Who Is Educating Our Kids?

There are many stories of our kids coming home from school with written or printed papers from their teachers with multiple spelling and grammar errors. There are run-on sentences, punctuation omissions or mistakes, misuse of words and sentences that are incomprehensible. We have to wonder who teaches the teachers, and how can they be qualified to teach our children.

Back when I lived in El Paso, I attended a band concert at my grandson’s middle school. I picked up one of the programs at the door to the gymnasium—lousy acoustics, but that is the only place large enough to hold a concert, since they don’t build schools with auditoriums anymore—and proceeded to my seat. When I opened the program to see what the selections would be, I came across a few of the language errors cited above.

One of the songs to be played was titled, Anchient Hunters. Then there was a page of acknowledgements with the following:

Thank you to all of the parents who sacrifice their free time, provide a constant chaffer service, and encouraging your children to participate in this musical experience.

Thank you to all of the students, it was a pleasure to step on the podium and work with you every day. You truly made music this year, you didn’t just “play the dots.”

The above quotes are verbatim in all respects, and I certainly hope that you can detect at least four errors contained in two short paragraphs. If not, you were probably another student taught by illiterate teachers.

We are currently spending over $10,000 per year per student to educate our children in this country, and they are still failing. Based on what I described and illustrated above, maybe the major problem is poorly educated and qualified teachers, and more money isn’t going to fix that, unless you think that higher pay will attract better qualified educators. I don’t think so. Besides, as we’re learning from the Wisconsin demonstrations, teachers unions seem to have iron clad tenure and pretty darned good benefits that the present ones aren’t about to abandon.

My wife and I both hold Bachelor of Science degrees in Elementary Education. We both went to the University of New York College at Buffalo, so named to distinguish it from another institute of higher education in Buffalo, The State University of New York at Buffalo.

Our college had formerly been called Buffalo State Teachers College, and was dedicated to turning out public school teachers. Somewhere in the 1950s someone on high in the university hierarchy decided that the college would be more diverse if it expanded to include Bachelor of Arts degrees and a wider range of degree programs. Most other teachers colleges followed suit.

Although teaching was still offered as a major at SUCB, I think the college lost the emphasis on excellence in the three Rs—a cute play on words that everybody used to know were misspelled, Readin’, ‘Ritin’ and ‘Rithmatic—and I know we completely abandoned the morality and pride that used to exemplify the teaching profession. How else do you explain the sloppy dress code and the huge volume of cases of teacher-student molestation in today’s schools?

It seems to me that there are only two logical choices for our children’s education. The first is private education at either parochial or tuition assisted schools. The second is home schooling. If $10,000 doesn’t get a good education for Johnny or Susie, along with the constant threat of teacher abuse at public schools, then what will? I’d wager that we could pay a lot less and get a lot more from one of the choices above.

Of course, we might still have to divvy up the taxes to fund our inferior public education too. There has been a drive on for several years now to provide vouchers to help parents with private alternatives. It is about time for us to scrap public education in favor of a system that actually teaches our children something besides environmentalism, sex, funky math and bad (or no) history.

Some cannot afford private education, and some don’t like parochial—read “religious”—teaching along with the basics. As for myself, I would rather a child get some moral education. They might even retain some of the goodness as they grow up. Many of us seem to have done that from the look of things today. Home schooling has been run by religious groups too, and has included some Bible teaching in the course curriculum.

My daughter home-schooled her son for six months a few years ago, and she tells me that the Bible study was at that time a requirement. She included a cursory study, if only to get credit for the remainder of the courses. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that home-schooled children are better equipped to start college without having to be tutored. They have been tutored all the way through school after all.

Okay, maybe I am a dreamer. Maybe I don’t get the big picture. But I certainly know an educated adult when I interact with them, and most of the young people I deal with do not fit that category anymore.

My grandson, the one to whom I referred at the beginning of this column, is now graduating from high school and is enlisting in the Army. He recently took the language skills test to qualify for the Defense Language Institute, but he was unable to score high enough. The testing uses some basic rules of grammar, similar to what we learn when we take a foreign language course, and as the rules got more difficult, he was unable to apply them all correctly.

I know he has a pretty high IQ, but I blame his public education for not teaching or challenging him enough to learn and apply grammar and spelling rules that would have prepared him for the testing. I don’t believe that anyone teaches those basics in our public school system anymore.

I want schools to get back to the basics. I don’t want my grandkids to come home from school with a paper that contains atrocious errors in grammar and spelling and tell their parents, “The teacher says it doesn’t matter how you spell it or say it, as long as the idea is correct.” That is just not acceptable!