The right point at which to leave varies enormously from person to person. So does the time to come back, as millions do.
This is ultimately a very individual decision, if we are thinking about either the wellbeing of the students or the wellbeing of society. But if we are thinking about children in school as meal tickets for the education establishment—which is often paid on the basis of “average daily attendance”—then the way to maximize that money is to hold as many kids hostage as long as possible and demonize the word “dropout.”
When mere rhetoric and repetition are not enough, the education establishment points to the fact that high school graduates earn more money than dropouts, and college graduates earn still more. But one of the first things you learn in Statistics 1 is that correlation is not causation. Unfortunately, it is also one of the first things that many people forget.
The youngsters who drop out of high school are different from those who graduate. Keeping everybody in high school to the bitter end will not change this difference in people, just as joining a basketball team will not make you any taller, even though statistics show that basketball players are usually taller than other people.
Most people who drop out of high school resume their education at some later point, either to complete high school or learn a trade or get admitted to college without a high school diploma (like yours truly). These individuals and their incomes are not counted in statistics about the earnings of high school dropouts.
Given the incredible amounts of time that are wasted on non-academic “activities” and “projects” in most public schools, the 12 years it currently takes to complete high school could easily be reduced to 8 years, if not 6, just by getting the junk out of the curriculum and doing some serious teaching of math, English and other basic skills.
This would lessen the burden and the boredom, enabling many more youngsters to complete their elementary and secondary education. It would also rid the school of the negative and disruptive influence of those students who have no interest in what the school is doing. It would also reduce the pressures to dumb down everyone's education, in hopes of getting the disinterested to stay on for the sake of appearances and fun activities.
It would also shorten the time that youngsters spend in an adolescent subculture and begin sooner the process of their joining the adult world, where they can learn from people who have a lot more experience and maturity than they or their peers have. It might be possible to debate all these various considerations from the standpoint of what is best for the individual and the society. But none of that really matters to the educational establishment.
Their jobs depend on having a large captive audience, and the self-interest of “educators” is served by extending the period of students' incarceration—starting earlier in kindergarten and preschool, and including summer school for all. There will never be a lack of high-sounding excuses for these exercises in promoting the self-interest of teachers unions and educational bureaucrats.
Only if more parents and voters start looking beyond the rhetoric and spin is the present bad situation likely to change. But have their own years of dumbed-down education made that unlikely?
SCHOOL TO SCHOOL?
One of the problems of getting old is that you miss out on so many of the exciting new things that young people enjoy. Often this is because what is new to them is something that has been tried again and again in the past—and has turned out to be a bummer again and again.
One of the many idiotic ideas that reappears in our public schools in new verbal guises is the idea that the school should be preparing young people for the world of work. Since every old idea has to have a new name, this is now called the “school-to-work” program, sponsored by the federal government and spending billions of tax dollars.
This used to be called “vocational guidance” and the idea goes back at least 90 years, when the gurus of so-called progressive education said that schools spent too much time on academic subjects and not enough time on “practical” things that would be “relevant” to the kind of work and life that students would go into after finishing school.
In the latest reincarnation of vocational guidance as school-to-work programs, 8th graders are given tests to determine what kinds of jobs they are supposedly suited for and they are asked to make career choices. Such choices are premature by at least a decade. Some of the best liberal arts colleges allow—and encourage—their students to take two years of general education in college before deciding what subject to major in.
Such choices are too serious to make without some solid basis. You may be fascinated by chemistry experiments in high school, but that is very different from saying that you can master the difficult analytical skills required for majoring in chemistry in college. Every college has students who enroll in pre-med programs and end up majoring in sociology.
What did you really know about careers when you were in the 8th grade? I didn't even know what an economist was and had never heard of a think tank, such as the Hoover Institution, where I have worked for 20 years. Nor is it at all realistic to expect school teachers to have any such encyclopedic knowledge of the thousands of occupations out there today, much less what the trends are for various fields in the years ahead, when these 8th graders will be working adults.
When meteorologists have trouble predicting the weather five days ahead and financial experts can get clobbered in the stock market, what in the world would lead anybody to seriously expect school teachers to predict the world in which their 8th graders will be living, decades from now? The high rates of obsolescence of jobs and skills doom any such efforts.
In an age when “educators” seem to be constantly trying to find things to do instead of educating, school-to-work is just another of those irresponsible self-indulgences which create the illusion that they are doing something useful, when in fact they are wasting precious time and spreading confusion among the young.
It is worse than that. School-to-work programs are also indoctrination programs for politically correct views about careers. They test for attitudes as well as aptitudes. Once you start playing little tin god, micro-managing other people's lives, it is hard to know where to stop. In reality, the place to stop is before you begin.
School is not a place for make-believe practicality. Schools need to do what they have a special advantage and a special time for doing—conveying to the young the basic skills that they are going to need, irrespective of the particular jobs they may have, which no one can predict anyway.
More important, people need to be educated as citizens and as human beings. For that, they need to be able to draw upon the wisdom of the ages—whether expressed in mathematics, science, history or literature—not the fads of the moment.
Employers are not demanding that job applicants show up knowing all about the work on the first day. But they need people who can read well enough to understand written instructions—and many employers complain that the schools are not supplying that.
Some employers are hiring engineers from India and Russia, not because they are better engineers, but because they have been taught the English language better than many Americans.
What we really need is a school-to-school program, not programs in which schools pretend to be what they cannot possibly be.
THE WAR AGAINST BOYS
The old saying, “Boys will be boys,” has long since become obsolete in schools across the length and breadth of this country. Unknown to most parents, there are federally-financed programs to prevent boys from acting the way boys have always acted before.
The things done by those who have taken on the role of changing boys range from forbidding them from running and jumping during recess to having them wear dresses and pretend to be girls or women in the classroom.
Whatever the particular mix of things done at a particular school, it is accompanied by a barrage of propaganda prepared by radical feminists for nationwide distribution with the blessing—and the money�
�of the U.S. Department of Education.
The people who are doing this see their role as changing your children into the kinds of people they want them to be—not the kind of people you want them to be. Parents who somehow learn what is going on in school and object are told that “studies prove” that this is the right thing to do, that “specialists” and “experts” know more about this than parents can possibly know.
A newly published book titled The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers not only reveals what these brainwashing programs are doing, it also shows that the so-called “studies” on which these programs are based are either hopelessly inadequate or just plain non-existent. Christina Hoff Sommers is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and she not only sees through the fraudulent claims of the radical feminists, she is familiar with real studies—both here and overseas—which show the direct opposite of what the brainwashers claim.
The people who are promoting the anti-male agenda are experts at nothing except manipulating the media and snowing gullible educators, who are more interested in puffing themselves up as “agents of social change” than in teaching children. Boys in elementary school, or even kindergarten, have been punished for being politically incorrect toward girls.
One nine-year-old boy who reached for a piece of fruit in a school lunch line and accidentally brushed against a girl was arrested, hand-cuffed and fingerprinted for sexual harassment, even though the charges later had to be dropped. A boy of three was punished in school for hugging another child. The feminist dogma is that such things are precursors of wife-beating, rape and other crimes of men against women—and so must be nipped in the bud.
According to these propagandists, 4 million American women are beaten to death by men every year. That is four times as many American women as die from all causes put together. The actual number of women killed by men is less than one percent of what was claimed.
However inaccurate and irresponsible the propaganda, it is very effective in creating the kind of paranoia that gets brainwashing programs and draconian punishment of boys into the schools. Staggering as it is to realize that schools are using materials and creating rules based on sheer dogma and outright lies, the tragic fact is that such tactics have been common in totalitarian countries throughout this century. What is uncommon is their pervasiveness in America over the past generation.
Radical feminists apply the old Hitler-Goebbels doctrine that the people will believe any lie, if it is big enough and told often enough and loud enough. Intimidation and retribution against all who dare to disagree is likewise as much a part of the new agenda as it was in the old totalitarian regimes.
The War Against Boys shows where the propagandists have gotten their facts wrong—where they have any facts at all. But the brainwashers' goals are not accuracy but power. In those terms, they have been an incredible success. They are no more interested in facts than any other power-seekers. Did Hitler study genetics?
Christina Hoff Sommers writes not only as a scholar but as the mother of two boys. Her book is must-reading, not only for parents of boys in school, but for all parents, and should inform any responsible citizen and voter who is concerned about American education.
Tragically, radical feminists are just one of many reckless zealots who have turned our schools into ideological indoctrination centers, instead of places for children to get an education in basic skills. One of the reasons American children do so badly in international tests of academic skills is that our schools are preoccupied with politically correct social crusades.
“RESEARCH” MARCHES ON
If you have tears, prepare to shed them. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Professor Janet Wright of Dickinson College has only the summer available to do research on wood rats.
Apparently she is concerned that wood rats are disappearing from Pennsylvania and other states for reasons that no one has yet figured out.
When Professor Wright figures it out, there will undoubtedly be an article in some academic journal, which a few people here and there may actually read.
The plight of Professor Wright is only one of a number of personal stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education about professors at liberal arts college who are kept so busy teaching during the academic year that the summer is the only time they have available to do their research.
Another whose plight we are presumably supposed to empathize with is a Professor Elmaz Abinader of Mills College who is “writing a three-part performance piece” about the women in her family. It is not clear how a “performance piece” differs from a play or whether this is one of those fine distinctions that keep academic minds occupied.
Professor Michael Womack, a biologist at Macon State College, is out counting mosquitoes for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Professor Jane Dirks of Carlow College is doing a study of the ethnic backgrounds of people she encounters while walking her dog. This led to a paper presented at the national meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Professor Howard Richards of Earlham College says that he is devoting part of his summer vacation to “organizing a whole movement to reconstruct the world.”
Reassuring as it is to know that there are things to do to keep academics occupied and off the streets, nevertheless it somehow recalls that old World War II slogan: “Is this trip necessary?”
For the professors themselves, it may be very necessary to keep their resumés from having blank space where there should be publications. Even at liberal arts colleges that emphasize teaching, at least in their brochures, it is increasingly necessary to keep putting things in print, in order to get your contract renewed and, eventually, enter the promised land of tenure.
We of course have no way of knowing how much of Professor Wright's interest in the well-being of Pennsylvania wood rats is due to the pure search for truth and good, any more than we have any way of knowing how much NASA's search for life on other planets is in reality a search for a way to get more money out of the taxpayers on this planet.
At one time, “publish or perish” was the watchword at big research universities but today it is the holy grail from Harvard to Podunk A & M. Criticize the research mania and you will be told that research has produced everything from polio vaccines to the transistor.
A lot of pygmies can hide in the shadows of giants. So the taxpayers are picking up the tab for “research” that serves no other purpose than to fill the library shelves, require more trees to be cut down to produce paper and—not wholly incidentally—bring in more money to college and university coffers. After all, research grants to support trivialities are just as much hard cash as grants to find a cure for cancer or AIDS.
The costs of these research grants extend far beyond the money directly spent or wasted. In order to free up time for professors to do research, their teaching loads must be reduced.
When I began teaching in 1962, it was not uncommon in most colleges for a professor to spend 12 hours a week in class and by no means unknown for the average teaching load to be 15 hours. Today, 6 hours a week is the norm in many of those same colleges.
When you cut the average teaching load in half, you are going to need twice as many professors to teach the same number of courses. That means twice as much money for salaries, even if the salaries are not going up. But professors' salaries have been going up faster than the rate of inflation. That is one of the reasons why tuition has also been going up faster than the rate of inflation.
Research on wood rats and on people you encounter while walking the dog may sound funny—but only if you are not a student, parent or taxpayer who is footing the bill for all this.
LET'S HEAR IT FOR UNFAIRNESS!
“Fair” is one of those nice words that make us feel good—no matter how much damage or dangers it leads to. The concept has sunk in so deeply that nothing causes such indignation as the charge that some person, policy or institution has been “unfair.”
Yet when I hear educational
policies discussed in terms of fairness, my reaction is: Thank God my teachers were unfair to me when I was growing up in Harlem back in the 1940s!
My 7th-grade English teacher, for example, used to require everyone who misspelled a word to write that word 50 times as part of his homework and bring it in the next morning. Misspell three or four words, on top of the rest of your homework, and you had quite an evening ahead of you.
Was this fair? Of course not. Kids on Park Avenue probably heard those words at home far more often than I did. The magazines and books in their homes probably contained many of those words, while my family couldn't afford to subscribe to magazines or buy books.
Fairness was never an option. The only choice was between the temporary unfairness of forcing us to learn things that were a little harder for us to learn and the permanent unfairness of sending us out into the world unprepared and doomed to failure.
Many years later, I happened to run into one of the guys from that school on a street in San Francisco. He was now a psychiatrist and owned a home and property in Napa Valley. If he wanted to live on Park Avenue, I am sure he could afford it now.
As we reminisced about old times and caught up on the things that had happened to us since then, he mentioned that his various secretaries over the years had commented on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word.
“Mine too,” I said. “But, if they knew Miss Simon, there would be no mystery as to why we don't misspell words!”
Although I never finished high school and struggled to make ends meet for a few years before going to college, when I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test I scored higher on the verbal portion than the average Harvard student. That was probably why Harvard admitted me. No doubt much of that was due to Miss Simon and other teachers like her who were “unfair” to me.
Controversial Essays Page 13
