Letters to the Editor
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Bad example
While it's true that public schools in the US have declined precipitously in the last two decades, the question asked of students in the segment shown was more emblematic of the weaknesses of traditional teaching than of the school system itself. Knowing the first five presidents' names in order is not a precondition of personal happiness or even prosperity. It is simply a fact that may be googled when needed.
A better example from the history discipline would have been an open-ended question such as, "In what ways have ordinary people become more or less free over the last [5,50,500] years?" That would show knowledge that the students could actually use in their day-to-day political, social, and economic lives.
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stop everything! anecdotal evidence of something!
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe there are serious things wrong with our public education system. Reforms are needed, bureaucracies need to be streamlined, **parents and communities need to be more involved**, yadda yadda yadda.
But please -- are we supposed to draw some sort of conclusion based on video footage of a few morons who think Lincoln was the first president? Newsflash: morons walk amongst us, and have since the dawn of mankind.
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"I Forgot All About That Thar His-STORY"
Why is it always a Southerner???
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It is NOT the schools's fault
I am a public high school teacher, at a prestigious magnet school that was ranked 74th in the nation this year by Newsweek Magazine. And you could find students at my school who wouldn't know the names of the first five US presidents in order. I had to think for a couple of minutes myself to remember them, and I had John Quincy Adams in the wrong place. And I went to a prestigious private high school in the 70s.
It is not the schools's fault that there are no communities any more. It is not the schools's fault that children spend more time in front of the TV than they spend interacting with their parents. It is not the schools's fault that when corporal punishment was removed from the schools it wasn't replaced with anything effective. It is not the schools's fault that politicians and bureaucrats have decided that the best way to deal with all these problems is to further hamper teachers by forcing us to focus our energies on standardized tests.
Teachers have to be everything to many students. They have to be parents and community, role models and babysitters. Even at my way-above-the-norm high school, I spend less than half of my time and energy actually teaching.
The problems in our schools are a reflection of problems in our society in general, not problems that can be addressed by looking only at the schools in isolation. It is short-sighted, as well as unfair to those of us who are teaching, to look at this situation as "problems with public schools." This approach is doomed to failure, as is every attempt to treat the symptoms instead of the disease.
But most especially, it is unfair to the students, who are our children, and our future.
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The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
If you had asked people fifty years ago about the state of the schools, they would have said, "They've never been worse." If you ask people fifty years from now about the state of their schools, they'll say "They've never been worse." If you ask them fifty years after that, they'll say....
Much like crime or poverty, people will always believe that they live in the worst of times for public school.
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Ironic?
I hope that intro copy was meant ironically. EVERYONE thinks things are "so much worse" now than when they were in school. Of course if you look at math alone, the US is going to lag behind other countries. This is because the US is one of the few countries that believes in wholistic, liberal education that puts equal stock in the sciences and humanities. We educate the individual, not the next number pusher. And the juxtaposition of the foreign students and the American students answering the president question was a perfect exercise in propaganda. I could go ask 100 people any question I want right now and just clip together the five dumbest answers to prove a point. What's the point of the continual "bad schools" message? Well, for starters it's predominantly directed a public schools to scare parents into sending their kids to private schools or to support voucher programs, et al. I don't know what Oprah is getting out of sending this message. Since you can't access test results from private schools (if the kids take them anyway) you have know what of knowing whether they are better off than the public ones. They do succeed at segregation based on wealth and race, though.
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We educate the individual?
The public school system is mostly about nullifying the individual. It's about arbitrary goals set for the collective. It's about authority and penalties for questioning it.
If it was about the individual, not as many individuals would find it so incrediby boring and irrelevant to their lives.
And even though I do find most public schools terrible places for an individual to actually learn things about their world and their place in it, I do agree with the poster who wrote that, ultimately, it's not usually the schools' fault.
It's a parent's responsibility to see that his or her child is educated. Most parents with an uneducated child have only themselves to blame.
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Offshoring of education
Schooling programs are necessarily designed to serve the needs of the economy. The modern American school system's development was greatly facilitiated by the great 19th century capitalists such as Carnegie, Astor, Morgan and Rockefeller. In addition to training docile, but capable, factory and office workers, they also pushed truly wierd ideas like bionomics as the basis for the creation of an over-class to deal with the modern scientific world's complexities and override the clumsy notions of 18th democracy. To a large extent they succeeded. The problem is that America now suffers from both the obviation of paticipatory democracy (which required good generalist literacy) and a decline in the demand for skilled office and factory workers.
Ironically, this piece starts off with whining from Bill Gates, the country's richest man and a college drop-out, and finishs with ignorant young people struggling with the limits of their eternalized childhood fog and Newspeak glosses (Jay Leno has been doing a similar segment for years). Let's be honest: America's corporate elites have found it expedient to wiggle out of their social contract with Americans and make new deals elsewhere. At least Bill got richer last year; most high-school graduates didn't.
The Chinese girls seemed best at US-president-naming, which also comes as little surprise. A study this month from IBM's Institute for Business Value and Fudan University in Shanghai suggests that lack of educated staff is one of the main hurdles to Chinese corporate dominance in international markets. Thus, education is a top priority in China these days. The Chinese have been sending out teachers and school officials worldwide to study the best practices of the world's top public school systems. Here in Finland, we had Chinese teachers observing in our kids classes for several weeks. Finnish 15-year-olds, it seems, do very well in math, history, geography and novel problem-solving, and the Chinese are interested in incorporating Finnish approaches in their teaching. Haven't seen any Chinese teachers sitting in your kids classes lately? Now that's something for Oprah to really worry about.