MARILYN PENN: STUDENT ENFEEBLEMENT
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With graduation season upon us, it’s not surprising that columnists would voice their comments about the state of education and the disconnect between the university and the real world. David Brooks (NYTimes) objects to the emphasis on individualism and finding one’s bliss:
“The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness – the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.”
Maybe according to Amy Chua and David Brooks but not according to the hundreds of irate readers who reacted with vitriol to the tiger mom’s methodology and certainly not according to mainstream America which has been fed a steady diet of raising children with self-esteem instead of self-sacrifice for a significant goal.
A case in point is the current decision by the City University of New York, a vast enterprise populated by almost half a million students, to diminish its requirements and cut back its core curriculum to make it easier for students to transfer from two to four year colleges and graduate in less than six years. What’s wrong with this approach is that it places the onus for the problem on the wrong party and therefore looks for a solution in the wrong place. The disturbing truth is that many of the students who are accepted at the various schools in the City system are unprepared for college and even unprepared for Community College, a two year version that gives its own degree but also feeds into the larger university. Rather than accepting the fact that not all students belong in college, the city has poured untold sums of money into remedial programs that go on for years with unproven results.
The time and place for remediation is elementary school as many of the students who get pushed through high school are actually reading at a third grade level. Because we have social promotion in our public schools, emphasizing the need not to shame a child over the more compelling need to give him the essential tools for success, that remediation does not exist. In NYC, 98 percent of 3rd, 5th and 7th graders get promoted by scoring level 2 out of 4 on English and Math tests. If the standards were raised to achieving level 3, the number of students who would be left behind would be overwhelming to the system. Schools today are performing largely custodial functions, keeping children off the streets and faking the results of what they’re actually learning.
In most cases the fault does not belong with the teacher or the curriculum but with the enormous lacunae in the vocabularies and school-readiness skills of too many of our students at the time they start kindergarten. They enter school already handicapped by difficult home lives, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders and poor comprehension of the English language. These children get passed along from grade to grade until those that manage not to drop out, graduate from high school functionally illiterate. Because in America we believe that every student is entitled to a college education, they then may enter a community college where they enroll in remediation programs, drag down the level of their regular classes and spend too many years before either failing or earning a degree that has lost all meaning but allows them to enter a four year city college.
By contrast to this self-defeating scenario, the serviceman who came to fix my refrigerator this weekend earned $125 for stepping into my house and then proceeded to charge for parts and labor that totaled several hundred dollars. We may glorify college and look down our noses at service jobs, but very few people graduating from community college or 4 year college without a graduate degree will earn as much as an electrician, plumber or repairman will. Until we are willing to admit that the students we are graduating are the equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, we are not empowering them.
We are simply delaying their recognition that the time spent going thru the system will not assure them a decent job or the competence to handle one. We are in fact, enfeebling a significant portion of our younger generation by failing to let them fail when they are young enough to work harder. By the time they are in college, it’s usually too late to inculcate the lesson of discipline instead of distraction. For the generation raised on twitters, tweets and constant cyber amusement, the notion of doing several hours of concentrated homework is a foreign language, one we have given them no incentive to learn. The shame belongs with our educators and administrators who perpetuate a farce of epic proportions. Where is the little child we need to point a finger at their nakedness?
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Marilyn Penn is a writer in New York who can also be read regularly at Politicalmavens.com.
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