How much education do we require, how much is too much?
It is not at all uncommon for a child to be placed in a "preschool" environment at the age of six months. Granted that there is little that can be formally learned at this early age but it represents the beginning of a career in schooling. Imagine if you will, one begins schooling at such a tender age, enters a Montessori or other preschool, then into kindergarten, followed by the elementary, secondary and high school, then college, perhaps a Master's and a Doctor's program, followed by a post doctorate study and finally as a "super doc" works in a research environment. (An alternative course could have gone toward a medical or law program.) This can easily occupy 35 to 40 years in an academic environment. If one targets retirement at 65, over half of one's life has been spent in learning? Is it any wonder that you hear of burn-out, stressed-out, bankrupt men and women in their 40's and 50's. And just about this time in life, they are told, "you need to retrain, your past training is inadequate for today's changing employment requirements".
We need to rethink our educational system. "... has led me to think that extensive reading, superficial and indiscriminate, such as the very easy access to books among us encourages, is not at an early period of life favorable to solid thinking, true taste, or fixed principles. ..." This from Mrs. Anne Grant in Memoirs of American Lady, pp 129, was published in 1808. Mrs. Grant in reflecting on the differences in culture between the England and The United States concludes that the way in which education was being pursued at that time was wrong. Shaping the child as so early an age robbed him (or her) of the pleasures of youth and the influence of parentage. So true in 1808 and no less true today!
Mrs. Grant also had this to say about education: " Reading is one thing; ... a promiscuous multitude of books always within reach retards the acquisition of useful knowledge. It is like having a great number of acquaintances and few friends/ one of the consequences of the latter is to know much of exterior appearances, of modes and manners, but little of nature and genuine character. By running over numbers of books without selection, in a desultory manner, people, in the same way, get a general superficial idea of the varieties and nature of different styles, but do not comprehend or retain the matter with the same accuracy as those who have read a few books, by the best authors, over and over with diligent attention. I speak now of those one usually meets with; not of those commanding minds, whose intuitive research seizes on everything worth retaining, and rejects the rest as naturally as one throws away the rind when possessed of the kernel." If one substitutes the word "Internet" for "books" then you can update Mrs. Grant's views, and see that they are timely indeed. What value is it to a student to browse the Internet. There are so many words and pictures, and so little substance.(from pages 70, 71. part two.)
Or, "No boy or girl should see the inside of a school-house until at least 10 years old". No less than Luther Burbank wrote this in his book, The Training of the Human Plant. pp 16, published in 1907. Lest you think these are the thought's of a radical, conservative-leaning individual; read the book. You will discover Burbank advocates Governmental acceptance of responsibility for the care and feeding of the indigent. Public responsibility for the mentally and physically disabled, and other programs, long before Roosevelt's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society or Clinton's Gallimaufry.
Further Burbank wrote, "the curse of modern child-life in America is over education." This was not intended to criticize the quality of education but instead the quantity of time spent in unrewarding classrooms.
Today attention is focused on special education. Consider in Sioux City Iowa, an exceptional place to raise your children, over 10 percent of students are judged to be functionally deficient in some way. The statistics as quoted from the Sioux City Journal, May 11, 1997: Of 14,491 students, 1,160 had learning disabilities, 345 had mental disabilities, 245 had behavior disability and 75 were developmentally delayed. Actually the good news is that only 92 students were impaired by injuries, visual, hearing, autism, or physical disabilities or were severely or profoundly limited. I think if fair to say that we are over responding to what in earlier days would have been said to be "individuality". As Luther Burbank wrote, " No two children are alike. You cannot expect them to develop alike. They are different in temperament, in tastes, in disposition, in capabilities, and yet we take them in this precious early age, when they ought to be living a life of preparation near to the heart of nature, and we stuff them, cram them, and overwork them until their poor little brains are crowded up to and beyond the danger-line. The work of breaking down the nervous systems of the children of the United States is now well under way." Hey, this was written in 1908, how little we have learned.
Lest you think the Iowa is different from the rest of the country, consider a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (May 14, 1997), in which it is reported that there are now 5.4 million students in special education programs. That's thirteen (13) percent of our kids! And attendant with the numbers is an increasing awareness that some of these "children" don't belong in the school system at all. Some are extremely troubled and some severely disabled. In all its wisdom and with good intentions, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act without provisions for exception. There is no way legally or morally that a school can cope with this problem. Of course the system can throw money at the problem, and hire one-on-one instructors or export the student to a special learning facility. (As example, a small community in southeast South Dakota, with a population of less than a thousand, now sends a child to a school on the east coast, at a cost to the community of over one hundred thousand dollars a year. That's a unauthorized tax of over one hundred dollars on every citizen of the community!) And this is to continue until the kid reaches the age of 21. What to do, what to do? Well the first thing is to recognize that parents and family have the first responsibility for their produce. They no longer can thrust them off on society and go on about their lives as tho the slate has been wiped clean. Second, is to get rid of the nonsense of classification that is now categorizing some 10 to 20 percent of students as disabled and rewarding the schools (and parents) for the so called disability. Third, accept that some children are severely disabled through no fault of their own or their parents and learn to live with the problem. Make life as comfortable as possible for them but accept the premise that life is not fair.
On the lighter side, that defender of the common man, Mike Royko has much to say. Here's a squib from one of his books. In discussing the value of higher education, he relates a story about his son, a college graduate. The boy visiting New Orleans was approached by a young lad and offered a bet, which he couldn't refuse. The Orleans native bet $5.00 that he could tell young Royko where he got his shoes. Well being from Chicago, it was apparent the kid didn't have a chance to win the bet. Royko lost. Why, because the answer was "you got your shoes on Basin Street." With a college education and lots of careful training Royko's son lacked the street smarts of the inveterate New Orleans' native.
That's the trouble with today's education, lots of time spent in an environment that stifles thinking, exploration and the imagination. How sad! But wait, the good news is that our educational system is undergoing changes. Never mind that Baltimore has stepped back into the 1960's and placed higher emphasis on the rights of the teacher than the students. Or that Washington D.C. insist in spending more money per student than most anywhere in the country with disastrous results while teachers are unable to maintain discipline in the classroom. Or the President wants National Testing and Standards, which do nothing but take more of a teachers time and divert students interest away from getting an education. One of our congressmen said it best, "A calf doesn't gain weight by weighing him everyday".
Wiring the classrooms for computers is going to pass. Why? Because in a short time, it will be recognized that the teacher is much more important than the irrelevant information available on the Internet.
If we practiced triage in the educational system, we would let those that can, take care of themselves; focus our attention on those that can benefit; and provide comfort to those that cannot, while removing them from the system. We spend far too much on students with disabilities at the expense of the rest of the student population. We don't try to save those that can become useful members of the community (as example those in poverty and in the inner city). We haven't got it right yet, but we will if we learn from our ancestors. After all that's what education is all about.
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