Have you, folks, heard Trump’s plan for changing education? If even 5% of it comes to pass, it will be a wonderful thing. I’m in Illinois, so giving the control over education back to the states won’t help much over here but everything else is such joy.
Great primary education, at least, is possible. I’m seeing it in my daughter’s private Christian school. It’s small, cosy, homey, everybody knows each other. The kids are outdoors a lot. It doesn’t have the industrial feel of the public schools in our town. Everything radiates normalcy. It’s a traditional nation-state education that promotes patriotism and love for the community. Kids are required to dress decently. There are no uniforms but it’s not allowed to inflict unnecessary body parts on others. The culture of bookishnes and real, paper books is promoted. But also a culture of sportsmanship, of outdoors life.
It’s not remotely perfect. Nothing in human existence is. But it’s significantly better than the public schools where the only kids who learn anything are those who have hypermotivated parents dragging them to every tutoring service in existence.
Public education needs to face stiff competition in order to improve. And it needs a lot less money because it’s currently being wasted on things like luxurious gender-neutral toilets (real story) and downgrading schools for not having many black students irrespective of the regional demographics (also true story).
Clarissa's Blog 
Your description of Klara’s school also describes my kids’ public elementary school pretty well.
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In Illinois, children in public schools are taught “sex assigned at birth” and all the rest of it since kindergarten. They are taught that our country is “structurally racist” since grade 1. Is it very different in California?
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Klara’s school sounds like the ones in Bogota, NJ where I sometimes sub. Small, intimate schools with proper playgrounds and equipment, teachers who know all the kids and other staff, cheerful classrooms with lots of books, all because it is wealthy, liberal town.
Just across the river is Hackensack which has some of the worst schools I’ve ever seen, it’s the seat of Bergen County and much of it is a slum. All the elementary schools and the middle school are hideous institutional buildings with the ambience of a jail, a chronic teacher shortage resulting in a revolving door of substitutes, fat, lazy principals and no dress standards whatsoever for the kids.
I’m not kidding, when I spent a month at the middle school I saw enormously fat girls in tight spandex shorts and crop tops, totally ripped jeans, boys with saggy pants that exposed butt cheeks and every sort of tasteless T-shirt possible. I saw kids wearing T-shirts with profanity, that encouraged drug use or criminal behavior, or had blatantly sexual slogans. The staff could care less since they just want the kids to show up, plus no matter awful the kids behaved the principal did nothing. So letting the states run education might be hit or miss, maybe the schools would get better or just stay the same
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I haven’t seen it yet. What’s being proposed?
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A sad thing I just recently learned is that in many public high schools students no longer have to read a single book from beginning to end in order to graduate.
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I confirm. I hear this every year from our incoming college Freshmen. The concept of having to read “a whole book” disconcerts and unnerves them. This is very sad.
In my daughter’s third-grade class, on the other hand, the minimum is one book per month. A book is to be at least 100 pages long to count. They also have a school-wide reading competition, regular projects based on reading a book from start to finish, etc.
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I would have loved Klara’s school as a kid, I got punished in school for reading way ahead of the book or for reading after finishing up work instead of just sitting there. And college students complaining about reading books is laughable, I graduated college in 2021 and had to read loads of books since I majored in History.
For my senior thesis on the origins of jazz music in New Orleans, I read about 15 books, 10 scholarly articles and listened to loads of 1910s and ‘20s jazz, ragtime and Dixieland, which drove Mom nuts. And I took 4 other classes and wrote papers for them all and made the Dean’s List, so I can’t understand how any college student can complain about reading if they’re in the Humanities.
I read loads at home too, I just finished reading Dominion by Tom Holland which I’d heard about here and loved it. Currently I’m switching between Blood and Gold by Anne Rice for fiction, it’s part of the Vampire Chronicles and it’s about a Roman vampire named Marius. And for nonfiction, I’m reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the African American cancer patient who’s cancer cells are used for all sorts of medical purposes and how her family fought to get royalties and recognition. I honestly can’t not read, too much TV bores me and screens make me tired
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I’m of mixed opinions on this. On the one hand I love to read and I think everyone should read and read a lot. On the other hand when something that should be fun is “required” it becomes a chore and quickly looses it luster.
I remember when I was in middle-school, we were “required” to score X number of points in I think it was called AR, where each book was worth X amount of points depending upon the difficulty, and you had to pass a little test to make sure you had actually read the book in question.
I loved reading, but I hated AR with a passion. Even today I remember a bunch of the guys from my grade got around this by finding little children’s books and using them to pass with. As the school had tied 20% of our grade in English to this, it was more or less mandatory.
Now all that being said I think reading should be heavily encouraged, not just for learning from history, but also for reading for entertainment. If done right those little marks of ink on paper can cause joy and fear, excitement and nail biting anticipation, and so many other emotions. Books can show you new worlds, and take you into the past. I find it a true shame how many people do not get to experience this wonder due to any curiosity being smothered before it can blossom into something wonderful.
So lets encourage reading in schools, but also be very careful not to regulate it into being a just another chore adding to the misery that the state of academia is currently embodying.
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I understand, having reading books as something that is supposed to be good for you is going to backfire with kids. Reading should be fun for everyone, not some competition or as just a grade. Students should be encouraged to read anything and everything they find interesting, the more the merrier.
I read a lot of serious nonfiction about history but I alternate with travel guides that have pictures and maps or trivia books or autobiographies of rock musicians. After reading something like a serious history of Ancient Rome with lots of Latin, I’ll read the autobiography of some ex-drug addict rock star or an Insight Guide with loads of pictures. Kids should be encouraged to read whatever they like, both my brothers read lots of graphic novels and manga and comics but also stuff on military history
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Whatever it takes to destroy the power of teachers unions, I support.
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Never again should there be a catastrophe like the closures of schools during COVID. We should not forget or forgive.
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Laziest pieces of shit in all of government, and that’s a high bar. They just didn’t want to do their job.
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