Recommendations for Avoiding the Disease that Knows No “Red” or “Blue”

Yep, you’re right.  No recommendations.  Yet, it’s purpose was to establish the existence of a fiasco, much like the 1986 Challenger disaster.  If everyone had blinders attached to their eyes, we’d continue to shoot people up into space without repairing the design flaw.  NASA’s graveyard (if they have one) would be more heavily populated.  Same with our nation’s systems of schools.  Do we really recognize the thoroughness of the rot?  Quite understandably, parents desperately search for the best options for their kids.  The problem: the best options are mostly window-dressed routes to, once again, mediocrity.  It’s everywhere from pre-school to grad school, from the ghetto kid living among the social chaos to the legions enrolled in the college curriculum’s assault on classical instruction and the relentless infusion of the identity nonsense and calling it scholarship.  The situation cries for a storming of the Bastille.

Here’s some recommendations … if you want them:

• If a classical education is desired, look for a school – secondary to college – with a curriculum based on the great books.
• Electoral politics gave us the people who sanctioned and produced the nightmare, and electoral politics is the essential route to the antidote.  Elect people who will work to decertify the ed schools and force a return to a classical instruction.  No greater advance in education can be accomplished than to remove the monopoly power of the college ed schools.  Leave John Dewey to rot in the grave, and stop trying to resurrect him in the naive minds of the young.
• Don’t start, right out of the gate, with any reform with utopian titles like “No child left behind” or “All students will succeed”.  Anything implying “all” should be reserved for thoughts of heaven and the pew.  Fact: “All” students won’t succeed!  The attempt to do so has led to unending reforms and a never-ending teat for the consultancy class.  If nomenclature is your thing, “all” should be replaced by “removal” of some.  The school must be made safe for the scholar and the scholar-to-be.
• Speaking of scholars, let’s produce some and place them in the front of the classroom.  Of course, “scholar” should be a reference to one with his/her head screwed on straight, with feet planted in the here-and-now.  A school is no place for the airy effete with pretensions of an ethereal and secular paradise.  To produce adult scholars, out goes [fill in the blank] Studies Departments – and with it, all the tolerance/multicultural crap.  Real minds require an introduction to the great minds.  Sorry, they aren’t distributed according to the likes of Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus.
• Not everyone is cut out for formal, classroom instruction and its subsequent route to slipshod cognitive development. Recognize that some kids like working with their hands.  Better a cutting torch in their hand than a knife at the throat of a convenience store owner.  I’ve always been a strong advocate of professionally-approved apprenticeships with the trade unions and businesses.
• Let’s stop the feminization of pedagogy and the curriculum.  Make education more attractive to boys.  Cut out all the grouping; end co-ed PE; and return to instructing the natural inclinations of a discipline.  Those “natural inclinations” are obvious.  History should be taught with an eye to the great men/women, great events, and littered with the great stories that define us.  Instructional periods might have to be limited to 45 minutes to avoid the male ants-in-the-pants syndrome.  For the Language Arts, classical literature should be the touchstone.  The Iliad and the Odyssey is a great war story.  Teach a vernacular version.  The same is true of much of Shakespeare.  It’s better to a know a few great books well than the cover stories of Time magazine.  Of course, these old authors are a bit prickly to the ears of your average snowflake in the staff, desk, and professoriate.   To hell with ’em!
• Back-to-School Night should be reserved for teaching the ins-and-outs of being a tiger mom.  Lock up the video games.  Better yet, do a buy-back thing like the one for guns.  All tekkie communication stuff should be embargoed and computers placed in the community section of the house.  One parent must be home at all times.  Parents should read, read anything so they can be seen by the kids.  TV should be limited to a single planned-for program, like a person does with a movie.  After that, it’s turned off.  It should never be allowed to be a constant background noise.

RogerG