I have been spending a lot of time with the health reform legislation lately and have begun to wonder what people understand and what the consequences are of failure to understand some basic concepts. I’m not the only one.
What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As the U.S. rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what American citizens, voters, and taxpayers need by way of knowledge and skills to form reasonable conclusions about the hottest domestic policy issue of the day.
Today’s elites seem certain that John Q. Public is irremediably ignorant about, and perhaps oblivious to, the health-care debate, and thus susceptible to being misled, brainwashed, or cowed. Some Democrats are convinced that the insurance industry is creating “movements” bent on misleading and confusing people and planting suspicion in their hearts, while at least one GOP congressman and more than a few conservative pundits and talk-show hosts say President Obama is lying. All these folks seem to assume that the masses cannot possibly understand the debate. But must we accept that as a given? What would it take to comprehend the health-care battle?
OK, how do we get that education ? I grew up in the 1940s and 50s, went to Catholic school and still have sharp memories of my early schooling. For example, I was reading (For the 20th time, at least) The King Must Die, by Mary Renault, one of my favorite authors. It brought to my mind that, in elementary school, I learned the fact that King Minos had a great fleet and that Crete had “wooden walls” on the sea. These small items of history were common in elementary education at the time I was a child. I wonder how many children today would know what I was talking about.
I read to my children as they grew up. When they were small, I read “The Lord of the Rings” and “Watership Down,” both fantasy literature. Interestingly enough, children’s literature is now being de-monsterized meaning the scary stories are being removed so that children are not frightened by the stories. I can’t find the link right now where this was discussed but it makes clear that there is a reason why children’s literature has so many frightening stories. Those fears are part of children’s lives and working them out in fiction may be helpful in assisting children to cope with the real events of life. Most fairy tales are actually based on frightening events. Jack and Jill fell down the hill. Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their parents in the woods. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella both had wicked stepmothers in an era when the possibility of the death of mothers was very real.
All of my children read although reading seems to increase in attraction as they grow older. Reading for pleasure is an activity of childhood that has been devastated by television. Children who do not read a lot, have difficulty with reading and with reading comprehension. It is a skill that grows with practice. They will learn no history from television. Only reading will bring them into a historical world where things fit into place in the greater scheme of things. It was easier for me because we had no television. In fact, because my father was in the juke box business, he hated television and refused to have one in the house. When I was in eighth grade, I didn’t know who Jackie Gleason was. That was a social handicap. Eventually, a family friend gave us a TV set for Christmas and the barrier was broken. Fortunately, by that time habits of a lifetime were set and I have never been much interested in TV. At one time, with my first wife, I had a set of earphones with a long cord. I would sit and read with the earphones on as she watched TV. I mostly listened to classical music in those days. It goes well with reading.
What do we do about the poor quality of schools today ? I don’t know. Spending lots of money on schools isn’t the answer.
In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City’s schools were in simply terrible shape. The city, like most others of its size (pop. 460,000), had experienced white flight from the 1950s on, and the school district even more so, even whites resident in the city pulling their kids out of the public schools. By 1977 enrollment was 36,000, three quarters of them racial minorities (which at that point meant mostly African Americans). The voters had not approved a tax increase for the district since 1969. In 1977 litigation commenced, members of the school board, district parents, and some token children suing the state and some federal agencies on the grounds they had permitted racial segregation. Federal judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee, got the case.
The solution seemed obvious.
After eight years of litigation, Clark gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted, and then some. He in fact ordered them to “dream” — to draw up a money-no-object plan for the Kansas City school system.
Dreaming is no problem for educationists. The plaintiffs — education activists and their lawyers — duly dreamt, with an initial price tag of $250 million for their dreams. This was twice the district’s normal annual budget.
It proved to be only a start, however. Over the next twelve years the district spent over 2 billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated.
The results ?
After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.
Kansas City did all the things that educators had always said needed to be done to increase student achievement — it reduced class size, decreased teacher workload, increased teacher pay, and dramatically expanded spending per pupil — but none of it worked.
The great C-130-loads of money being air-dropped on the system also brought about waste and corruption on a heroic scale. Theft was rampant. So was overmanning: The project became a huge jobs and patronage program, with the inevitable mismanagement and scandals.
So that’s not the answer. I don’t know what it is, beyond the obvious, but I do know that an educated citizenry is necessary for a democracy to flourish and I think we are in big trouble because we have a lot of citizens who don’t read and know no history. And they vote.
Tags: education, energy policy, History, science
I think a strong, basic educational system is the key to an informed populace. Unfortunately, our educational system has devalued teaching facts and Western values, and instead emphasizes self-esteem and the ability to write and talk without really saying anything. That is not the formula for success.
In other words, I agree with you.
What is almost as bad is the fact that college teaching has deteriorated so much. When I was taking pre-med classes, I could not get a student loan as a pre-med major. So, for about two years, I was an English major. I took English literature courses including English and American Drama Since 1890. I still have the textbook. Our exams consisted of quotes from various plays that we had to know well enough to identify the play and analyze the quote.
My daughter, currently a sophomore at U of Arizona, had an English composition course last fall. Her only text book was mostly concerned with “Whiteness Studies” and one assignment that was worth about one-third of her grade was an essay discussing an example of a white man abusing women and minorities. We chose William Kennedy Smith and I wondered if the teacher would get the irony. She didn’t and Annie got a 90 on the essay.