BRAVO FOR DAVID GELERNTER, WHO HAS AN excellent piece that asks why we should even have public schools. He opens with a startling statistic; only 12% of graduating seniors are "proficient" in science, 19th in a study of 21 countries.
And then, of course, there is the whole liberal-conservative thing:
We sent our children to public and not private secondary school exactly so they'd become part of a broad American community. Instead, our boys have been made painfully aware nearly every day of their school lives that they are conservative and their teachers are liberal. Making parents feel like saps is one of the few activities at which today's public schools excel.
I can personally attest to that. In fact, it has gotten to the point that my daughter go out of our way to find current events that will make her Cultural Geography teacher go red in the face. One of my daughters was even instructed to remove a "Norm Coleman" button despite that fact that half the school was walking around with similar "Paul Wellstone" buttons. She was told the school didn't allow political messages.
My oldest has been called Nazi by emboldened liberal students at least as many times as I have, and has had to listen to teachers engage in unglued rants about the Republican Party in classes that have nothing to do with politics. Is this what we call progress?
Public schools used to invite students to take their places in a shared American culture. They didn't allow a left- or right-wing slant, only a pro-American slant: Their mission, after all, was to produce students who were sufficiently proud of this country to take care of it.
Not anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment