[Texgreen] The US education system

[Roger Baker]

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Mark Morford: Kids these days ...
Mark Morford

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who just so  
happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy  
who's seen generations of teens come and go and who has a delightful  
poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and family and  
beloved teaching career.

He often writes in response to something I might've written about the  
youth of today, anything in which I comment on the nefarious factors  
shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether, say, EMFs and  
junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day  
and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks  
not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among  
students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy  
slackerhood, or that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are  
short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he  
says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are  
overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and  
don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic  
plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again,  
these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored,  
nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step further. It is not only a sad  
slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than  
that.

As far as urban public education is concerned, we are essentially at  
rock bottom. We are at a point where we are churning out ignorant  
teens who are becoming ignorant adults, and society will pay dearly,  
very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless  
fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the  
soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is  
seriously considering moving out of the country to escape what he  
perceives will be the collapse of functioning American society in the  
next handful of years due to the destruction, the shocking - and  
nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who  
stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he  
loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young  
minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's like the  
melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about  
it for years, but until you see it, the deep visceral dread doesn't  
really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of  
television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before  
age 6 and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions  
are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all  
the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to  
incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year,  
there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland  
High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf  
twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year,  
noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when  
confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from  
understanding simple history to working through moderately complex  
ideas to even (in a couple of recent examples that particularly  
distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even  
"democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high  
school students he estimates he's taught during the span of his  
career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a  
functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to  
form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph.  
Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he  
realized that not a single student knew how to use a ruler.

In short, it is, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once- 
passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers nearly powerless to  
stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're only the  
victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger  
picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among  
the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly  
effective educational system, one that generates intelligent,  
thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is  
to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws  
dictating that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just  
pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo burrito and be glad  
we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism.  
For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space  
before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more  
dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem  
is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current  
generation convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and  
malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it  
always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public- 
education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about  
teens and youth movements and actions that impress me. Damn kids made  
the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media.  
Broke all the rules.

Some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs and so on  
that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top  
universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning  
mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and  
acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible  
public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of  
America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were  
they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did  
they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and  
take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions?  
Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them  
are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and  
increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more  
who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and  
the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no  
video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned  
kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system,  
it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the  
population?

As for the rest, the evidence seems overwhelming, to the point where  
it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing  
America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering,  
not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay  
Lohan, but people far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any  
of it, much less change it all for the better.

Too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will even know what  
the word means.
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