WHY CAN’T JOHNNY READ?

In competition with the rest of the world American students generally are at or near the bottom of the barrel. It is getting worse year by year. The American education system is now a colossal failure!

The demands upon our educational system by the GI Bill of Rights after World War II were awesome. Their responses to these demands were outstanding and it proved to be their finest hour!

The Greatest Generation re-entered grade school, high school, trade schools, colleges and universities to learn the necessary skills and hone their natural talents so that their children would live in a better world. From battle to books they were magnificent!

Since that time our institutions of learning gradually slipped into the jurisdiction of Barney’s Law of Institutionality! Like all institutions they became an entity unto their own making and began to perpetuate their own image and forgot their intended purpose. It is that simple!

In all of these public service institutions there is an absence of norms and standards of productivity. The work ethic then becomes lethargic compared to the hustle and bustle of the private industrial standard. The entire staff of these institutions ultimately will join together in a self-serving conspiracy simply because they lack an authoritative force that would compel them to do otherwise.

Prior to the incursion of a liberal onslaught in the 1930’s the teaching profession was somewhat an art form. Every community throughout our land sought responsible persons that displayed the natural talents to teach our children. We had an innate feeling about these persons who would be best suited to have the ability, the maturity, the morality and sense of ethics to perform this task.

The Methodist Church, more than any other institution, with their circuit rider form of Christianity brought forth upon this land this desire for learning and with it the art of teaching to a young and prosperous America!

We also had colleges that their primary function was to enhance the art of teaching. My father’s college, Appalachian State Teachers College, Boone, NC was one of the best. Although my father was a jack of all trades, he was most respected for his talent for teaching.

The words teaching and training were not synonymous. Never! We knew that training was for getting a pre-determined pattern of desired reactions to a given situation by rote. Teaching was an art form in which knowledge and skill are imparted by experience and example, an exercise of the intellect!

You train dogs!

You teach people!

We knew the difference!

A hold-over in the minds of the veterans who were forced and disciplined to accept a pre-determined pattern by rote in their military training and the demand for more and more jobs demanding less and less thought to perform, contributed to a change in our educational systems throughout the land.

Our college and university system, prior to the infiltration by governmental professionals and the self-interest of union members, used to teach our future leaders American history and the principles and the philosophy necessary for leadership. They do not provide the minimum necessary even for good citizenship nowadays. These systems are now white-collar vocational and technical training centers. They lack the expertise to teach our youth the art of learning and the ability to think for themselves. A sheepskin does not necessarily mean you have a good well-rounded education anymore. For example, the technical points of the subject of law is understood by most judges but the judgment to apply this knowledge is definite lacking. They have been trained. Not taught!

Our institutions of higher learning are in a class by themselves! When I think of our colleges and universities especially those funded by the taxpayer I get a mental picture of a man attired in a casual manner and wearing horn rimmed glasses. He is smoking a straight stemmed pipe and has a smug look on his face. This is the new professor and he has reached college heaven – tenure! All of these institutions have this thing called tenure. It actually means, in simple terms, permanence of position. Faculty members, one and all, seek to reach college utopia. To get there it is necessary to get something published! It really doesn’t matter what it is or what it is about as long as it is published. The more they can get published the greater their chances of getting to college heaven!

Before tenure the teachers and professors spend as little time as possible actually teaching, the intended purpose, and most of their time is spent writing trash or anything they can get published somewhere. About one in one thousand of their publications are worth the time to read them. After tenure, they reduce their actual teaching load to less than six hours per week! This is the actual national average. They are tenured and unlike the professional politician they do not have to run for reelection every couple of years. What a life!

We pay good money to send our youth so they may learn from the professors in our university system. They, in actuality, wind up with taped messages and instructions from fellow graduate students!

The desire to control the educational bureaucracy is overwhelming. There is a word describing this people; they are egalitarians. I normally refer to them as the liberal elite but in this case their name fits them perfectly. They are diabolically more evil by a wide margin with their ignorance. They confuse words like diversity with their desire for racial and gender quotas, busing and affirmative action. The real diversity, those that are real and genuine resulting from natural causes, they refuse to recognize at all!

For them to get real and recognize nature’s diversity would upset their apple cart altogether. They are laboring under the false premise that all people are the same. Change the political, economic system, the poverty and whatever racism is left and you will get equal results.

That is a crock of you know what!

The uniqueness of the individual human soul is the very thing they are forgetting within their ignorance. Each and every child is naturally equipped with its own differences like attitudes, talents, IQ’s, energy levels, ambitions, dreams and aspirations. No amount of bureaucratic finagling will ever be able to change that!

People should be judged on the basis of their character and not on their test scores, job or income. Education within my lifetime has become more and more political with each passing year. The professional egalitarians in the system has it all screwed up.

Control must be within easy and immediate reach of the individual parents.

It was reported in the newspaper the other day that math teachers in Massachusetts are not only refusing to take math tests, their unions have filed lawsuits charging that it is unfair, illegal and discriminatory to see if they know enough to be able to teach.

What makes this truly ironic is that over half the applications for teaching jobs in this state a couple of years ago failed a very simple test!

Now I hear on national television news service that the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the United States, is urging that an extra year be added on to high school for those students who fail to meet the standards for graduation that exist today. The same standards that have been dumbed down over the years by this same union! A make work ploy and featherbedding for their members? You tell me!

This same union, the NEA, has been for some time now campaigning for smaller and smaller classes while industry across our land has been down sizing, economizing, re-tooling and demanding better efficiency. Common sense tell us that we have better tools of communications and much better access to information that any other time in our history. Our students have at their fingertips the entire recorded data on any subject they can dream up! Smaller classes? I would think we would have doubled them by now!

The taxpayer spends more and more money and the yo-yo’s running our educational system does not produce better education. We can’t even catch up to where we were thirty or forty years ago according to decades of research by people in the know.

Incidentally, why do we have these national tests for our children in school, especially high school? Is it wise to scare the hell out of our high school students with these things? They are putting an untold amount of pressure, stress and worry on our children needlessly. Our children take these tests with the belief that their entire future is at stake. How much truth is revealed in their fears? The age old, report card should be able to reflect each students intelligence, qualifications and requirements for additional education opportunities at institutions of higher learning. We must ask ourselves: is this for the convenience and laziness instilled within members of these institutions at the expense of our youth?

We have more than enough money available to again have the best education system in the world. We have professional politicians waiving your money at professional educators to show their "commitment" to improving the schools by "investing in our young people." Believe me these professionals can and will waste all the money they can on brainwashing our children with political correctness/postmodernism and other sorts of projects and activities requiring meetings of the faculty while the children are sent home.

The intellectual factor and the moral caliber of most people now entering the teaching profession are now on the wane. Test scores have shown this factual data for years and years. The teachers’ unions like the NEA are fighting desperately against testing the ability of their members. They want things just as they are now with automatic pay raises, unionized tenure, smaller classes and a lot of time on whatever fads and fantasies your tax dollar will buy!

That is their plan for survival because they have long since given up actually educating our children!