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"Public-Edu" Fiddled While No'ne Learned...Oct 13 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Bureaucracy fostered illiteracy is unacceptable. Though a child's education begins at home, parents should not be forced to "homeschool" children to insure they receive a proper education. INTRODUCTION Due to the failure of "Public-Edu," a.k.a., "the public education system" to properly educate our children, more consumers, convinced that the education they can provide their children is better than no education at all, have turned to homeschooling. Rather than restrict this discussion to "What should you know about homeschooling?," I thought it might be more useful to shift the question to address the issue in a slightly broader context: "What should you know about home education." Framing the question in this manner provides a useful opportunity to consider beginning and continuing a child's education at home to augment an education system mired in bureaucracy, and which has little impetus to reform because it holds a virtual monopoly on the education of American youth. The appallingly high (and growing) illiteracy rate of graduating students is due, more than people realize, to our failure to encourage reading and learning at home. Though it may begin at home, our flawed education system's thoughtless reliance on unenlightened “teaching” methods and the pall of bureaucracy-entrenched antipathy that enables their continued viability, insure years of illiteracy to come, unless we take affirmative and intelligent steps to reform it. MOVING PROGRESSIVELY BACKWARDS INTO THE FUTURE... When enough taxpayer-financed, "backwards-taken" steps to "improve literacy" cause enough people to start asking why their "educated" children are unable to read the very diplomas they receive at graduation, perhaps the demand for answers will take on a collective public voice that becomes so loud that even the politicians and legislature are no longer able to ignore it. Speaking from traumatic, personal experience, the only thing that "fact-memorizing" does, is teach children that learning is an unpleasant, bitter and objectionable activity; that teachers are the enemy and "reading, writing and 'rithmetic" are the "weapons of virtue" by which teachers inflict scholastic suffering. Why must the proverbial "sins of the fathers" be visited on their innocent, information-era sons & daughters? I'm sorry, but "fear of change" is not an acceptable answer; nor was it ever... Change happens whether we mark its inevitable arrival on our calendars, or put on our blinders hoping to avoid what many perceive as the unpleasantness of the unknown. Principles, on the other hand, remain static and eternal. TO TEACH AND TO DELIGHT Aristotle; a pretty shrewd Classical Greek fella, whose distinguished resumé included an extended stint as the personal teacher and trainer of no less a personage than world-conquering Alexander the Great, seemed to think that the proper method for effectively and successfully educating is "aut prodesse aut delectare" ("to teach and to delight.") If a child discovers learning is entertaining, his positive experience motivates him to want to learn more, and more importantly, to learn because HE seeks understanding; not because he understands he'll get his ass beat if he doesn't. PASSING THE TORCH This is where you come in, parent/sibling/guardian. Is it really such a tough thing for you to kindle junior’s curiosity" by reading to him a few times a week? I used to do my part to keep the Homeric tradition sacred, by reciting heroic tales taken from Greek epics, like "The Iliad" and tales of the Round Table knights, borrowed from Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur," to my brother Chris. I would abruptly cut off my narratives at crucial, "do-or-die" moments in the action, then tell him where he could find the story's source if he wanted to read what happened. You want to see how fast someone can "index a library?" Bring Junior to the verge of tears telling him about Apollo's ignominious slaying of Patroclus' after the latter and his Myrmidons "singlehandedly" saved the Argives from being driven into the sea by the Trojans. Then, as you abruptly cut the story off, ask him: "Jeeeez! Can you imagine what Achilles wants to do to Hector's face when he gets wind of the shameful way Hector abused Patroclus' corpse?," or some such exclamation, and your missionary work here is done. Needless to say, this works for Juniorette too; just be sure to adapt your literature choices accordingly. It wasn't long before Chris had read all of my classics, ...and without the need of any prompting. Problem was, he'd still want me to continue reciting them to him anyway... . A CONFLAGRATION OF HEARTBURN-GENERATING METAPHORS If you're interested or passionate about some subject, that's the one YOU use to stimulate a child's (or an adult's) curiosity. Passion is contagious; the subject irrelevant. Passion is the lingua franca of person-to-person communication. Your passion and enthusiasm about whatever it is that stokes your coals, will provide the spark that ignites the fiery, motivating passion that lies dormant in Junior's soul. Once his passion has been lit, all you have to do is make sure the appropriate literary fuel remains available, and in large supply. As with any fire, passion waxes and wanes; the more fuel it has, the more it wants; the more it consumes, the brighter it luminesces. Maintain the flame well enough, and before long you can tend to other matters without having to worry (at least for a while) about the flame dying out. If you've got other little passion-bonfires waiting to happen, just point your original passion-conflagration in their direction and watch the pyrotechnics. A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION: “ACTUAL LEARNING” VS. “EDUCATION SYSTEM CONDITIONING” It’s amazing how quickly the current education system makes soggy ashes of your enthusiastically glowing little brood of bonfires. For your edification, we’ve located a high-level public school official who we’ve provided with some of the pertinent background info on your children. Based on same, he’ll be providing you with a brief description of what you and your children can expect once they’ve been registered for public school: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE; " ADMINISTRATOR #6554321:" “Based on what we’ve learned about your children’s high individuality levels, I’m afraid they may have a rough time of it here in public school. When the Ed System Mediocrity Machine’s individuality-scanners pick up the unusually high electromagnetic energy levels being emitted by your children’s relatively dynamic personalities, the faculty admin will have to separate them from the fold as quickly as possible, lest their spirited attitudes contaminate the conditioned complacency of the rest of the flock, or otherwise, raise its morale to dangerously high levels. I see from their profiles that they are :::AHEM:::‘self-motivated’ ‘independent-thinking’ and ‘innovative.’ Simply APPALLING! We don’t care what phrases you want to use for those qualities, but here in the public education system, we call them ‘disobedient,’ ‘insubordinate’ and ‘unable to follow directions,’ respectively. It’s clear to me your discipline-needy children will have to be herded up to the Individuality-Sterilization Lab for a thorough spirit-dismantling, a preliminary Personality-Purification bath followed by a Bureaucracy Brain-Melt, an initial Red-Tape Desensitization, some basic indifference therapy and further uniformity processing. At this point, if all goes well, the drones you used to call your children, will commence their 52-week Assimilation into the E.S.M.C. (i.e., the Education System Mediocrity Collective.) Afterwards, they’ll be assigned identification numbers, which will be used as a replacement for their names. Assimilation is going to be particularly painful in the cases of your children because you’ve trained them to think for themselves. There’s a chance we may not be able to fix them at all, in which case, we’ll have to brand them as permanent troublemakers and outcasts. Once this occurs, society will be able to see that they’re “different,” and will finish our work for us. Please understand... it’s for the good of society. THE UNDERLYING DYNAMIC As the population grows larger, economy of scale and the pursuit of time, money and resource-preserving efficiency make uniformity and predictability more valuable commodities. The pursuit of efficiency demands that we replace names with numbers, handshakes with contracts, personal contact with automated responses, etc.. In sum, bureaucracy fills in for humanity. It might, at first blush, appear that bureaucracy is an unavoidable evil if governments, corporate boards and administrative bodies are to be able to accommodate the needs of an ever-growing world population. Maybe, to some degree, for some interim time period, this is so. However, this belief is false and misleading. It acknowledges “size,” but fails to take “proportion” into account. When groups or numerical increments of any given item become too large, you simply break them down into smaller groups that proportionately mirror the numeric ratio of the elements that compose the larger group. This effectively eliminates the specious, if expedient argument that red tape and bureaucracy are necessary-evil by-products of imposing order and organization on an ever-growing world population. Ironically, it is the very resource that has become synonymous with “red tape;” the computer, that prevents growing numbers ad infinitum from ever becoming a bar to maintaining proportionate accuracy and efficiency. Nonetheless, there remains one constant in our human psychological make-up that IS, and will always be a bar to individuality and personal interaction. The human ego. The irrepressible desire to control. At the heart of any and all unnecessary bureacracy and red tape (and it is theoretically, ALL unnecessary) lies one individual’s or institution’s ego-driven desire to control and dominate a proportionately larger group than is either desirable or necessary. HOW BUREAUCRACY AND RED TAPE ARE USED TO INFECT SOCIETY WITH ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM PROPAGANDA The way this blight manifests itself in the education system, is by making schools anti-individuality conditioning factories; generic hubs of anti-originality and anti-variety propaganda. Pupils aren’t educated, so much as they are socially-conditioned to quietly fit in so they don’t stand out and expose themselves to the eminent probability that they will be DRUMMED out or ostracized as a consequence. The very “rugged individualism” that enabled the democracy that enabled the “free” societies and public schools which advocate and instill this humanity-destructive “order-keeping” principle, is shunned, abhorred and routed out in the name of “order.” Does anybody ever bother to ask: “WHO’s order?!” “WHO’s uniformity?” WHO’s prototype or matrix is being used as a model for this alleged order?” WHY is it always the innovater who dropped out of high school or who never had any formal education who establishes and founds the corporations and organizations that run, and thereby rule the world? Could it be that public schools are only schools in name, but in actuality, are human-livestock conditioning outposts being purse string-manipulated by a government whose primary interest is in propagating itself, its ideology and keeping the machine running without any squeaky wheels so as to accomplish the first two? I believe the unwritten primary goal of education is to teach students how to think for themselves. It is NOT to socially-condition and spirit-break our offspring into mindless, dreamless, obedient work drones, because if it is, then having a “civilized society” comes at too high a cost. The goal of public education should be to open minds; not close them. It’s to spark interest; not to disenchant and cause apathy. It’s to encourage leadership and build character; not to shun people for individuality and discourage the willingness to take creative risks. Yet initiative is discouraged; fitting in and avoiding “rocking the boat” are applauded. Rather than teaching a student to think for himself, our schools preoccupy themselves conditioning students to memorize useless facts “by rote,” so that they might be regurgitated once or twice for tests, then subsequently forgotten. All I learned in school was how to usurp classroom control from oppressive, unworthy authority figures and how to use the system to beat the system. Unfortunately, those were courses I taught myself; learned “in spite of” teachers, admin and bureaucrats, not “because of them.” Any genuinely positive and meaningful reform we hope to achieve in education must embrace the idea of reforming antiquated, unenlightened 20th Century "parakeet conditioning sessions" by refurbishing them with the enlightened ideals and principles touted by classical scholars and our own common sense. If you and I appreciate the intrinsic value of providing children with a positive learning experience, why don't our bureaucrats? What are my qualifications, if any, for writing this article? Well, for what it’s worth, when I got out of college, I got my teaching certification and worked as a substitute teacher while waiting to start law school. I speak from my direct experience in that capacity. Regardless, you don’t have to be a teacher to recognize illiteracy, or that kids aren’t being challenged or stimulated. Many of the pupils in my classes were there as human placeholders; bodies annually promoted upwards to the succeeding grade, not through scholastic merit or achievement, but simply to guarantee that the school admin maintained its federal government $ subsidy-insuring numbers. Recently, a state-wide survey of public school students taking the California legislature-mandated “EXIT Exam” (i.e., a minimum English/Math competency level test, the passage of which will be required to graduate high school as of 2004,) revealed that 76% (76%!!) failed the minimum math level requirement test and 56% failed the minimum English level requirement test. I call this an example of “bureacratic roosters coming home to roost.” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ AN IRRELEVANT-SEEMING RELEVANT ANECDOTE When Los Angeles teachers went on strike, I thumbed my nose at a collectivist, money-stealing, political agenda-motivated organization called a “labor union” and was given a 12th grade Creative Writing class of “problem students” for about three weeks. The experience was quite an epiphany. Since I was not that much older than the students, looked the same age, and had built a part of my notorious high school legacy upon the scalps of substitute teachers I had sentenced to death, I had no illusions about the ugliness I was up against. I knew I’d have to immediately formulate and execute some risky powerplay in order to seize control of the class and thereby postpone my inevitable, substitute teacher-torturing penance for a few years. I singled out the most malignant-looking example of juvenile deliquency-run-amok (the apparent leader) from my target-rich selection pool and loudly offered him control of the class. He and the rest of the heretofore noisy class froze in stunned and silent disbelief. I’m six feet tall. This black leather-clad gorilla stood up at about six-two or six-three. Perfect. I would need all the drama and imagination-appeal I could muster. Unbeknownst to anyone but my friends, my family and my previous victims, I am undefeated (lifetime) at arm-wrestling (i.e., right-handed arm-wrestling; I’ve lost about 2 or 3 times "lefty.") I told him it was my policy to first attempt to establish a mutually-agreeable alliance with my rivals before I wasted such a potentially valuable resource by rubbing them out. It was clear I had his rapt, amazed attention. Adjusting to the eerie, almost echoey silence that now suffused the room, I made my pitch: "It looks like both of us want to rule this classroom, but I don’t believe in sharing what’s mine. My guess is you feel about the same. Yes?" He nodded his assent. "You look like a big, tough viking-- You probably outweigh me by 25 or 30 pounds; how ‘bout we arm-wrestle for undisputed control of the class?" His beady eyes lit up. "You beat me and I’ll take your desk, you get mine, and the class is yours to do with what you’d like. You have my word." Whoops and hollars of "yeah!" erupted from the intensely attentive class. "UNH, UNH, UNH... Not so fast... You haven’t heard the rest of it. If you lose, you become my bouncer. If someone gets out of line, I don’t want to have to mess up my pretty clothes showing them the error of their ways. I look at you; I point at them, you fix the problem, --no 'if's and's or but's.' Do I have your word?" He considered this for a second and then shook my hand in agreement. The class gathered around my wooden teacher's desk, and gorilla and I put our arms up against each other’s arm, then clasped hands. Another student prompted: "GO!" I waited a second, letting gorilla get the jump, so that there could be no "you got the jump on me" excuses offered afterwards (seasoned arm wrestlers understand the advantage a fast start gives one or the other of two evenly-matched opponents.) After a second or two, when I heard him start huffing and puffing, I looked at him with my best macho-idiot, Clint Eastwood-gone-schoolmarm expression, and with overdone sang-froid, warned him: "Don’t be surprised, but I want you to be forewarned of the force with which I’m now going to pile-drive the back of your hand into my desk, so I’m going to do it on a three-count, okay?" I didn’t wait for his response-grunt. "Three... two... one... *BOOM!*. I pile-drove his knuckles into my desk with a very dramatic "thud!" "You wanna go again... my new bouncer?" He smiled sheepishly and shook his head "no." The class was indisputably mine. Though I had expected more "experimenters" to attempt to "call my bluff," I only had to "point to a problem” for gorilla one time before my class realized I was not bluffing. Word quickly spread to, among others, the students in my other periods. Not only did I have perfect attendance in my subsequent classes, but I apparently had several extra bodies who weren’t on my roster, as well. I made it clear to them I did not believe in assigning “...busy work; I was way too over-educated to make a competent babysitter.” Class time was strictly devoted to dialect related to reading assignments. They’d ask me to tell them the relevance of some particular book’s theme or another, and class dialogue would often center around that. In the coming days, I discovered within the ranks of my six daily groups of “misfits” “rogues” and “bad-asses,” some of the most passionate, interested, involved, promising, engaging and learning-desirous young adults I had ever encountered. After three very rewarding weeks, I had begun to formulate many of the ideas you read herein. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SOME LINGERING QUESTIONS & CONCLUDING THOUGHTS... Did one of these students go on to write my experience down, then submit it to martial arts expert and movie star Chuck Norris, the star and producer of the currently-running television show, "Walker, Texas Ranger?" Well, based on the fact that everything I wrote in my anecdote actually DID happen to me as I wrote it, coupled with the fact that I recently saw it portrayed on Norris's TV show, event-for-event, as it happened to me, I would have to say "yes." Is there a "lesson" to be learned by this? I think so. How about that kids learn not only from what you say, but perhaps even more from what you do and how you act? My teaching experience indicates to me that students absolutely ARE interested in reading and learning, but we've got to be enthusiastic about teaching and interacting with them. You don't "condition" children, as if they're some sort of circus animal, or else this is exactly what you can expect them to become. With regard to getting them to read books, try giving them books YOU were/are passionate about; what you say about a book to them isn't NEARLY as important as how they perceive you to feel about the books you try to sell them on. Illiteracy starts at home; the problem only becomes APPARENT at school, making education quality seem like its sole cause, but if parents were doing their job, "quality of education" wouldn't be the issue it currently has become; perhaps not even an issue at all. Oh sure, every possible bureaucratic institution that might bear some measure of the responsibility has its red tape-farting ass covered, but then again, that’s the beauty of bureaucracy: you can always point the finger of blame and shirked-responsibility somewhere else. Where there no responsibility is taken, there no achievement will be gotten. In the end, this lovely forcefield of blame-neutrality from behind which bureaucrats rape and rob taxpayers, while materially and permanently compromising the futures of education-deprived students, does not shield us from the ultimate responsibility of allowing it to happen... or to continue happening. “They’ve got the guns, but we’ve got the numbers.” Ultimately, it’s up to us to insure that our progeny learn how to think for themselves. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This was a long one. If you've made it this far without skimming, thanks very much for taking the time and effort to read my op. If you did skim, I understand why you would and don't blame you; just try not to be too hard on your kids when they do it. Cheers & Thanks For The Read, --29th  |
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