THE END OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
We have been writing here about education for more than 25 years. We have looked at the early development of America’s public school system, once the most successful in World history and have regularly documented its decline.
Earlier this year, we wrote of the “triangle” – we called it a tripod – of teacher, child and Mom as the arrangement that insured the earliest success. And then how that process was affected when Mothers began working during the Second World War, even as it helped America develop the first Middle Class in history. The increased income of two working parents gave members of the working class the ability to buy homes and cars, travel, take vacations and send their children to college.
And then how the existence of working Moms broke the tripod and caused the beginning of the end of successful public schools as the system did nothing to replace Moms who were no longer home to see that homework was successfully completed.
Today there isn’t much homework left.
Readers thought that this idea was sexist – that we were blaming Moms – women – for the beginning of the decline of education in America.
This, despite our writing about the consistent failure to educate all those attending Schools of Education. During the Vietnam War, many young men attended those schools as teaching would keep them from being drafted into the Army. This demand for teacher licenses turned departments of Education into Schools of Education as colleges and universities saw these schools as money-makers…and they were.
One of the most important recommendations in these studies was that student teachers be introduced into classrooms from their very first days of college, just the way nursing students are directed into hospitals in their very first term of college. But the sensible idea was ignored. Teachers-in-training don’t work with children in school until their final six months before graduation.
Today America’s public schools are on the way out. Programs in cities and counties across the country reveal that local school systems are using tax money raised for public schools to support parents who want their children in home schooling or in private schools.
In nearby New Jersey, the Republican candidate for Governor is complaining that the present Governor who is a Democrat and his Democratic State Legislature are making it difficult for parents to receive that kind of tax money for home schooling programs. The cry from unknowing politicians is that parents need to have a greater say in what happens in public school. They may think so, but parents don’t.
During all of these difficult years for schools, politicians and parents have been essentially silent. Politicians only suggested endless testing but nothing else. Parents are only concerned about whether their children are happy in school and about their kids getting into the “best” schools and then into the “best” colleges. They have done nothing to learn whether their children are being educated. Had they, they would have discovered what we did when our granddaughter said about her beautiful New Jersey high school: “Grandpa we make up our own grades.”
THE END OF PARENTING
Years ago, we made our only attempt to run for public office when we ran for a place on the School Board in upscale Westchester County’s Rye, New York.
We had no desire to serve on the Board as we found the meetings boring. As our opponent was years younger with no telltale gray hair to suggest he would vote against raises for everyone, we believed we had no chance and didn’t have to worry about winning.
But as with every political campaign that mattered, we learned more than we offered.
What we saw in several public meetings were women of a certain age who had been working and delayed having children until they reached that certain point and then had one or two in their early school years. They came to meet candidates for the School Board because they had moved to Rye and its expensive housing, believing Rye had a great public school program.
What they heard from us – in disbelief – was that it did not. They heard that the only thing the school system was trying to teach was reading and arithmetic. They heard the test averages for a whole series of subjects – history, civics, political science, the sciences like biology and chemistry, music and art – were way down the list into C and D territory and the look on their faces was a combination of disgust at the news and anger towards the man reporting it.
There were no questions asked, no comments challenging our remarks, just silence.
The $300,000 a year School Superintendent stood silently in the back of the room. He had nothing to say because there was nothing to say. These “older” Moms hadn’t heard opinions, just the facts.
That silence was the first marker of parental avoidance.
We knew then that we would certainly lose the election and was both relieved and concerned.
Years earlier we had lived in Waco, Texas and watched teachers stand passively, arms folded, in the back of the room, as we brought brand new methods of teaching to first and second grade students… new ways of learning that they had not seen before. The little children were excited. Their teachers wanted no part of it.
We had attended meetings of Junior High School teachers who literally cried as they told us of how badly prepared elementary school students were as they entered Jr. High….and how hard they had to work to help those children catch up.
They cried to us but to no one else.
As years went by and we had to take our granddaughter to a private Learning Center to help her learn to read – the public school couldn’t do it – we came to believe that the parental need to work for the income that would buy a certain way of life, had overwhelmed what having children now meant.
And this is how it worked. First came the pacifier. Then the toy computer. Then the IPhone. Then the credit card.
There is a commercial from JPMorgan which is telling. It shows a young couple trying to decide how to use their investment money. Should they travel to a Safari in Africa or maybe buy a house and have a baby. The husband smiles and enthusiastically says “Babies”. The wife, grim-faced, says “baby”.
Travel through Brooklyn today and couples in their thirties are seen walking baby carriages and dogs on leashes. They live in rooms because rental apartments are unaffordable.
Those with younger parents arrange to have those grandparents take care of the children during the work week. His parents for two days, her parents for three. Those who can, live in the suburbs…able in many cases to buy their first house in that environment. No worries about expensive or unavailable childcare or enrolling a child in a PreK for three or four year olds. Mom and Dad are taking care of the kids.
THE HARD TRUTH
And so today it is inevitable that the upcoming next generation has arrived essentially uneducated.
If you do not know what you do not know you are ignorant. In that condition doing stupid things is easy, and it is impossible to work with common sense.
In private business, the older generation in charge endlessly complains that this new group doesn’t like challenging work and resists it…taking lots of time to learn it…fighting it all the way and often simply saying they want other things to do which are less challenging.
In politics their ideas sound moronic. Some fighting their involvement, call them “millennial morons” others the GenZ entitled.
Does he really think his stated ideas are possible as he expects this society to enact all sorts of government sponsored programs, or is he simply talking to his personal GenZ audience winning votes he needs and getting union bosses to believe them too. A $30 minimum wage does sound enticing to them even as it would destroy small business in NYC.
What we already have in sections of Brooklyn in the hands of these young people is an example of a willful destruction of what works so that they can build some idealistic community by chasing away an older, constructive community telling them to take their cars and move to Florida.
We don’t have to foretell the future of New York and undoubtedly the rest of the country when GenZ takes public office.
Trouble is not ahead. It is here already.
The Real Estate Board which essentially runs New York and big money companies are still struggling to figure out how to spend money to defeat Mamdani. The only way that will be possible is to support one of the other three candidates and then get out the vote…the vote… for that selection.
Getting out the vote is the key. It will take direct action to do that. TV commercials will not be enough.
THE FUTURE
If we accept the truth that all great nations of the past lost their power when they stopped educating their people, we must recognize that we are in that same boat.
It doesn’t take the Heritage Foundation and its Presidential Front Man to turn America into a lesser nation. We have been doing that for years and they are just showing us how successful they can be because of how weak the nation is.
School systems are aping the actions of Charter Schools by taking public tax money and giving it to privately run Home Schooling programs and Private schools. It is happening now and is just the beginning.
There is no information that the shortage of teachers in many areas of the country will change. Schools of Education do not report a shortage of students but nobody we know has done a study to find out. Economic indicators about what young people are studying indicates that there must be.
In any case what those schools have been turning out breaks no sound barriers of expertise.
News in Texas is that many systems there will be turning classrooms over to Artificial Intelligence agencies for two hours a day while teachers stand aside to become helpers.
That is an indication of what can be done with AI.
The techniques are so far ahead today that they can be designed to provide each and every student in America, from the earliest grades, with an AI teacher, which not only knows what to teach but can also design a teaching technique to each and every child…something our public school could never, ever, do.
We see the need to educate as greater than ever before and will not accept that it is already too late.
Public will can make anything happen in this country.
The question is simple: as regards truly educating our children…does anyone care?