Shelly Aldean: Education in retrograde
With the closure of schools around the country as a result of COVID-19, parents have been faced with a dilemma – how to deal with the demands of work (if they are fortunate enough to still be employed) while, at the same time, facilitating their children’s education in the absence of in-person instruction.
According to an article by Bethany Mandel, editor of Ricochet.com and a homeschooling mother of four, “Parents supervising their children’s remote learning have experienced a rude awakening – the in-person version of the education being provided is subpar.” Even Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard professor who warns about the “dangers of homeschooling” admits that “some parents have discovered that public schools are worse than they thought, and have been surprised at how little their kids are learning.” Bartholet estimates that this revelation may cause the number of homeschooling parents to rise from 3% to 6%. However, based on a recent survey by EdChoice, this estimate may actually be low given that 15% of the families interviewed indicated that they are “very likely” to switch to homeschooling full-time.
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In his best-selling treatise entitled “Dumbing Us Down,” author John Taylor Gatto reflects on the fact that fifth grade math and rhetoric textbooks from 1850 (when public schools were first established) contain, what today would be considered, college level materials.
In the past, school subjects were, in large measure, confined to the basics – reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science and social studies. However, today, in some of the country’s more progressive schools, indoctrination has become part of the curriculum. In a recent letter she wrote to the Superintendent of Schools in Gladwyne County, Pennsylvania, Dr. Elana Fishbein, a mother of two elementary school age children, accused educators of trying to “indoctrinate the children into the “woke” culture using resources designed to inculcate Caucasian children with feelings of guilt for the color of their skin and the “sins” of their forefathers”. While Dr. Fishbein, whose Jewish parents fled persecution in Iraq, supports the notion of educating students about race, she is passionately opposed to indoctrinating them into any particular political ideology. You would think that any intelligent academician would be sensitive to the emotional damage that can be done by engendering in a young, impressionable mind a sense of self-loathing.
In my opinion, based on the disillusionment that many parents are feeling, if American public schools are to remain a source of education for more than just the nation’s underprivileged children whose parents are unable to homeschool or afford private instruction, they need to return to the basic premise that public schools exist to help students master the skills and knowledge necessary to offer them a better future in the world in which they live. Schools should not be places of indoctrination based on an instructor’s personal beliefs or ideologies. By the same token, teachers should not be expected to serve as behavioral specialists, life coaches, social workers, or the conveyors of institutional political biases. Parents have a fundamental responsibility to instruct their children in what it means to be a good, productive member of society in a way that benefits not only them but the community as a whole. In the words of Cultural Anthropologist Margaret Mead, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
Shelly Aldean is a Carson City resident.
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