Posted on 04/29/2009 6:04:59 AM PDT by Graybeard58
The roots of the decline of America's schools go everywhere. Unionization of teachers has made education no longer a calling but a job where employee comfort, enrichment and morale trump the needs of students. By emphasizing effort over achievement and substituting undeserved praise for constructive criticism, the self-esteem movement in public schools has spawned pandemic narcissism; think "American Idol." Even the seemingly inconsequential change of allowing students to use electronic calculators in the classroom has left millions unable to perform simple calculations in their heads.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but an underestimated contributor to this downslide is the evolution of the teacher from authority figure deserving of trust and respect to student confidante and personal adviser. Today, teachers seek to bond with students as if they were their peers. This inevitably has led to two important changes in student-teacher dynamics: growing classroom chaos because of the declining respect for teachers (negligent parenting exacerbates this); and increasingly, "consensual sex."
States long ago passed laws forbidding such relations because teachers have coercive power over students so true consent cannot be given. But as moral standards have fallen; the culture has become more permissive and sexualized; and more and more teachers have been charged with raping or molesting their students, teachers have fought those statutes as unconstitutional invasions of their privacy. So far, the laws have weathered these challenges because teachers in fact do not have a constitutional right to have sex with their students, and vice versa. But in a sign of the times, the Washington State Court of Appeals has found a loophole in state law that it says permits teachers to have their way with their students as long as their partners are at least 18.
Teachers who lust after their students have no business being in the classroom. But if this ruling is upheld on appeal, another court soon enough will decide 16- and 17-year-olds also make suitable prey because they, too, are "adults" capable of consenting to teachers' lecherous advances. Once that barrier falls, just as with same-sex marriage, an activist court will discover the Founders' belief, heretofore unknown and unwritten, that the Constitution protects the right of teachers to have sex with their students. On that day, "doing it for the children" will take on a whole new meaning.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
Thanks for the ping Graybeard.
These are troubling times as morality is under assault by the Godless Left.
It effects every aspect of our lives.
This is just so typical of liberal policies. The changes seem reasonable. They are defendable in and of themselves. I personally am sure that most of the people who propose and back these measures were quite genuinely trying to do good. The problem is that they never look beyond the immediate. They NEVER think through the other consequences of their actions, or if they do, they dismiss them as “someone else’s problem”.
Thus: self-esteem IS important. Kids DO need to be encouraged rather than beaten down. But, if you give praise and “validation” (whatever the hell that is) that is undeserved, then it becomes empty. The less talented kids will never progress, the hard working kids will stop trying, because they get rewarded no matter how much effort they put in, and all of them will never be stretched.
What is it about liberals that makes them unable to see this kind of thing? They are not blind, they are not stupid. I think its root is an unrealistic rosy picture of Human nature. That or some evil ulterior motive...
I suspect that the short-term feeling of doing good is more appealing to these people than the hard work of engaging your brain and thinking it through, which would result in cognitive dissonance as logic clashes with emotion. (Believe me, I know, since I’m a recovered moderate-liberal.)
Your statement is logical, but logic is also one of the subjects that can easily be given up for lost in today’s schools. I teach in a CA high school and logic and inference is one of the harder items to teach.
Today a larger number of kids reach High School with low math levels then in my day (many decades ago). The result is more chaos because kids find it easier to dismiss authority than to try again at what they have failed so far. The schools however know that they need to improve. The accountablity and standards movement, passed in spite of the labor unions, have aimed a spotlight at school achievement and it is working. My staffmates and I are working each year to bring up standard test results, and the kids are responding by learning some of the material that they have passed on for the last several years.
One school is a small sample, but what I see is at least a start back up that road.
And I don’t see the permissiveness except for a few who should not be in the classroom (and they are usually quickly weeded out.)
But then I recall folks like Pol Pot....Stalln, Hitler etc etc etc
“.....they are not stupid.”
Me ol’ Great Granny said it best...”The louder the noise, the emptier the head”, and you know who makes the loudest, most aggravating, and obnoxious noises ever heard don’t you?
Yeah but if you object to the proposals, it comes over that you are “uncaring”, and you get sreamrollered. What, you oppose teaching about gender issues? Do you not CARE that children are not given important information? Dont you realise the rates of teenage pregnancy? Dont you think we need to teach tolerance? and on and on, yada yada. All on the immediate issue, nothing on the consequences...
Maths is hard, and people dont want to do hard things when easy things are more highly rewarded and, well, easier.
Personally, I think Math is the most important subject on the curriculum now (twenty years ago I would have said English). And everyone should know how to talk back to a statistic - its virtually a life jacket in todays society.
"Maths" ? What are you, some kind of Limey?
Personally, I think Math is the most important subject on the curriculum now (twenty years ago I would have said English). And everyone should know how to talk back to a statistic - its virtually a life jacket in todays society.
Do you know the famous book, How to Lie with Statistics ? I had this book out from the library when I was a kid, and my mother had to convince her mother, who saw it, that it was not an incitement to immoral behavior. A futile effort, of course.
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