The Myth of Eddicashun

In a college in the Northeast where I taught Spanish language and Hispanic literatures, I once gave a “student” a sentence in a transformational drill.  He asked, “What’s that second word?”

“That’s a verb.”

“Well, what kind of verb?”

“It’s in the preterite tense.”

“Oh, we studied that last semester.  I can’t be held responsible for that.”  I told him to go and try that one on the math department and then report back to me.  When another second-year Spanish student had never heard of an adjective, I asked him how he had managed to graduate from high school without knowing something so fundamental.  I mean, we used to call our elementary schools grammar schools, after all.

He said, “Well, I’ve never studied English grammar.”  When I expressed my shock, he continued, “I’ll bet almost no one in this class has ever studied English grammar.”  I asked for a show of hands, and he was right.  In the faculty lounge I was stupefied to learn that it is now possible to obtain a Ph.D. in English without ever studying English grammar.

All this ties in with another telling incident.  A chapel speaker asked the seniors in the front row why they were in college.  Without exception they replied, “To get a degree.”  To the faculty member seated next to me I expressed my surprise that not even one would claim to be there to become an educated person.

He replied, “They wouldn’t dare.  They’d be in disgrace if they admitted something like that.”  I bring these incidents up because our government is again threatening to throw money at the educational system to bring it up to the standards of the rest of the developed world.  That’s the time-honored liberal response to any problem:  Throw more money at it.

On an airline flight some years ago I was seated next to a Mexican engineer.  I remarked to him that I had heard the chairman of the Department of Education of a major Colombian university state that what his country needed in order to provide high-quality education was better facilities.  I asked the Mexican engineer whether he felt that was Mexico’s problem as well.  He said, “Emphatically not.  You could provide us with multi-million-dollar schools with all the state-of-the-art equipment and highly trained teachers, and Mexican children couldn’t learn, because their malnutrition keeps them from being able to concentrate.  What we need is better nutrition in the early years.”

I submit that the fundamental problem with education in the United States is analogous.  Our children are hardly malnourished physically—in fact, a huge percentage of them are obese—, but they tend to be oriented against the life of the mind before they ever enter kindergarten.  Watching filthy soap operas and world extreme cage fighting, or playing mindless video games,  is not exactly a good preparation for learning in school, nor is the so-called music they hear from the womb through their childhood.  I call today’s iteration of it “the shrieks of the damned.”

When they get to school, instead of developing the basic skills they will need in life, too often they are bombarded with attacks on traditional American values.  Remember the man in Massachusetts who was arrested for daring to complain that he wasn’t informed that his kindergarten son was being taught to appreciate homosexuality?

When asked why the majority of recent high school graduates in San Francisco couldn’t say from which country the United States separated, nor in which century, one of their instructors replied, “Oh, we don’t teach facts.  We teach concepts.”

My paternal grandfather only got through the fourth grade in a village school in the Ukraine, but when he died he was educated far beyond today’s typical college graduate because he devoured all the information he could get about God’s great world.  My father received an eighth grade education in a one-room schoolhouse on the edge of the desert.  He and his friends read and wrote well, they knew history and geography, and they could do a lot of math in their heads.  Even more important is the fact that Grandpa taught Dad how to think critically.

Nothing could be more hypocritical than pretending that pouring more money into education will make it better.  Money may help, but the real problem is the mental and moral bankruptcy of a large proportion of the population.