Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Other Voices (followed by an important afterword) Cancel Public School If we took the future of the nation seriously, we would end public schools tomorrow. by Dan Gelernter A friend who volunteers at a Sunday school in Harlem for low-income children called me the other day, greatly upset: She had been working with a pair of students who failed to learn the assigned reading, which was a short psalm or a prayer. She thought perhaps the fourth graders, a boy and a girl, weren’t applying themselves. The truth was much worse: The two children turned out to be illiterate. Their public school teachers had passed them, grade by grade, into the fourth, and no one had ever taught them how to sound out words. Their teachers graded spelling tests and assignments—they knew they were passing kids who couldn’t read. The two fourth graders didn’t understand words like “will” or “firm.” They couldn’t read them, and they didn’t know what they meant. Yet these children were intelligent. They were eager—touchingly, pathetically eager. And by the end of the hour with my friend they had made tangible progress. But what is one hour, compared with 35 hours every week in public school? The New York City public school system spends $28,800 per student per year—more than anywhere else in the world. A brand-new public school teacher with a master’s degree and zero prior experience starts at $65,000 a year, plus benefits. And the children can’t read. It’s little wonder that children become disaffected, bellicose—what we popularly call “troubled.” Little wonder that they turn to drugs and gangs and crime. When material isn’t taught well, and when the children can’t understand, they often blame themselves. They feel stupid, then resentful. Before long they’ve decided that education isn’t for them, and soon they’ll be lost forever—their potential to live happy, decent, productive, and socially healthy lives is destroyed. Their teachers and the school system are the destroyers. Continued... https://losthorizons.com/N/140.htm#4