Forty years ago when I graduated from college with my teaching degree and was hired to teach in an elementary school things were considerably different compared to what I went through as a student in the late '50s and all of the '60s.
An online friend sent me a link to a great video about what the state of public education has evolved to today. Don't miss watching it. I'd like to share with you my perspective on what it conveys, along with my first-hand experiences related to it.
My first shock was that, in my state, I was required - in order to teach - to become a dues paying member of the national, state, and local teacher's union. I wasn't happy, but as a newly married person, I found myself forced to consent despite my objection.
I find it interesting that this video includes nothing about the teachers union's role in the scenario which takes place in it. Personally, I would think that it would've added an even greater dynamic to the story, but it seems to have excluded it because everyone else involved is filling its role as the defender of the politically correct attitude of the matter.
While the portrayals of the parents in this video are pretty close to accurate, my personal experience with one parent was when I was having a conference with both the mother and the student. The student remarked that something was not fair and I responded that sometimes things in life aren't fair. The mother suddenly became irate and insisted that such a statement was inappropriate and the I should be working to make life fair. My response to her was that it wasn't fair that my brother had been killed by a gang member when only 39 years old, which shut her up.
My wife, who just retired this year, experienced much of the same frustrations. However, for our district - we both taught in the same one - after I retired while she continued, her biggest frustration was that the administration kept changing the district curriculum which turned out to be completely inadequate in so many ways.
As a consequence, and because she was so much more concerned than I about doing the best job possible in her school, she spent uncounted extra hours correcting the material in the curriculum which needed adjustments to work best with her students because it was so poorly written and designed.
Furthermore, the curriculum kept being narrowed down over the years to now only Math, Reading and Writing were being taught. History (Social Studies was the new name given to it by the liberals.), Science, and Art have been abandon, while Music and P.E. have been maintained, but only with a fight by parents.
Our national mind set is to throw more money at whatever problem we face and it will improve. My experience in the field of education over the decades I taught is that whenever an increase in funds came to the district, middle-management grew by leaps and bounds with the creation of new departments with added managers who sucked up the big bucks with six figure salaries.
It's my assertion that today's public schools don't teach children how to think for themselves, but that they demand that they think the way they believe they should. Critical thinking is no longer taught and the result is a sinister form of fascism which is only inclusive of the left's way of thinking about social issues.
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