Where did public education run off the rails? When did we surrender our pact with children to those only interested in education as a new avenue of personal enrichment? Like most revolutions, it didn’t happen all at once, but over time and with the same ultimate effects - resegregation, the denigration of the teaching profession and indoctrination rather than real education. You remember real education, don’t you? It wasn’t so long ago the purpose of education was still to give students the skills required to develop in an orderly, sequential, age-appropriate process into contributing, functioning members of society; to teach students critical thinking and to provide basic reasoning skills. An overabundance of educational initiatives in the past 25 years or so have served to incrementally replace critical thinking as the primary goal with social constructs and standardized test prep that have no business in classrooms or school buildings. My belief is the collective and individual intent of each of these initiatives was, one small piece at a time, to drive away teachers, parents and students, allow the use of public education dollars for private education and personal enrichment and to ensure an undereducated populace that would vote how they were told.
Railroaded
Railroaded
Railroaded
Where did public education run off the rails? When did we surrender our pact with children to those only interested in education as a new avenue of personal enrichment? Like most revolutions, it didn’t happen all at once, but over time and with the same ultimate effects - resegregation, the denigration of the teaching profession and indoctrination rather than real education. You remember real education, don’t you? It wasn’t so long ago the purpose of education was still to give students the skills required to develop in an orderly, sequential, age-appropriate process into contributing, functioning members of society; to teach students critical thinking and to provide basic reasoning skills. An overabundance of educational initiatives in the past 25 years or so have served to incrementally replace critical thinking as the primary goal with social constructs and standardized test prep that have no business in classrooms or school buildings. My belief is the collective and individual intent of each of these initiatives was, one small piece at a time, to drive away teachers, parents and students, allow the use of public education dollars for private education and personal enrichment and to ensure an undereducated populace that would vote how they were told.