“If You Were President: What would you fix first in America’s schools?”
This is the kind of shit that makes me wonder how Fox retains the impression of being a conservative news network. Because if I were president, the first thing I’d do is abolish the Department of Education and devolve the running of America’s schools back on the states, and quit throwing good money after bad in an attempt to solve the educational crisis that we’re in precisely because the government has thrown so much money at the problem.
O’Rourke’s Law: You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
Curmudgeon’s Corollary to O’Rourke’s Law: You can’t fix the fundamental problems of education by throwing money at it. First, you must TEACH.
Generations of children learned to read, write and cipher with no more resources than textbook, slate, and chalk. (In many cases they didn’t even have a textbook.) It’s only in our own day that it’s been decided that without computers, state-of-the-art science labs, and air conditioning, children are incapable of learning.
In our own city — or more to the point, in the suburban school districts — we have built palaces of education on the backs of the middle class that rival our universities for size and grandeur. And our children still don’t learn. My own high school, gigantic and labyrinthine in my day, is even larger and more splendid than ever before, nearly thirty years later. Yet I would say that I probably had a better education thirty years ago than the kids today are getting, and that my high school diploma — for all my crap GPA and class standing — is worth more than theirs are.
At the same time, the horrifically failing IPS school district in Center Township wants to throw more and more money that it doesn’t have at what it thinks is the problem — air conditioning, newer buildings, performing arts centers, giant gyms and stadiums, fancy programs. Folks downtown lament every fall and every spring, “How can children concentrate in the heat?”
I’ll tell you how they can. We did. The only rooms in any of the schools I attended in my day that were air conditioned were interior rooms without windows. And even they weren’t air conditioned very well.
Yet we still learned. What a conundrum.
You can’t solve the education problem by throwing money at the public schools. You have to TEACH. You have to throw out the idiotic left-wing feel-good propaganda that stands in for real teaching these days and start teaching kids to read, write and cipher. Stop neglecting boys because you think girls have been neglected. Stop the idiocy of Title IX and let schools play the sports that people are actually interested in watching.
Get the fucking state the hell out of education. It did just fine before our parents decided to abdicate local responsibility to the state, and ultimately to the Feds.
And LOWER MY FUCKING PROPERTY TAXES. I’m tired of paying for palaces when simple classrooms are all that’s needed.