Last week, Matt Phelps shared well-thought-out ideas for improving what he has found to be a clearly failing educational system. But his suggestions assume that the system just needs modifications — start the educational process earlier and institute a two-year internship program in the late teens — and not a major analysis of just how the system is now constructed, and how that may explain the problems so existent.
A recent article in Time magazine by Joe Klein illustrates well the ubiquitous ignorance that now exists about the cause and effect of the decline of this country’s educational system. It makes clear the well-generalized American myopia that is widely promulgated.
The article, “America from the Road,” trumpets its attempt to disclose “the big issues our politicians aren’t talking about.”
Klein provides the best possible example of just what is ignored in U.S. society.
He notes, as Phelps did, that there is nearly universal dismay with the state of our educational system. Few have little doubt that the system is wracked with problems. Most blame for the educational miasma centers on teachers and their unions or associations. This is so widespread that politicians jump on the disgust bandwagon and grasp quickly on a favorite political appearance solution: firing those teachers whose students don’t do well on standardized tests. Klein provides a line in his story that personifies this concern: “ … the American education system has proved entirely incapable of taking students to a higher-skill level.”
Toward the end of his article is a description of his visit to a neighborhood in Yuba City, Calif., where he has dinner with many of the people living “in the bankrupt Dunmore subdivision.” He finds it “remarkable” that living next door to the Chavez family he is visiting is a Hindu family on one side, and, on the other side, a Muslim family. A Zimbabwean from nearby drops in, along with Mexicans from across the street. He talks with Bill, a half Filipino and Panamanian, who tells him proudly that Yuba City has the largest Sikh population outside of India.
To Klein this embodies “the nation’s greatest principle and greatest strength: no matter where we come from,” we learn “the things we have in common.” Angela Merkel’s recent declaration to Germans that multiculturalism “has clearly failed” would, at the least, surprise him, if not shock him. And it appears to be outside his thinking capability to understand what it may be like to face the task of walking into a classroom today and attempting to teach composition to students with such varied backgrounds to students having a limited understanding of the teacher’s language.
Somehow Klein’s selective perception misses seeing just what has to make our educational process a futile exercise. Nor does he understand the impact his lauded diversity has on the classrooms of Yuba City, let alone immigrant-ridden New York and Los Angeles, where teaching how to intelligently read a Shakespeare play is, to say the least, challenging. It is fair to ask, is this the problem of an abundance of weak teachers, or does the system and the demographics of the community in which that teacher works guarantee poor results?
Richard Pelto
