor” teachers where living in much nicer neighborhoods and homes, than the vast majority of the town. I asked them if they could afford to live in these areas, and got some wheels slowly turning in their heads.
P.S. We turned to homeschooling our children after a very short time with public schools. Kids all turned out much better equipped for real world success.
Love that question. I can picture the “Norman, coordinate” moment going on in their heads.
I didn’t know ANYONE else knew about The Day of the Triffids!!! It took three nights for me, my sister and two cousins to make it thru!!
I had the same experience with Trig I felt like I walked in half way through the movie.
Steve, you are totally right about including more vocational training in high schools. One of the things I hated the most about my own high school experience — and that was 40+ years ago — was the disdain, if not outright bigotry toward the kids who were headed toward building trades and similar things. The clear message was that they were lesser beings than those of us who bore the label “college bound”. I wish I could have taken those courses instead of being shoved into the 4-year college racket.
Thinking about something all three said about variable speed schooling, maybe a college style picking of classes and not locked into grades approach would work. There could be both compressed classes for those that are good at (but maybe not interested in) certain subjects that could be only a quarter long, and semester long classes for people not as comfortable with the material.
Along with vo-tech type classes, something teaching minor home repair and handy skills for anything mechanical, and also descriptions of what to leave to the pros vs “trying” yourself, skills useful for people whether in an apartment or solo house. Practical things that, say the people in Texas without power and a lot of snow, would have found handy.
With little nature in cities, the robotics and makerspace projects that let kids work on and build things are good for hands on and practical learning. Some cities are taking empty plots and making them into gardens and green spaces (a triple win, make the Enviro’s happy, the farm to table cheap fresh food people happy, and get kids outside and learning where food comes from).
To Bill’s last point about the teachers not being responsible for the box going out the door, if the parents are not involved there is only so much that can be done. That should mean that a kid just doesn’t graduate, instead of not attending half of the year, not being able to read, and still graduating in the top quarter of the class. In the one room school house days, even if the parents were not schooled, they were not required to send their kids to school or face CPS officers, they sent the kids because they wanted them educated, and if the teacher said Johnny was falling behind, the parents got after Johnny if he was slacking or got him help if he was struggling.
Excellent discussion! I remember hearing the president of the NEA back in the late 1970’s tell an interviewer that his responsibility was for the promotion and salaries of the teachers that belonged to his union. He was not responsible, nor was the NEA, for advancing the education of students. My wife and I decided after hearing that interview that we would make whatever sacrifice we needed to make to send out children to private schools. We also put aside money for them to pay for college. The one proviso for funding their college was that their degree had to result in a profession, not just something to do. As a result, both of my kids are successful in their careers, and left college with no student debt. I believe that is the responsibility of every parent. Those who allow their kids to accumulate the tremendous debt that goes with a college education these days are irresponsible. And my wife and I should not have to pay for their bad decisions.
Your approach to your kids’ college funding makes sense — provided that kids know what career they want, and that it’s a career for which there’s a reasonable demand. What doesn’t make sense is sending a child off to college to take any old thing, out of some fear that s/he will a failure without a BA nor BS degree. (Which is what happened to me).
That is why it is so important for parents to spend time teaching, coaching, counselling their kids. And spend time appreciating the gifts from God that parents have been entrusted with. We only get our kids for a short period of years, and then they are off on their own, hopefully living the principles that you, as a parent, have engrained in them. Kids are like sponges – they soak up lessons from just watching what you do. I love watching young sons walking with their dads or grandads and noticing that they even walk just like their dad or grandad. Their gestures and how they treat things are learned like that, too. They learn how to treat their spouse based on how we treat each other. And they learn their value to their parents by how their parents treat them. I certainly wasn’t a perfect parent, but I sure love seeing what my kids are like as parents to their kids, my grandkids. It’s then that I realize that my wife and I did pretty darned good as parents.
I learned English and Hebrew from kindergarten through to grade 12 ( and learned all the same topics… history geography, literature and grammar in both languages except for science and math in English and bible studies in Hebrew) then adding French from grade 4 and Latin in Junior High with an option for more in high school… then I chose Russian in grade 10 but switched to Theatre arts in grade 11… and we had home economics … and the boys had shop (which really pissed me off at the time)… but I did learn to sew and set a table properly…
I made sure that my kids and now my grandchildren would at least be bi-lingual… and my Canadian branch are now adding French to the mix…
When I had to send my kids to school I had a tough time dealing with that reach for average attitude that public school turned out to be.. I had to find an alternative and did for a few years but at a certain point had no other options… my eldest chose to go to a different high school and ended up at the American International school which was a revelation for me… It had small classes and amazing teachers who really cared about the kids and their progress… I loved it… and so did she…
I wish schools would put more emphasis on languages. I had the good fortune of being offered full-year, seven day a week Spanish classes beginning in 7th grade. I loved it so much that I continued with it through 12th grade. I would have taken French, too, if I only there had been time in my schedule.
I agree… and the younger the better…
At 65 years old, this discussion on how to educate our youth brought tears to my eyes in how much it has regressed to a level of mediocrity and mind controll. Think the song, “Just Another Brick In The Wall.”
You want to solve the schooling problem? Get the government OUT of the system, and learn what the Puritan’s original plans on education for America was. Watch my friends film “Monumental: In Search of America’s National Treasure”
Oh the Horror! Teachers actually taking responsibility for their students?
The starting illustration put me off completely. Mealworms on an apple? It’s like helicopter rotor on a Boeing 737.
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just out of curiosity tried google on “apple worm” pictures. OMG. Then tried to refine with “Real”. over 95% are photoshop nensense or illustration. Guess searching for real cows would provide most of them lilac. I thought the fake news service only roams with ties to politics. 😮
Public employee unions must be abolished and the first in line should be the teachers unions. Whenever the teachers unions say it “for the kids” you can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t.
Scotts version of an ideal education for our children will not happen until we replace the authority that does not want to improve the minds of the children. The goal of todays authority is to imprison the minds of the children to make them obedient puppets to authority. Bill is correct in describing such as ‘evil’.
The “sick” apple pic reminded me of the old joke: “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? Half a worm!” My wife and I home educated our kids *before* it was cool. We got tired of having to “unlearn” our kids the bad examples and emphasis … we need to be careful not to distance the teachers who truly care for kids, and sacrifice for them. In Virginia we don’t have teacher’s unions but unfortunately the NEA ( the MSM of teaching) constantly gives a false spin to make teachers feel compelled to support the awful garbage the large unions push.
Benjamin – Virginia does indeed have teachers’ unions. However, you do not have to join the union in order to teach; this being a right-to-work state )for now). Outside of Northern VA / Tidewater and Richmond, the union (VEA) is largely absent.
Those teachers who care (my wife was one for more than 3 decades) would actually welcome not having to incorporate the indoctrination into the learning experience.
I didn’t know. Thanks for the update. Out my way the VEA must be weak.
What part of the state are you in? We are in the SW (Rke, Bburg) area. Very week union, especially compared with the NYC area where I grew up.
Same area. I’m in Giles, but know a lot of teachers in Montgomery.
My brother in law is from Giles and my sister in law is a teacher in bburg.
This is the one thing I think today’s trade unions could do to actually be useful again. Get kids that don’t want to be in school and get them with a group of grownups to teach them a trade AND how to be adults at the same time. The important part is to give kids chances at success.
Little successes lead to big successes. Once a young person learns how to change the oil in a car or wire an electrical outlet, that’s a WIN. Showing proficiency in practical skills will teach not only how to do a job but will teach SUCCESS. Once kids learn they can be successful at something then they can start tackling those previous points of failure, such as Math, or English. Unions could offer tutoring, too.
Forcing kids into a college track when they are not ready just teaches failure.
This doesn’t have to be done by unions but I’m trying to think of a way to turn a very conservative group of hardworking people away from the socialist ideology that has infected them for so long and get kids out of the socialist ideology of the public school. I know not everyone likes unions (I was in one for 10 years) but I think something like this would help reform the unions by reminding the members about hard work as they teach that principle to young apprentices.
I attended a one-room school spanning grades 5-8 when I was a child. Mrs. Brockman was our giant of a teacher standing at 4 feet plus 1 inch tall. It was the best learning environment of my entire life, which has included many years of college education at multiple post secondary institutions. In spite of my innate rebelliousness, that diminutive woman managed to encourgage me to excel in the core subjects of reading, writing and arithmetic, and my academic success can be traced back to that small seed of encouragement. God bless Mrs. Brockman; may she rest in peace.
I rather like the Reagan Solution. It worked well with the flight controllers. Go to work or you’re fired. Not happy with some of the crap they are teaching, but that ‘s a conversation for another time. Go to work like the rest of us want to.
not sure todays’ young women have that ‘sense of ownership’ and i would say dedication to the advancement of the human genome, that they did when on the prairies of old. now it’s all about abortion rights, title nine gotcha opportunities and equal outcomes over equal opportunities to enhance the lives of girls/women.
For those still on the fence about getting the “vaccine,” please watch this first.
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/hfzL5gUeQvxr/?fbclid=IwAR3tcnb6yveUur67Saxv3WNuQdgTNGy-W-_SlZ4yiIU_k7bbSDfKLDTQaHc
on the surface a ‘trade track’ sounds like an excellent idea but seeing as 93% of teachers (and admin to be honest) are feminist hate filled man haters i doubt you would see much support for something that would almost certainly appeal to boys more than girls. that’s just not the new world order anymore stephen.
but that’s just me.
I think if there was a purge of the useless and a replacement of the competent a trade track would be more easily done. Someone could just pull a list of all of the females convicted of child sex abuse to quiet some of the man haters and open the doors for some male teachers. Female vo-tech teachers and engineering types should be available too, and women wanting to teach other girls they can get into a variety of professions would be strong cheerleaders for the project.