# 13 Reeding, Righting, and Newmathmatics

Or: What the hell happened in the classroom?

_{(Originally appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine vol. 7, no. 3, Fall, 1996)}

_{This time around, I want to talk a little bit about a subject that’s very dear to me: the education of our children, and what some dunderheads are doing to completely trash it.}

_{In order to get into this, I’m going to start by telling you a story, and it goes like this:}

_{A friend of mine had his 6-year-old son starting school; He attended a local neighborhood public school in Baltimore County (a school all the local lore contended was a “good” school). He attended the first grade, and after a year at the “academy,” my friend told me the boy could not yet read, and in general possessed very poor work/study skills. When he was in the second grade, things weren’t getting any better, and my friend knew he had to do something. He asked the principal if he could sit in on a few classes during an average day, and the woman acted delighted he was taking such an interest in his son’s “educational process.”}

_{Yeah, that’s how she phrased it.}

_{My friend is an engineer and very attentive to detail. Here’s what he observed:}

_{Thirty-two little kids, mostly 7 or 8 years old, sitting in this room at little desks big enough for two chairs side-by-side. Two kids at one desk? Kinda odd, no? But wait, there’s more. The two-kid desks were then arranged in groups of four so that you had an arrangement like eight people sitting at a roadside picnic table. So what we really have is eight kids at “one desk.” Now the really interesting part of this arrangement is that not all the kids can be facing the front of the room or the teacher all at the same time.}

_{But . . . there was no front of the room!}

_{Yeah. While he watched, the teacher kind of drifted around the room, weaving in and out of the picnic-table-desks talking and gesturing as much to herself as the kids. As he watched them, he estimated that no more than 30% of them were ever paying attention to the teacher at any one moment. Most of them, for the majority of the time, were fidgeting and bugging each other—mugging and poking and whispering and giggling.}

_{My friend couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and afterwards, he asked the teacher about the desks—namely, what the rationale for such an odd arrangement might be. (She parroted some bullshit about the kids being in “learning groups” so they could “help teach each other”)}

_{That prompted my friend to ask her what happened to the idea of all the desks in rows, all pointing and focused in a single direction—at, oh, how about . . . say, the teacher?}

_{She smiled at him with a saccherine, patronizing smile and told him that was the “old” way of teaching, and it just wasn’t done anymore.}

_{He said something like: “Well, it looked like a lot of them weren’t paying much attention to you. And I don’t think 7-year-olds are very well-equipped to ‘teach themselves’.”}

_{When she didn’t reply, he added: “I think your desk set-up is counter-productive—hardly of them are paying attention to you.”}

_{The next day, he enrolled his son in the local Parish’s Catholic grade school, and within a few months, hey! guess what!?, he was reading. (He was also more polite and attentive and well-behaved. Funny, huh?)}

_{That was a while ago, and I’m sure what I’m telling you is not news, and most of you are probably saying “what’s with him, doesn’t he know that’s how it is in all the schools everywhere?”}

_{Yes, I do. And that’s the problem.}

_{Somewhere along the line, somewhere in this century, a cabal of academic “educators” gained control of America’s public school system and began poisoning it. Gradually changing it from a fairly successful means of preparing citizens to be productive and accomplished into a hideous juggernaut of bureaucracy and busy-work whose “accomplishments” over the last twenty years are truly laughable.}

_{Look at the test scores, which keep telling us our kids simply do not learn as much or as well as they used to. Scores keep dropping. Fewer and fewer kids graduate; and of the ones who do, there is a frightening percentage who are functionally illiterate. This is an embarrassment and should be an impossibility. The NEA and the Teachers Union monoliths should be ashamed of themselves and what they’ve done to the American school system, but they’re not(!). Oh no, they march and protest and form Political Action Committees and do all the things that bloated bureaucracies do to accrue more power unto themselves.}

_{Recent surveys of high school graduates have revealed that:}

_{32% of them could not point out Chile on a world map;}

_{68% had no clue in what half-century the Civil War ended;}

_{47% could not identify the terms “radius” or “circumference;”}

_{12% were apparently unable to name the mother-country of English;}

_{and only 8% could identify the author of the play, “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.”}

_{No, I’m not kidding. What in hell in is going on in our schools for the graduates to be so ill-informed? Just what are they learning? Not much, I think.}

_{And then Hill-Billy Clinton stands up on national TV and promises a (yet another) government program of an army of “reading tutors” to make sure our children are reading by the third grade . . .}

_{Friends, when Elizabeth and I heard him say that, we almost fell out of our chairs, right before we considered putting out boots through the TV . . .}

_{Reading Tutors!!!!?}

_{The third grade!!!?}

_{Listen, have we suddenly and mysteriously been yanked into some alternate universe? Some strange place in which everyone but you and I has become suddenly reduced to the mental functioning level of sea cucumbers? Well, we must have—because everybody at the Democratic Convention rose up in thunderous applause at this presidential proclamation. The next day, all the media-sheep reported it and nobody, and I mean nobody asked the obvious questions.}

_Like:

_{If our teachers were doing their job, why would we even need this grand army of tutors?}

_{And, if they’re NOT doing they’re jobs, why are we still paying them?}

_{And, what about having kids reading in the FIRST goddamned grade??? (. . . the way you and I did it.)}

_{And most of all, how can the Grand Pooh-Bahs of the NEA and all the local chapters of the teachers unions look anybody in the eye and champion the truly pitiful results, the utter shambles they have made of this country’s educational system?}

_{How can they justify the incredible expenses per pupil for the results they get? When compared to even the average private school in any state in America, the public system is beyond laughable. Private schools routinely produce successful graduates at rates four to five times better than their public counterparts for at sometimes half the cost.}

_{(The argument you hear from the NEA-types when confronted with the private/public comparison is that the kids going to private schools are somehow “smarter” or more “privileged” or more “motivated” and that they come from “better” environments)}

_{But this is largely bullshit. Take the Catholic high schools in Baltimore, for instance, where I had several friends working as teachers. Diocese surveys have shown that more than 70% of their students were from middle class, two-parents-working families. They are basically normal kids, just like the ones in the public schools, but they are being taught. They are being forced, in some instances, to study things they might not like, that are (dare I say it?) hard, but may allow or inspire them to dream and achieve.}

_{And the majority of the parents who are sending their kids to these schools are not blue-bloods to manor-born; they are regular people breaking their collectives asses, sacrificing new drapes and sport utility vehicles and trendy vacations, to make sure their kids escape the horror and the drudgery and the non-learning experience of a public education.}

_{(I cite my own experience as an example: my father was a machinist who worked at Bethlehem Steel’s shipyard in Baltimore. It was a filthy, noisy place, blistering in summer and frigid in winter, but he pulled all the overtime they’d give him. Then he took a second job working at Pikesville Liquors on Friday night and all day Saturday. My mother worked in a dress shop as a cashier. They did it because they wanted me to go to a Jesuit high school and the tuition of $600/ yr was about 10% of their annual income.)}

_{This year Elizabeth and I have enrolled Olivia (aged 5) in the local New Hampshire Village kindergarten. It is a small public school, very well equipped and full of well-meaning, smiling people and a parent-controlled School Board. We have decided to give this school two years—kindergarten and First Grade. If at the end of that period, Olivia is not reading and performing up to reasonable expectations, we’ll enroll her in a Catholic school in Claremont, which is about a 40 minutes ride. Which means almost two hours driving every morning and the same every afternoon. A big sacrifice? Maybe, but we feel it is the least we can do to insulate her from the nitwittery that poses for real education these days.}

_{Okay, so the public school system is an embarrassment, and their steadily declining results seem unavoidable. How has this happened? Who is responsible?}

_{As you might suspect, I have a few ideas and opinions.}

_Listen:

_{The first place we must look are those bastions of quaint, leftist politics—the groves of academe, the campi of our American universities and colleges. (And before any of you start bleating that I am just another outsider throwing stones at the very people who are laboring mightily to uphold a revered intellectual tradition in this country, let me tell you I speak from much inside experience. I possess a master’s degree, and enough additional credits for my Ph.D. absent my doctoral dissertation—which I can promise you I will never write; I have taught college courses as a graduate student; I have worked as an Adjunct Professor; I have spoken as a guest at many universities around the country; and my son, Damon, is currently teaching high school in Montgomery County, Maryland. I know the way things work on the campus, believe me.)}

_{Now, think back to when you went to university . . . and ask yourself what “school” or “college” (other than the obvious doormat—Home Economics) was granted by common knowledge to be the one where it was clearly the easiest place to hang around for four years and look down one day and find whoops! a degree in your hands?}

_{If you didn’t say the College, or School, of Education, then you either (a) didn’t go to college, (b) walked around in a Budweiser-fog for 4 years, (c) received a degree in Education, or (d) are lying to yourself and worse, to me.}

_{I knew women back then who were taking courses in how to make attractive bulletin boards; how to design and fill out “lesson-plans;” how to teach “growth skills” (things like filling out a check book, reading a tape measure, and I must assume—finding your own ass without the use of a mirror on a stick); and even courses on how to talk to parents(!).}

_{Now what I say next may piss off more than a few of you (especially if you might be teachers), but my conscience demands I be honest here: when I was in college, I met thousands of other students and without question or doubt, the most opaque, dull-witted, un-informed, unimaginative, unaware, unthinking, un-ambitious people I encountered were, hands-down-no-contest, from the College of Education.}

_{They were largely a collection of very dim bulbs.}

_{Back in the early seventies, when I had a grown-up-people’s job, I worked as a psychotherapist at a state hospital for the criminally insane. One of my co-workers was a guy running the patient “school” (a high school equivalency program for a lot of the patients in for the long haul . . .); and this guy had a Masters degree in Education from one of the State universities. During the course of several years of conversations and lunch-table philosophizing, I discovered how woefully “educated” this guy was. You know how you can be talking to somebody, mention a name, or a concept, like say, Jeremy Bentham or refraction, and you can just tell the other guy has never heard of the word . . . ?}

_{You all know that moment, right?}

_{Well, with my Master of Education friend, it used to happen with staggering regularity. Just off the top of my rapidly deteriorating memory, I can recall him being totally ignorant of: Brahms, ArchDuke Ferdinand, Jean Piaget, the Magna Carta, Robert Frost, tectonic plate theory, Thermopylae, Margaret Mead, gulags, nebulae, and . . . let me assure you the list went on and on.}

_{So many names, places, ideas, and concepts.}

_{So many blank and vapid stares.}

_{And I’m not talking about truly esoteric stuff that I wouldn’t expect mere mortals to know like Barbara Tuchman, syszygy, Loren Eiseley, the Systema Naturae, Tycho Brahe, the Council of Nicea, or chief resources of Sumatra (okay, I was joking you on that last one . . . ).}

_{I used to leave the cafeteria in a state of disbelief—how in the hell could this guy could get through four years of college and two years of graduate school and still be so largely unscathed by knowledge? It seemed impossible, but this guy was living proof. Not only could a graduate school accept a pinhead like this guy, but they also gave him a degree and declared him fit to teach others, to impart his “wisdom” unto our children.}

_{And even back then, I wondered how and why did it happen that we are entrusting our children’s futures to a bunch who left a few windows open in the Gray Room? It seems to me that somehow we got completely turned around on this issue. The education of our children should be the most rigorous and heavy-duty challenge we could ever hope to have. It should make getting a few guys to the moon in a ship the size of a Rubbermaid trashcan just another jot on our generational “To Do” list. But educating our children should be the Main Heat, the Big Deal in all of our lives.}

_{That job should be entrusted to the Best and the Brightest.}

_{Not the Dullest and the Dimmest.}

_{But that’s what we have done.}

_{And it’s funny because I hear The Learning Channel’s going to be running a series (sponsored by the NEA) about Great Teachers. I have heard this is being done in response to the incredible heat the NEA and whole public education system is taking from people who have enough of high school graduates who can't identify the combatants of the Spanish-American War. What they have are a list of the exceptions, the upper end of the bell curve, the teachers that were so good that even the avalanche of “new” and “modern” educational theories and practica could not sledgehammer them into submission. The heights of their achievements only serve to embarrass the rest of the system all that much more completely.}

_{So here’s a challenge to my readers. (Especially) If you are teachers, let me hear from you. Tell me why it is somehow better to relieve students from the “burden” of such pesky ideas as competition, grades, and discipline. Tell me why courses such as French, Spanish, Russian, Latin. and Greek have been removed from curricula; why English Literature and Grammar have been replaced by “language arts”? Why history is now conducted under the mantle of “social studies”? Why Civics is a word totally unknown to most teachers? Why outcome-based education is supposed to be better than challenging students to learn? Why standard English is being supplanted by argot and slang? Why it is suddenly “wrong” to have all the students sitting in rows actually looking at the instructor? Why the idea of wearing a school uniform is anathema to most modern educational “theorists”? Why did some modern “educator” with power and influence decide the classical methods of education (such as the requirements that students master language skills such as grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and orthography; or performing basic math without the use of a calculator) no longer obtain? And how did he/she convince the rest of educational establishment that such idiocy is a good idea?}

_{And the big one: After seeing more than a generation of lowering standards, declining test scores, performance indices, and mounting evidence of a MASSIVE dumbing down of our students, how is that the education establishment (like the NEA and the Teachers Unions) cannot admit to the possibility that perhaps THEY might be responsible?}

_{Tell me.}

_{Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m the dummy . . .}

_Sure.

_{Nota Bene: I wrote this almost thirty years ago, and sadly, it not only remains an accurate and true portrait of public education, but things actually devolved into a situation far worse—witness the bizarre preoccupation with “gender politics” and “anti-racism” being force-fed into the mush-minds of young students.}