US Education

Victor Davis Hanson has some observations on the US public educational system at NRO, and some suggestions for improvement. He sees, as I think we all do, cashiers that can't make change, people that can't balance a checkbook, etc. throughout our society. But it wasn't always this way, for many years the US educational system was the best in the world. But then a funny thing happened - teachers started indoctrinating their students on political issues like diversity, sex education, and environmentalism.

"We should first scrap the popular therapeutic curriculum that in the scarce hours of the school day crams in sermons on race, class, gender, drugs, sex, self-esteem, or environmentalism. These are well-intentioned efforts to make a kinder and gentler generation more sensitive to our nation’s supposed past and present sins. But they only squeeze out far more important subjects.

The old approach to education saw things differently than we do. Education (“to lead out” or “to bring up”) was not defined as being “sensitive” to, or “correct” on, particular issues. It was instead the rational ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the abstract wisdom of the past.

So literature, history, math and science gave students plenty of facts, theorems, people, and dates to draw on. Then training in logic, language, and philosophy provided the tools to use and express that accumulated wisdom. Teachers usually did not care where all that training led their students politically — only that their pupils’ ideas and views were supported with facts and argued rationally."

He also suggests rewarding teachers more than adminstrators, athletic coaches, and counselors, and allowing a person holding a master's degree to teach. I once had a look at the high school curriculum from the turn of the 2oth century high school - Latin and two other languages were offered, along with calculus, philosophy, and several other subjects today found only at the university level (and often not even there). My grandfather had a eigth grade education - and read widely, could do basic math functions such as figuring crop yields per acre in his head (he often used a calculator but only to check himself) and knew his Bible like sports fans know their favorite team's won loss record. The dumbing down of America has reached epic proportions today and Hanson's ideas are only a partial remedy.