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Finally, one of the 4,716 studies of the American educational system conducted last year contained at least a glimmer of sense.
Once again, the wizards tried to find out why American students lag so far behind the developed world in math, science, geography and language skills.
And it turned out that they don't spend much time in class. The typical school day is six hours long, and most school districts convene for 180 days, resulting in 1080 classroom hours a year.
However, the studies found that only half that time is devoted to academic pursuits. The rest? Well, ask any elementary teacher.
Start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. Then take roll. Collect lunch money and dispatch someone to the office so that the cooks know how many meals to make. Those are the things that school administrators care a great deal about, and they get done.
Then it's time to start accommodating fads. One
fashionable sequence, promoted by a fast-food chain and
every candidate seeking office, is DARE. In a truly
educational drug program, the students might pick up some
chemistry, physiology, neurology or economics in the
process of learning about drugs and their effects on
people, but in this country, they acquire holistic
refusal skills.
The nice thing about holistic refusal skills is that there's no way to measure them, and so it's unlikely that any study will ever demonstrate that American students are lagging behind their German, Japanese and Azerbaijani counterparts.
From the student standpoint, a few minutes of role-playing is a better deal than trying to understand how cocaine blocks the norepinephrine re-uptake mechanism in the synapses of the nervous system.
The distraction of the day doesn't have to be DARE, though. It could be water safety, gun safety or sex safety, or maybe a dose of multi-cultural appreciation. Today is doubtless a holiday in some culture, somewhere, and its significance must be celebrated lest the school be sued for hurting a child's feelings by ignoring is culture.
Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with these programs. But they explain why so little time remains for the traditional business of schools.
And that remaining time is also disturbed, because there
are a lot of disturbed children in the classrooms. Teachers
can discipline a normal
kid, but any child with a
dysfunctional
certification can bark, whistle and
throw paper airplanes through the day, and there's not much
anybody can do about it. Most schools spread these students
out; this insures that no teacher gets stuck with too many,
but it also means that every classroom has one or more
permanent disruptions.
That's how it works in modern American education, where the idea is to make students feel good about themselves. Flunking a real subject is hard on the self-esteem (my inner child still writhes in agony every time someone mentions differential calculus), and if self-esteem is the goal, then find some subjects that everyone can pass.
Are there solutions? The wizards say we've got to lengthen the school day to at least eight hours and extend the school year to 220 days.
That's popular with the teacher unions, since it means more pay, and much more time for pleasant feel-good subjects.
But they might look in the other direction. Neither of my grandfathers ever went past eighth grade, but they managed reasonably productive lives -- owning and operating businesses, mastering new skills, reading to acquire new knowledge as necessary. Perhaps the educators should look at fewer years, rather than more days and hours.
When I think about it, most skills I have were acquired by eighth grade (grammar, spelling, math) or else acquired by experience -- computers, furnace maintenance, jackleg carpentry. Society spends a lot of money on the educational years between ninth grade and PhD, and maybe there are ways to get a better return on that social investment. But it's safe to wager that no think tank will look into that.
Here's another proposal. Let the Japanese and Germans worry about factoring polynomials and comprehending the second law of thermodynamics.
We'll continue to do what we do now, and see how our students compare to the world in condom installation, driver education (our accident rate is pretty low, considering), gun safety (when you consider how many guns there are in this country, our violent crime rate is actually quite low), drug awareness (what American isn't aware, especially in an election year?) and general self-esteem.
For all I know, these are the talents that will be important in the world of tomorrow, and wouldn't it do wonders for our national self-esteem if a scientific study demonstrated that we lead the world in these vital skills?
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