Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

North America is Destroying its Future, One Child at a Time

North Amer­ica, the way things appear to be going, will be left in the dust of the asian pow­er­houses by the 22nd Cen­tury. This will hap­pen for rea­sons entirely of our own doing. North Amer­i­can pros­per­ity at home & sig­nif­i­cance on the world stage is being undone one child at a time.

A solid edu­ca­tion is the basis for future prosperity. Good health is the foun­da­tion for sharp, able minds that can learn, grow, and inno­vate. I have already posted about the poor health-legacy that we are leav­ing our kids, so let me now talk a lit­tle about the unrav­el­ing of our edu­ca­tion sys­tem — a sys­tem which, even in its cur­rent state, lags behind that of our inter­na­tional competitors.

Writ­ers, even years ago, com­pared the edu­ca­tion given to North Amer­i­can kids against that given to asian kids, and found the North Amer­i­can sys­tem defi­cient. Yes, the top uni­ver­si­ties in Amer­ica, in par­tic­u­lar, are pow­er­houses of research and devel­op­ment, but pri­mary & sec­ondary edu­ca­tion lagged far behind. Why?

1. Teach­ers have been stripped of authority
2. Medi­oc­rity is the de facto goal, not excellence
3. Home­work is not val­ued, even by parents
4. Learn­ing is dicontinuous

Teach­ers can­not teach if they can­not enforce dis­ci­pline in the class­room.  Kids can­not learn if they are allowed to lis­ten to music, play video games, text mes­sage, or to indulge in any other dis­trac­tions so that they do not have to pay atten­tion to the teacher. I was appalled to hear from my teacher friend that she and her col­leagues are not allowed to take the MP3 play­ers, PSPs, or cell­phones away from stu­dents. They are not allowed to do any­thing but give an evil eye and repeat, ad nau­seum and with­out any power what­so­ever, “Stop that, and pay attention!”

Kids aren’t dumb. They know when some­one is merely all-talk and no-action. The cur­rent cli­mate — and we can only blame our­selves, the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion amongst which the par­ents of school­child­ren come from — has stripped teach­ers of dis­cre­tionary author­ity in the classroom. They are, in essence, 3-dimensional video record­ings, not peo­ple, not teachers. 

Dis­tracted kids can­not learn. Sim­ple as that. By strip­ping away teach­ers’ author­ity to main­tain dis­ci­pline in their class­rooms, we have taken away their abil­ity to remove dis­trac­tions from the classroom.

No Child Left Behind sounds nice, but it’s a load of crap. We live in an age of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness gone amok, where doing things for-show is often more impor­tant than doing things for-results. Kids need good self-esteem, yes, but telling them they’re doing great when they aren’t, or pulling every­one back so that the tail-enders don’t feel dimin­ished is putting things ass-backwards.

Kids should feel good about them­selves for what they have accom­plished — and kids can accom­plish a lot if you guide, encour­age, dis­ci­pline, and teach them. They should not feel good for sim­ply sit­ting there and breathing.

Do you remem­ber report cards? They tell par­ents how their kids are doing in school. How well are they doing com­pared to the expected standards? How well are they doing com­pared to their peers? A, B, C, D, or dare I say it, F, meant some­thing. Now Ontario is chang­ing to some­thing akin to “Doing well, doing alright, could be bet­ter”. The idea is to move away from rank­ing kids, or mak­ing them feel like they need to be push­ing harder, or mak­ing par­ents or teach­ers feel like they could be doing some­thing bet­ter to help, teach, and guide the kids.

It’s easy to make sure every kid feels like they’re an ace. Dumb every­thing down, pull every kid down to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. Then, you can be sure you will have schools that, as the infa­mous say­ing goes, “every kid is above average”.

Home­work is an absolutely nec­es­sary part of edu­ca­tion. In part, it is impor­tant because of the explicit les­son that the kids are learn­ing from home­work: arith­metic, gram­mar, read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, ana­lyt­i­cal skills. But the other part, the implicit les­son, is just as impor­tant: per­se­ver­ance, dis­ci­pline, the rewards of hard work, self-reliance, team­work, and very sim­ply, the abil­ity to learn better.

I was shocked at a Christ­mas lunch with a num­ber of man­agers from work when the dis­cus­sion touched upon home­work for kids, and one man­ager said aloud, “I don’t think kids should have home­work. We don’t take work home after 5, so why should they take home work after class ends?” I didn’t know what to say to that. I thought at worst he was a sin­gu­lar aber­ra­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, other man­agers in the group nod­ded their heads in agree­ment. Holy cow, I found myself in the midst of man­agers who are them­selves edu­cated and should know better!

Kids have a lot to learn. In just about 12 years, from age 6 to 18, kids have to learn and inter­nal­ize an incred­i­ble amount of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge. There’s no way around it. Lit­er­acy is not optional. Facil­ity with num­bers is not optional. Knowl­edge of his­tory, geog­ra­phy, and sci­ence is not optional. An appre­ci­a­tion for arts, cul­ture, and lan­guage is not optional. The abil­ity to intel­li­gently assess, ana­lyze, and syn­the­size is not optional. These are all var­ied and com­plex areas that kids must learn about from scratch, or else they will not be able to com­pete & thrive in the mod­ern world. That is a lot to ask of a child to learn, and not a lot of time to do it.

Not every­thing can be taught in the class­room. This is the case even with uni­ver­sity stu­dents and stu­dents in pro­fes­sional schools. At least as much is learned by a stu­dent on his or her own, as is learned in the class­room envi­ron­ment. Just as with an ath­lete, the coach or teacher only guides. It is still up to the indi­vid­ual to take it fur­ther, and to con­tinue to learn and prac­tice on their own.

Most dis­turbingly is the les­son given to kids who are not given home­work or are not required to do it. They are told that they only have to do the bare min­i­mum — show up, sit in the chair, and be alive. They miss out on the les­son that hard work cre­ates rewards, and that there are some things that can only be accom­plished through hard work.

Finally, learn­ing must be con­tin­u­ous or else one loses momen­tum each time it stops. Imag­ine an Olympic ath­lete train­ing for 9 months, and then doing absolutely no train­ing for the next 3 months. What would hap­pen when they resume training? They’d suck. Big time. They’d have to take the first month or two when they return just to get back to where they were when they took a break.  Maybe more than just 2 months. That means they’ve lost at least 5 months of devel­op­ment com­pared to some­one else who con­tin­ued to train.

This is what hap­pens when we give our kids 3-month sum­mer vaca­tions every year. Is it any won­der that those kids at home or abroad who con­tinue to learn year-round excel com­pared to their peers who do not?

Do you remem­ber what hap­pened when you came back to school after sum­mer vaca­tion? Your hand­writ­ing sucked. Writ­ing with a pen or pen­cil on a sheet of paper felt strange. Some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pens to kids’ other men­tal facil­i­ties through disuse. Those kids who are for­tu­nate enough to be sent to sum­mer pro­grams of var­i­ous kinds to keep learn­ing would have kept the momen­tum of learn­ing & devel­op­ment going. Those kids who were allowed to veg in front of the TV, play video games, and just go out to the mall or the park every day, would need to build up momen­tum once again.

We are not con­di­tion­ing our kids for excel­lence. Though we mean well — we want kids to be happy, to enjoy life, and to have good self-esteem — we aren’t prepar­ing them well for the future that lies ahead. There is com­pe­ti­tion in the work­place. There is com­pe­ti­tion in the econ­omy. There is com­pe­ti­tion between national economies. Though com­pe­ti­tion is no longer a mat­ter of life & limb, for most of us, it is still there.

There is a say­ing that he who is taught in the strictest school shall win. It is not the strict­ness that is impor­tant — that is only a means, and can be enforced in enlight­ened ways, not through cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment. What is impor­tant is the devel­op­ment of the pupils — our chil­dren, our future — so that they can excel and win, and in so doing, cre­ate pros­per­ity, hap­pi­ness, and well-deserved self-esteem for themselves.