OK, so then who will teach students about the amazing achievements of our civilization? Should we simply cede our culture and history to be vilified, mocked and bastardized?
Yes, let’s forget all that and go make technology to ensure that those who despise us have all the technological means at their disposal to better control us.
Stuff like this is why I’m applying to get my teaching license for high school social studies/history, young people are shockingly ignorant about history and civics. I’ve encountered high school students who think the US Civil War was fought in the 1940s, who think the Union fought the Nazis, who can’t name the Governor of New Jersey, the capital of New Jersey and who think Kamala is a goddess who will give everyone stuff.
My father was an immigrant from Cuba who could name all the states, their capitals and all the presidents and I know them all as well, this was expected of American children in the mid 1960s. This is seriously disturbing American young people don’t know about their own country or history, I’ve encountered immigrant young people from a variety of countries who can name the states and presidents and are fascinated by American history.
My younger brother has autism and his high school classes just taught life skills like shopping, but no history or literature or math beyond the most basic stuff. When we visited the Manassas Battlefield in Virginia, he had no idea that the Civil War was between the Union and the Confederacy and that New Jersey was a Union state, but he was interested. So we’ve been watching Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War on Sundays after church and now he’s fascinated, he really wants to see Gettysburg one day. He’s catching up after not learning any of this and it’s great to see his curiosity, all American young people ought to know our country’s history and heritage
We’ve been to the Kennedy Space Center and my brother loved it, he’s a big Star Wars fan. I try to get him to read more science fiction and astronomy instead of playing video games, he likes the Cosmos show on Disney+
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Didn’t your father or grandparents have to have a basic knowledge of history in order to pass the civics test when any of them naturalized? Last I checked, one of the questions that could be asked was “What was the cause(s) of the Civil War?”
I re-watched the Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary a while back with my parents (immigrants) and they were just shocked at all the pictures of dead bodies stacked up like cordwood.
I never went to Gettysburg, but my middle school English teacher made us memorize the Gettysburg Address. (I’ve since forgotten it.) Classrooms had pictures of the presidents lining the walls.
How are you handling teaching your brother about Cuba, the Castros, and the Cold War? Right now over half of Americans have no memory of the Cold War whatsoever.
Thanks for the questions. My dad and grandparents took the test back in the 70s, I’m not sure what the questions were. My mother took the test in 2005 and I helped her study for it, she did have to answer the question about the causes of the Civil War. This is why so many naturalized Americans know more about civics and history than many native born Americans.
My brother was shocked by the dead bodies in the Civil War too, he’s seen bodies in movies but not like this. The classrooms still have pictures of the presidents but very few have presidents after Obama, if I was being charitable it’s because they can’t afford to update but my cynical side thinks they don’t want to acknowledge Trump was president. Of course, the class libraries have tons of hagiographic biographies of Obama.
Although my parents are Cuban refugees and I am genetically predisposed to hate Communism, I can sympathize with Cuban people who hated Batista. Cuba was a feudal society and it’s understandable people who were poor and discriminated against would think Communism was a good idea. However, I tell him that Communism is an evil ideology that never works and just oppresses people and fascism is no good either
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The people who could, went for better jobs.
This feels a bit like what happens in churches, when nobody who’d be good at being on the parish council, or the steering committee or whatever, signs up to do the job… because they have more profitable things to do with their time. So the people who end up doing the job are unsuited to running anything, want to get access to the church checkbook, or activist types who are in it for getting in power and then changing everything. Next thing you know, the doors are locked and the building’s for sale.
Same thing repeats, with teachers, city councilmen, school board… except those institutions keep getting funded.
Kind of, but at the same time not at all. Back in the 1920-30s a bunch of commies fled Germany and went fled to America. They got into the colleges and proceeded to teach their wickedness. That was not the start, but its a good starting place.
The thing is, academia has never been cleaned out, a rot was allowed to fester inside it, slowly hollowing it out as those folks gained more power and positions and did as their kind does, hiring only those with similar views whenever possible.
The thing about the communist is wherever they rule, they do their best to destroy cultures, histories, and anything besides the party.
Basically until the education system is cleaned out, and by that I mean upwards of 95% of all administration and probably close to 65% of the teachers fired and barred from ever teaching again, we will continue to slide down this path.
Think about it for a second. The colleges are basically indoctrination camps at this point. Do they ever hire anyone willing to teach American Culture. And by that I mean American as in can trace their bloodlines back to colonial times, not we were here illegally, but granted citizenship by traitors. Of course not, none of them would. You don’t end up with professions voting in lockstep where 98% vote the same damn way, unless you were actively recruiting people who had your same viewpoint. Especially not in a field with as many people inside it.
So frankly no. If you have kids, bite the bullet. One of the parents or their grandparents needs to stay home and home-school them. Otherwise they won’t be taught their own culture. Their history will be told to them falsely, and they will walk away hating you and their own people.
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Yes, we can all just declare that it’s too hard, we are doomed, let’s crawl away and die. Or we can take our culture back. If a tiny group of Frankfurters could do it in a strange country, why can’t we in ours? They didn’t think their project was doomed. Why are we so eager to give up before even trying?
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I didn’t say its too hard or that we were doomed. I stated three points. The first is how academic got into the situation it was in. The second was how to make sure your (people in general, not you in particular,) kids could be taught without being indoctrinated. And finally the third was a path the cleaning out the education field so that it could be rebuilt.
None of that is being pessimistic or defeatist. It is however acknowledging what has happened and how to keep your loved ones from being broken before things can be fixed.
Yes. Communist ruin everything.
But I feel like we could arrange the system better, at least at the grade school level, to avoid some of that.
Back when teaching, as a profession, was largely a temp job for bright young people on their way to marriage or a better career, and certification consisted of anything from zero to a few weeks of teacher training and passing a test… America was the most literate nation on earth.
Now we trap very inappropriate people in that career, with 7 years’ worth of student loans to get a masters’ degree, and no space to switch careers, when, at the two-year mark, they realize they despise children.
I think we could improve a lot of the more intransigent problems in our school systems, without having to scrap the whole thing, if we shoved hard back in that direction: teaching shouldn’t be a lifelong career. It should be a temporary civic duty for bright people with bigger goals. A badge of honor. “Oh, yeah, I taught seventh-grade math for a year before I got my masters’ in applied mathematics. Where did you teach?” “There weren’t any slots open in my hometown, so I took six months to go teach second graders in North Dakota because it sounded like fun! That was before I got married.” “Yeah, I missed out on that when I was young, so after I retired I taught high school for two years.”
Some of the very best teachers I had, particularly at the high school level, were not teachers. Little church schools can hire *anybody* to teach, and often do. So their contratcts for other church employees often came with a requirement to teach a class or two. The fresh-out-of-college enthusiastic young assistant pastor taught history. The choir director taught religion and directed the band. The church accountant taught algebra. And my high school trigonometry class was taught by a retired Navy engineer who happened to be married to my old first-grade teacher (a dear, sweet woman). Somebody’s mom-the-RN would take a few days off every year to come dissect stuff with us. They’d never done a day of teacher training and they were all great. Schools need *more* of that. Those guys were great because teaching was a sideline, and their main job was more demanding and paid better.
That’d also make political takeovers of education more difficult IMO. Not impossible, but right now, get a political operative into an NEA-protected teaching job, and you can never get them out! If teaching were generally a temporary post for people who’ve already done much more demanding jobs, people who are headed for better jobs, and bright young ladies on the marriage-and-family track, you’d get a better quality of teachers overall, without the dreadful institutional inertia that keeps burnt-out old ladies teaching fourth grade for thirty years. Sure, make space for the sweet lady who teaches first graders the Presidents song every year, as long as that’s working out. But it shouldn’t, generally, be a *career*.
See the issue with this is that it spirals back to who controls academia. The administrations, the school boards, and the federal dept. of Education are all in lockstep. The schools are badly run, not because things are falling apart, but because this is how they want things run. Communists in general don’t really plan for the long term, they are very much in the now type of thinkers.
As long as they are in positions of power change is not something that you will see. Or rather change in a positive healthy direction. And that was my point. Without removing the rot inside academia, and barring them from ever entering again change is impossible.
Now this being said I do actually agree with several points you made. You were correct about when it was a temp job, we had an abundance of excellent teachers. You were also correct about how student loans trap people into a job they find out they hate for years with little ability to swap course.
There are a plethora of people who would be wonderful teachers who simply didn’t want to jump through the hoops put up today. I personally wanted to be a high school history teacher. It didn’t work out as I am working in finance now, but the main reason I wanted to do that was to teach kids their history. As it frustrated me greatly that with a few notable exceptions every history professor I had taught either edited history, or never even covered the 1900s.
The student loan debt is a monster. There is no way to get around this. Quite frankly there is enough blame to spread around and no one is really innocent of it, other than those who refused to go to college in the first place. So I’m not going to go around pointing fingers and calling for people’s removal. The only thing I am going to say so I don’t go off in a rant is that I don’t know why student loans can’t be removed through bankruptcy. It makes no sense at all. All other loans and debts can be, but not student loans.
Frankly I would love to see the education system get fixed. However I am a realist and understand that you can’t just expect those running the show to understand that they are wrong and change their ways. It typically takes massive number of such people being removed from power before change can take place, and I think that is where we are today.
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Exactly.
End teacher colleges, and the you-need-a-masters-in-education credential requirements, and you immediately take away the chokehold higher ed currently has on elementary ed.
It wouldn’t solve the whole problem, but it’d be a large step in the right direction.
We of course are homeschooling ours, because waiting for a solution isn’t practical. Even if reforms start now, they won’t reach fruition until my children are too old to benefit.
My state is conducting a very interesting experiment in liberating students and parents from the shackles of a captured school system: they are offering an $8k/yr scholarship per student, to be used for qualified education expenses, for parents who wish to excerpt their child from the public school system. This is less than the amount we currently spend per child to educate them *in* the school system, and puts small private schools within the reach of many parents who could not otherwise afford it. It is also available to homeschoolers (we have not applied, but we know people using it) to use for things like tutors, music lessons, curricula, sports, and classes. It’s been going for… two years? now, and many families are taking advantage of it, resulting in a proliferation of tiny experimental schools– my cousin is running one, with about a hundred students, and it is fantastic. They are teaching kids to swim and sail, alongside the reading and writing and math. This has also, apparently, resulted in the closure of a few really dismal failing schools that parents were desperate to get their children out of. All to the good.
We’ll see how it works out over the long haul, but so far, it’s looking great. Private schools are not required to hire credentialed teachers from teacher colleges. They can hire whomever they like as long as they pass a background check, and since the teachers are not unionized, if the hire doesn’t work out (bad at their job, have inappropriate interactions with kids, try to propagandize students in a way not approved by parents), they can get rid of them and hire somebody else.
As for the higher-ed institutions… most of that could be resolved by ending federal student aid altogether. Next best thing would be to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy. There are way too many people going to college, far too few in the skilled trades, and the everybody-goes-to-college mindset has led to absurd credential inflation, such that in order to get any of the “some college required” jobs you must now have a master’s degree. You shouldn’t have to rack up a lifetime of debt just to get an OK job. But we *should* force universities to divest themselves of administrative bloat. Uni shouldn’t be a jobs program for bureaucratic pencil-pushers with advanced degrees. We could also go a long way toward making Unis great again by making every researcher who’s ever had a paper retracted for reasons of fraud, permanently ineligible for public funding for future research. No project they work on can be funded by public money.
I spent a whole class hour teaching students how to attach a file to an email and turn on the spell check function in MS Word. Also, how to insert a triangle into a .doc file. I don’t envy anybody who will have to explain Excel to them.
People say “credentialism” but who exactly will want them in the workplace when they think that “assign key to symbol” is magic? Literally, that was the reaction when I showed how to do it.
The students in the course are in their Junior and Senior years. I mean, wtf? I’m now considering teaching MS Word to my 8-year-old because this is disturbing.
I feel like a bloody magician every class when I say, “did you know you can justify margins in Word” and everybody goes, “Oh! Wow! That’s amazing!”
This wasn’t amazing even back in 1997 but OK, I guess it’s very amazing now.
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Bring back competency tests for employment.
There is no reason you should have to complete four year degree to prove that you are capable of learning to use a word processing program.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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