Tragi-comic "Educators"

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Tragi-comic “Educators”

The following is from The Thomas Sowell Reader, pp. 335 - 337:

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Tragi-comic “Educators”

American education would be comic if it were not so tragic in its consequences.

Recently I received a letter from a school teacher, asking for an autographed picture for his class because it would “ultemetly” help his students to have me as a “roll model.” Atypical? Let us hope so. But a few years ago a study showed the average verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test score for aspiring teachers to be 389 out of a possible 800.

With American school children repeatedly finishing at or near the bottom on international test comparisons, the response of the educational establishment has been to seek ever more non-academic adventures to go off on.

Among the latest of these “innovations” — a magic word in the wonderland of educational Newspeak — is called “outcome-based education.” Like so many of the catch phrases that come and go, it means nothing like what it seems to mean.

Education based on outcomes might sound to many people like finally creating a bottom line for schools, teachers and administrators to be judged by. Nothing of the sort. It is yet another way of getting away from academic work and indulging in psychological and ideological indoctrination. This is called advancing beyond “rote learning” and teaching school children to “think.” Many in the media gullibly repeat such phrases, without the slightest investigation of what concretely they mean in practice.

When concrete specifics leak out, there is often shock, as there currently is in California, where tests are intruding into students’ family lives and sexual experiences, among other things. The parents who first protested were predictably labelled “the religious right,” but now even some in the educational establishment itself have begun to express concern.

Not long before, parents in Connecticut who objected to film strips of naked couples engaged in sex (both homosexual and heterosexual) being shown in the junior high school were labelled “fundamentalists” and “right-wing extremists,” even though they were in fact affluent Episcopalians.

There are all sorts of prepackaged responses to critics of the public schools, of which this is just one. Recently, I got a first-hand dose of these stereotyped responses when addressing a class of students who were being trained for careers as teachers. They seemed disconcerted by the questions I put to them:

“Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?”

The very thought that the dogmas that they were repeating with such fervor might be open to question or subject to evidence seemed never to have occurred to them. This was a far more ominous sign than their merely being wrong on particular beliefs. How can they teach anybody else to think if they themselves have not reached this elementary level of logic?

By “thinking” too many educators today mean teaching children to reject traditions in favor of their own emotional responses. Objections to such propaganda programs are called objections to letting children think. Anything less than a blank check for indoctrination is called “censorship.”

In light of such non-academic activities in our public schools, it can hardly be surprising that American youngsters do badly on academic tests administered to youngsters around the world. Nor is it surprising that academic work is so readily abandoned for social experiments, ideological crusades and psychological manipulations by educators whose own academic performances have long been shown to be substandard.

It is not uncommon for those few schools with traditional academic programs to have waiting lists of parents who want to get their children admitted. When admission is on a first-come, first-serve basis, it is not uncommon for parents to camp out overnight in hopes of getting their children into institutions that will teach them substance instead of fluff and politically correct propaganda.

Against this background, recent campaigns for a longer school day and a longer school year are farcical. If a lack of time is the problem, why are schools wasting so much time on innumerable non-academic activities? Moreover, there is no amount of additional time that cannot be wasted on similar pursuits.

No small part of the existing problems of the public schools is that the school day is already so long and boring, with so little to challenge the ablest students. Moreover, many average and below-average students who have lost all interest are retained by compulsory attendance laws for years past the point where their presence is accomplishing anything other than providing jobs for the educators.

Despite orchestrated hysteria about “the dropout problem,” what many apathetic students most need is a cold dose of reality that they can only get out in the workaday world — not in the never-never land of the public schools.

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I would make some comments in regard to the above. In our schools today young people are being indoctrinated in the atheistic outlooks of the modern left (i.e. the outlooks of secular humanism). They are being taught that there is no God, no life after death, no heaven, no hell. They are being taught that all truth is relative and that the only thing that is true is what one can scientifically prove. If you can’t prove it, it is not true. They are being molded by an atheistic mentality. They are told that fornication is fine, adultery is fine, that all morality and religious belief is subjective and open to question. Can one by reason deduce that the outlook they are being taught is not true? No, I don’t think one can. I think it stands outside the realm of logic. I look at all of the wonders of nature and of the heavens above find it all so amazing and wonderful that I think that it is inconceivable that there is no God who created it all. Others look at all of the evils and injustice in this world and think that it is inconceivable that there is a God. One thing is for sure. There is a God or there is not. There is a life after this one or there is not. I am convinced that there is a God and there is a life after this one. And I believe there is a final judgment and punishment for sin and wickedness — an eternal hell of everlasting fire as Jesus taught.

Let me say this. What our children are being taught stands in high contradiction to not only Christianity but to every other religion existing today and in the past through the ages. Man just naturally looks at the heavens above and believes there is a God. The outlooks that are being inculcated into our children stand in high conflict to the outlooks and beliefs of millions of people of many societies through the ages. Our modern leftist outlook stands in conflict to the wisdom of the ages.

Our modern left hates Christianity. It is a kind of reaction to Christianity. They hate most of all the outlook of Christianity on moral purity.

Satan hates Christianity also. Mainly for the same reason as our modern left, I think.

10 Dec 2023