BlogsArticle by Founding Headmaster, "How did the Education Scene Get in This Condition?"
HOW DID THE EDUCATION SCENE GET IN THIS CONDITION?I am often asked what it is that is so wrong with education today and, as you probably have much opportunity in you own community to notice the effects of today’s education, I thought that I would address this subject a bit in this letter. Although it may be obvious to all of you that the level of literacy and knowledge in your environment is becoming abysmal, I don’t know how many of you are certain that this represents an actually plummeting statistic—that the educational level (especially in the United States) used to be very high indeed. As an example, I can tell you that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, at the time of its original publication (January 1776), was a best seller in the colonies with over half a million copies sold amongst a population of 600,000 white families. I would encourage you to personally read a few pages so that you can see for yourself the level of literacy possessed by the men who stood and fought in order to make of this country a free republic. HISTORY Throughout approximately this first 100 years of this nation, education progressed along the lines generally influenced by the values the Founding Fathers placed on education. Undoubtedly, the expansion of the school systems was slower than it might have been but, generally speaking, the industrial, economic, agricultural and cultural growth experienced by the U.S. during this period was a tribute to these values and the educational networks they inspired. American schools were demanding and the level of skills in language and mathematics required of a high school graduate were sufficient to awe the average college graduate of today. PSYCHOLOGY The nation’s second 100 years saw the great changes that have culminated in our present scene. These changes were forged from three new social ingredients: Fabian Socialism, the great corporation foundations, and Wundtian psychology. You can get quite an illuminating perspective on the evolution of this change by reading the book The Leipzig Connection (copies can be obtained here at the school) but I thought I’d fill you in a bit on where these changes have taken U.S. education and what seems to lie ahead. It must be said at the outset, the psychology’s hold on education is presently complete, and that, with very few exceptions, there is in the nation no education which is not psychology. This is regardless of whether the school be public or private. The production statistics are impressive: 42% of our high school graduates today are “functionally illiterate” which is an encoded way of saying that they can’t (or won’t) read or write; in one year, recently, 72,000 American teachers were physically assaulted by students; 10% of U.S. school children are currently on Ritalin, a prescribed central nervous system stimulant—this is given to keep them quiet; according to one survey, 80% of central Los Angeles teachers are on Valium. Impressive. Three types of psychology emerged from the ferment of the early years and these are brands you will find on sale in your local schools: behavioral, developmental, and humanistic. Behavioral psychology is a tool for modifying behavior to socially desirable patterns. It is the type of psychology that does its homework with white mice and monkeys and now advocates mood-altering drugs and brain implants. This is some hard core stuff. Developmental psychology is largely traceable to the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, who “discovered” that a baby’s intelligence develops in physiologically determined stages and that the baby is the only animal who doesn’t inherit all his survival traits (finding food, etc.) so these have to be drilled into him at these different stages. Humanistic psychology is the most insidious and perhaps the most evil of the three. Here are some typical statements by humanistic educators: “Some changes are desperately needed. Schools can no longer be permitted to carry out such a horrendously effective program for drying up students’ sense of their own sexual identity. The schools must not be allowed to continue fostering the immorality of morality. An entirely different set of values must be nourished.”1 “…the concept of learning a particular amount of content as a preparation for life is obsolete, and must be abandoned…Emphasis on content is outdated…”2 “…how a person feels is more important that what he knows.”3 (Emphasis added.) All psychology postulates the individual as being impacted by his environment and views its own job as one of helping the individual find and accept a “behavior pattern” that will allow him to adapt to the environment. And that’s where “education” comes in. In fact, that’s what “education” is nowadays. It is the “science” of training people to “receive” their environments rather than training people to be able to causatively and effectively deal with their environments. Among the results, we have disco zombies, conditioned by advertising and media to live out their lifetimes preoccupied with sensory gratification, rather than exercising their spiritual strengths. This is the current scene—politically, economically and culturally. THE CURRENT SCENE AND THE FUTURE Symptomatic of the national condition is the created and well-publicized shift in the popular attitude to drugs. The situation is rapidly deteriorating and our children must be educated to be able to deal with the world they will confront as adults. By “deal with it,” I mean they must be able to really take it on as its core and turn it around, either at our sides or where we leave off. And so we must build up our schools—we must invest in them with our time, with our goals, with our best methods and with our money. If we do this, we will have a future to talk about. It’s not a small project and I believe all educators will welcome your help. I can tell you right now that what I want are the best, most able, most responsible and ambitious students you know and can help get here. We must educate our future leaders. A Message on "Exploring Education" From the Headmaster January 4, 2010 Exploring Education Ours is a technology driven society. Every day newer, better, faster, smaller, more powerful micro-gadgets hit the street, pushing yesterday's older, slower, less powerful, not-so-micro-gadgets aside. The advance is swift. Technology marches on. As a child, one of my most treasured micro-gadgets was a Sony Walkman. I could listen to an album's worth of my favorite music on a compact cassette tape; it was my own personal concert. The sound quality was fair. The music would speed or slow according to battery strength. But it was cutting edge technology and it was fantastic. Comparing the technology of the Walkman to today's is laughable. With no moving parts, today's digital music device can hold 40,000 songs and is a fraction of the size of the Walkman. And if that's not enough, it'll also store and display 200 hours of video. Incredible! So what happened to yesterday's micro-gadget maker? The answer lies in this famous quote by educator Dr. Laurence Peter: “Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” Unfortunately, yesterday's micro-gadget maker, the expert in the technology of compact cassettes, is a master of a dying technology. We can hope his expertise advanced apace with the technology and he is today gainfully employed in a related field. If this is the case, and we hope it is, we can correctly assume his core competencies, his ability to study, to read, to mathematically compute and to reason, were fully achieved in his schooling as a child. But what of the micro-gadget maker lacking these solid academic basics? Without these components of competence in place, like yesterday's discarded micro-gadget, his ability to make his way in today's world has vanished. He has gone from king to pauper. How does the educator of the present prepare today's students to be competent with the unknown technologies of tomorrow? The answer lies in the teaching of the basic academics, the traditional core competencies: reading, writing and arithmetic. Beyond that the teacher must add still more competencies: the ability to study, to communicate, to research and to reason. All of these abilities, fully taught to a very high standard, give the young student a firm foundation upon which all future education can be built. And from there he can build his own kingdom no matter where the tides of technology and change carry him. For, as the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle said, “The king is the man who can.” Colin Taufer Headmaster A Message on Literacy From the Headmaster
In June Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, made a startling statement about the condition of the nation's public schools. He criticized the system, describing it as one that permits, "...lying to children and their parents, because states have dumbed down their standards." (Link:http://www.newsweek.com/id/189237)
Perhaps it is this “dumbing down“ effect that explains why, in a 2007 survey of 97,000 college freshmen, over half of the students polled said they did not get a great deal of satisfaction from reading. Nearly 40% admitted that books had never gotten them very excited. And 43% said books had not broadened their horizons and stimulated their imaginations. (Link: http://dumbestgeneration.com) These statistics say a lot about the quality of literacy education in the nation's elementary and secondary schools, public and private. Despite the school type and where it places its emphasis, the first and most important measuring stick of any school is literacy. Are its graduates literate? Literacy is commonly thought of simply as the ability to read and write. This is a limited definition.
For most of its long history in the English language, “literate” has meant "familiar with literature," or more generally, "well-educated, learned." Only since the late 19th century has it also come to refer to the basic ability to read and write. It is the full and classic definition, of being well-educated and cultured, especially with respect to literature or writing, that should be used when discussing the quality of student literacy and education.
And when we speak of literature, we are speaking of two things really: First, it is all writings that have permanent value, excellence of form, great emotional effect, etc. Second, literature is the writings of a particular culture regarded as having lasting value because of their beauty, imagination and impact.
Literate people have the keys to a broad and penetrating understanding of concepts and cultures. Students in the course of their educations should make liberal use of dictionaries and other reference books to achieve a complete grasp of what they study. Combine this focus on comprehension with a high-volume and rich literature program, and you will see a student’s confidence in and love of reading emerge. And it is through this love of reading and exposure to the many magnificent aspects of our culture through literature, past and present, that these same students can advance their culture to greater heights. This is, after all, what an education should do. For, as author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard put it, in 1980, “It is well worth mining in dictionaries and classics for their exact and sometimes numerous definitions. Words are not just a dry academic subject. They carry the tide of progressing civilization. They are for use in your livingness. They capsule the knowledge and content of the world.” – Ron the Humanitarian: Education In addition to the quality of the material read in a literature curriculum, there is the factor of volume. True literacy is achieved through high-volume reading. The payoff is the more a student reads, the more the student can read. It’s a simple equation. High-volume readers develop bigger vocabularies faster which means they struggle less with more difficult texts. They recognize better the different pacing and styles of written materials. They acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, a sense of aesthetic style in the written word and they discover moral convictions missing from their real life situations.
All of this adds up to faster academic progress all around. It’s like exercising. Go to the gym three times a week and the sessions are invigorating. Go to the gym three times a month and they’re painful. The more the student reads, the more the student can read.
This is where many schools of today fall down in their literacy programs. The quality of material is shallow and the quantity of books read skimpy. This is a recipe for disaster in an educational program. Such a system churns out students who are both illiterate and aliterate. A student who is aliterate is one who is able to read but has no interest in doing so. It is the illiterate and aliterate that push society towards lower standards both in and out of school. As Mark Twain once famously said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.”
Discovery and enlightenment through literature is one of the greatest pleasures of life. Make sure your child is on the path to true literacy in the fullest sense of the word.
Colin Taufer
Headmaster
r
©2009 Delphi Academy of Florida. All Rights Reserved. Delphi Academy of Florida admits students of any race, color and national or ethnic origin. Grateful acknowledgment is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard. Delphi Academy of Florida is licensed to use Applied Scholastics™ educational services and materials. Applied Scholastics and the Applied Scholastics open book design are trademarks and service marks owned by Association for Better Living and Education International and are used with its permission.
Parents' Day VideoProbably the most anticipated part of Parents' Day is the school video finale. Created by Headmaster, Colin Taufer, and assisted by several students, it's a positive look into the past year, who we are and what we've done. To see the video click the following link: |
|
