The State of Our Educational System

US News has an interesting editorial by Mortimer Zuckerman in their latest issue, having to do with the departure of Lawrence Summers and the downside for Harvard's students.



It seems that Summer's celebrated episode of Hoof in Mouth Disease was only a public reason for the faculty turning on them. It seems he wanted the professors to teach, and not just the courses they thought up to coincide with the most recent research, but more basic stuff as well. Furthermore, he was fighting grade inflation. When 91 percent of your graduating class gets honors, honors are meaningless. Particularly when a large portion of the student body was emerging from the undergraduate program ignorant of core subjects.



Does the vast majority of this fight sound familiar? It should. Parents of schoolchildren from kindergarten through twelfth grade are fighting it, and into college for those who continue in public colleges. I've got a kindergartner who, I'm convinced, learns more in the hour or so per night my wife and I can devote before bedtime than the seven hours she's in class. They play around with sight words all day, and we come home and teach her phonics. The math they're doing is pathetic. They're still working on counting, and we come home and teach her about how adding is really just about fast counting. In fact, they seem to concentrate on feel good subjects. She comes home with songs about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King that she sings ad nauseum, but she can't tell us anything about what they did, nor did she know who George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were and what they did until we took the time to teach her. MLK and Rosa Parks deserve admiration and respect, but let's get the basics first (I have yet to hear of a high school or lower civics class mentioning General George Catlett Marshall, who in my opinion was probably more important to history than any of the presidents he served. He ran World War II, strategically, then took someone else's idea of rebuilding our former enemies and sold it to the american public, which was arguably the best investment we've ever made as a country. Wikipedia has a good overview, if your school failed you.



My point is this: The schools don't teach what the students need to know. They teach what the teachers want to teach, what is easy for the teachers to teach. I have heard, secondhand, tales of their children dealing with teachers who are mathematically incompetent - who literally could not do arithmetic without a calculator. This is unacceptable, even in an english teacher. The schools don't teach rational thought, or methods of evaluation. How can they, when the teachers cannot handle mathematics themselves?



What they have is not an easy job. Those that actually do their job are underpaid. But there are too many that shouldn't be in the teaching profession at all, and their organizations are doing their best to keep us from improving the situation. And, it appears, the phenomenon touches even the most prestigious of private universities. If the professors will not teach, how are they supposed to be in touch with what the students need to learn? How are they, and not grad students who do the actual teaching, supposed to be better equipped to set academic policy? Why are they not, instead, in a purely research position in private industry? Tell me again why they are receiving a salary from a college? Here's a hint: It's not to shelter them from inability to get a grant.



They are paid to teach, and they are paid to teach what the students need to learn. If they won't do it, that's called refusal to work, and is grounds for terminating anyone. If they can't do it, that's called incompetentce, and also grounds for terminating anyone.



If you are getting the idea that the tenure system is out of control, you're on the right track.