[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 86, Issue 11

[Phil Stracchino]

On 01/20/10 18:26, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> A 'Renaissance Man' opposed to a rounded education?

No, but you're changing the context.  That's not what I said.

> A college degree is proof of a particular accoplishment that includes  
> the study of various topics.

But we weren't *talking* about college.  We started out talking about
school, about home schooling vs. online schooling vs. private schools
vs. public schools, and what the important focus of basic education
should be.  And I continue to state that right now primary education has
been so diverted by the politically correct crowd that the goal of
actually turning out students with a good solid grounding in the vital
basics, prepared for college or actual entry-level employment outside of
the retail sector, knowing how to learn and study and capable of
balancing a checkbook and comprehending a credit-card disclosures
statement, and understanding hwo their country's government works and
what authority it actually does and does not possess, has fallen by the
wayside.  Have you looked up lately how many entering first-year college
students in various states have to take remedial math classes?  Have you
looked at how many have to take remedial ENGLISH?  It's appalling.

Primary education in the US has failed, because teaching kids *how* to
think and learn, providing them with the basic skills they need for life
outside school, and preparing them for college if they choose to attend
college, have been swamped by teaching them to be unquestioningly
obedient to authority (ANY authority, proper or not), multiculturally
sensitive, not speak or even think anything that might frighten some
bed-wetting ninny in San Francisco, and worship the man in the White House.


Those who choose to go on to college?  That's a whole different
ballgame.  By all means provide them with a well-rounded education and
the opportunity to broaden their horizons.  But let them define those
horizons.  Sure, if you want to require 45 credits in the humanities for
those math-and-science majors to graduate, go ahead.  Knock yourself
out.  But let them pick their 45 credits of humanities.  That way, maybe
they'll study 45 credits of subjects that actually interest them, and
learn something from it that they'll retain beyond the class final.
That other school down the road wants to allow its students to take
narrowly focused curricula that burn the entire 240 credits in math and
engineering, or math and physics?  Fine.  If they can get students who
want to do that, the program will succeed.  If they can't, it won't.

But in either case, those students should be able to walk into the first
day of their first class and hit the ground running.  They shouldn't
have to spend most of their first year of college gaining the core
competencies that their primary education should have provided them with
but didn't, because it was too busy teaching them that the Earth was
created in seven days six thousand years ago and that evolution is "only
a theory", or that dead white males are bad, illegal immigrants are
good, government can do no wrong, and criminals are just deprived and
misunderstood.  Oh, and how to hand-weave a raffia basket.  Because
*anyone* can make a living in the US by hand-weaving raffia baskets, right?

Now don't get me wrong.  *If you get time*, I have no problem with
exposing school kids to rt, music, foreign languages, whatever, *as well
as* those core competencies.  But fer cryin' out loud, *get those core
competencies down solidly first*.  If you can't even turn out kids with
a solid grasp of core competencies and basic life skills, but you've got
time to teach them to throw pots, if the kids you're "graduating" can
weave a Peruvian headscarf but can't construct a grammatically correct
English sentence or tell whether the cashier at MacDonalds gave them
correct change from $20, you're doing it wrong.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.