Reading Skills--Where Have They Gone?

Yesterday I substituted for a series of high school AP English classes. These are the advanced classes for upper classmen that supposedly earn the student college credit. I can tell you from personal observation they are more difficult than regular English classes.
I was in the same classroom exactly one week previous to yesterday. What I observed, comparing both days, stunned me. The class was reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. It’s a short book—just over 200 pages in a small page format.
A week ago the classes were reading a chapter that ended at approximately page 40. In a week’s time, these advanced students had gotten all the way to page 95. I repeat, these were advanced students, receiving college credit for their work.
This is typical of all the AP classes I have watched over the past few years.
When I was in high school, they would have handed me a book this size on a Friday, told me to have it finished within the week—and expected I would have a three to five page report ready within the same week. Those weren’t AP classes (they didn’t exist where I was in high school); they were just standard college prep courses.
Every day I substitute I am surprised by some way in which the same courses I took in the 1950s have been “dumbed down”. Can you imagine giving a present day high school student a seven to eight hundred page book to read and report on—as just one additional assignment, on top of the chapters in the text book?
The kid would probably require the services of a defibrillator. I wrote several reports like that in high school—it just came with the territory. But today, the high school classes at the highest degree of difficulty require forty or fifty pages a week. Easy pages—“Fahrenheit 451” is not a hard book to read. It’s short and the vocabulary really should be in reach of a college bound senior.
But this isn’t the most troubling thing. In class after class, the kids finish the assignments I’ve been instructed to give them and, then, many of them tell me they have nothing else to do. So I suggest that they read a book (I always carried one when I was in school).
Some of you might be amazed at how many high school students (smart ones, suburban schools) tell me they never read. They hate reading. They never carry a book with them. I’ll catch them trying to text on their Ipods or sneak a call on their phones. Read, never?
It is a trial for them to wade through 50 whole pages in a week. A two hundred page book that is essentially an “easy read” is a violation of the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution. The reading situation is not getting better; it isn’t even stabilizing. I just read a report that indicates reading ability has dropped substantially SINCE the passage of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.
Something we’re doing isn’t working—in fact it seems to be working backward. When I was a kid and we had some free time, I remember that even the poorer students grabbed a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and paged through it. Such a scene would be unimaginable today.
I snicker at the thought. A room full of teenagers peering through volumes of an encyclopedia when they have nothing else to read. Forget it!
But if you don’t read, school becomes pretty meaningless to you—no matter how large or small the budget or how good or bad the teaching skills. I stumbled on a book the other day that gave me some real insights into what has happened to reading in America.
It’s called “Readacide”. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.

Schools--Are Our Kids REALLY Worth It?

The other day I was subbing in a nice, safe suburban school. When I could let my eyes wander from keeping things from flying through the air or people from slipping in or out of the door, I looked up at a sign I’ve seen on many classroom walls.”
“Our kids,” it says, “are worth whatever it takes”. A lovely sentiment. Repeated over and over in classroom after classroom. Whatever it takes—our kids are worth it. The question crossed my mind—Is there any truth to that sign?
(No! I’m not talking about budgetary woes or millage shortfalls. I’m talking about the emotional and intellectual exertion, the sheer mental effort it takes to get kids to understand, question, learn and grow. Are we putting THAT into them?)
Do we really care? Are “our kids” worth the effort it would take to make serious, growing student s out of them? Let’s ask what would be really “worth it”.
Are our kids worth HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE? Are they worth going through all the hassle and complaining involved in telling them that they have work due tomorrow—and it MUST be done? Are they worth telling them there will be no retests?
Are they worth letting them fall flat on their faces if they have spent sixteen years refusing to listen or respond? Are they worth letting them flunk if they do not do the work? Are our kids really worth that much—or would we really prefer to go on shielding them from reality until it is too late to escape it?
Are our kids worth DISCIPLINING? Sometimes discipline has to be downright unpleasant to be effective. It may even have to hurt. Losing a job, smashing up a marriage or getting arrested can be seriously hurtful. Discipline that might prevent such experiences can in no way hurt more.
The Bible, interestingly enough, doesn’t say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It says something much stronger and more thought provoking: “He that spares the rod HATES his son; he that loves his son punishes him when necessary.” [Proverbs 13:24]
Ask yourself, what’s more loving, more caring. Letting the kid careen into flunking and failure, or getting his attention by making him hurt—and preventing the disaster?
Are our kids worth allowing them to reap CONSEQUENCES of really bad choices and actions. Some day you won’t be able to shield the kid from things that really happen. There’ll be no more retests or forgetting about it. Better a few consequences should land on them now than when they are legal adults with real responsibilities.
Are our kids worth INSISTING THAT THEY DO THEIR SCHOOLWORK and not keep sloughing it off? (it is a horrible pain to go through all the excuses, whining and bellowing that kids can throw in the path of a determined parent or teacher.)
That would be really caring enough—showing that the kids are “worth whatever it takes”. You’d have to give the teacher some tools to work with—including punitive ones. I’m sure this is definitely not what the “educator” who composed the sign had in mind. He or she was going for something far more saccharin and feel-good at the moment.
But fear is, after all, one of the impelling reasons people come to work on time and turn their projects in on time as adults. Fear keeps our speed down to fairly reasonable limits. Fear of the sergeant keeps the raw recruits jogging with their backpacks on. (It eventually keeps them alive when live ammunition is flying around.)
It’s sometimes necessary in the home and at school. It is—as any employer or military leader will tell you—a necessary component of leadership and of getting positive results.
Believe it or not, making certain you are at least a little bit feared is a necessary part of showing that your kids are really “worth whatever it takes”. It shows you care enough to go to the trouble to make sure they succeed. That’s real caring.
Just don’t expect to be thanked—now.

Public Schools--Why They Were Created

Few would argue that the American educational system—for all the billions spent on it—suffers from some serious glitches. Too many kids squeeze through with skills far too minimal to make them employable in today’s world.
It worked when a kid could walk out of school at sixteen, go into a factory and pull the handle on a punch press for several decades, and then retire on some kind of pension. It worked really well in the 1950s and ‘60s when wages for unskilled labor soared along with their pensions.
Except for a relatively few scientists and scholars—who tended to get their learning from private, parochial are public schools located in affluent districts filled with motivated—and motivating—educated parents, we did all right with the semi-literate punch press pullers.
Now the underlying problems with the system—that were always there, but of no real significance—are showing up. Brutal fact is the average public school was never designed to teach people the skills they need to live in a technologically challenging world.
Let’s go back to the beginning—1837, when Massachusetts’ Horace Mann became the first State Secretary of (Public) Education in history. The way we tell the story now, both Mann (who may well have been, personally) and the tax payers of Massachusetts were motivated by an altruistic desire to see all the little children properly educated.
Something doesn’t ring true here. Massachusetts basically invented the American (UNSKILLED) factory system—at this period in time. Kids went to work there at ages as young as eight and nine—and got no education at all.
So what got the same voting tax payers who owned the factories and employed the children at lovely low wages fired up to create a public school system? Blame the unwashed, illiterate, unwashed, Catholic Irish for that.
The factory owners were protestants—at a time when the nation was militantly protestant. Catholics were at best heretical, at worst treacherous and evil. The factory owners were largely from the Island of Great Britain, where contempt for the Irish has been epidemic for centuries.
After all the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England were all English protestants. Scotch Irishmen (also protestant, originally from Great Britain) gained great respect during the Revolution for their ability to shoot British sentries at vast distances—and they kept largely to the frontier areas of the new nation.
There were Germans in Pennsylvania—protestant. (New York City was always suspiciously diverse—14 languages were spoken in the city by 1660.) The rest of the new nation was largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for a few hundred thousand black slaves).
But, by 1830, Ireland had begun a century-long process of emigration, in which two out of every five living Irishmen fled the island—five million coming to America alone. The most Irish city in America became that once bastion of Puritan probity, Boston.
The Anglo-Saxons were shocked, to say the least, at the unwashed and illiterate condition of the new immigrants—the first of subsequent wave upon wave of non-English, Welsh or Scots folk. These “new” immigrants simply weren’t at all like the old Puritans and Virginians.
It became necessary to teach these barbarians how to be proper Americans. Teach them how to write and speak proper English, to wash their hands and bodies, to forego some of their most offensive Catholic superstitions. What better way than to fund a “non-sectarian” public school system that would teach all children to be good, clean, protestant Americans? As more immigrants flooded in, more “public” schools were created.
(Some of that kind of instruction was still found in our schools when I attended in the 1940s.) The Irish reacted, not really surprisingly, by creating parochial Catholic schools so that they could hang onto their own traditions.
But the real point is: can a public school system originally structured to teach cleanliness and protestantism and English values do an effective job of teaching math, the sciences or other purely academic disciplines? Or do we have to go way back to the beginning and construct a completely new system designed to meet the needs of our post industrial, knowledge oriented society?
Might problems with the purposes for which and ways the system was originally structured be part of the reason it isn’t working today? If so, we have bigger problems than can be solved simply by increasing or cutting teachers’ pay.