My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.
For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.
When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.
At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.
Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.
The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods.
When my youngest entered kindergarten, they were told not to call classmates, classmates. Instead, they were told to call them “friends”.
This allowed the teachers to say things like, “You need to be nice to your friends.” But the school had utterly destroyed the meaning of the word “friend.” A person in my class might be a friend, or they might be a bully that I can’t stand, or they might just be an acquaintance/classmate.
My daughter was taken to task because she refused to hold hands with a young black girl in her class. We got called in because we were obviously teaching our child racist tendencies. We were told that my daughter refused to hold a friend’s hand.
“Which friend?” we asked. They refused to tell us the name because of “privacy”, you know. Our daughter comes out and names names. So we asked her, “Why won’t you hold her hand?”
“Her hand is wet and slimy.”
It had nothing to do with the color of skin. It had everything to do with an actual issue.
But the Education Industry lied to us. They told us that this was a “friend”. By defining friend to mean any student in the school, they lied.
You don’t get to redefine words to get the results you want.
For years, the education industry has been creating new terms and phrases to describe the same things. This isolates the parent from the student.
So what brings this particular rant on?
Listening to a lecture for a class my wife is taking and a report on a teacher quitting for the way she was treated.
A teacher is an adult. They have usually made it through collage. They typically hold a degree. They are not children.
They might be students, but when on the job, they are not.
So why do so many administrations treat their employees like children?
Why are their classes so dumbed down that I’m giving the answers to the questions from hearing the lecture?
A teacher quit after she was chastised by the administration for removing the wheels from her chair. No damage, nothing that can’t be restored in a few seconds. She was told she needed written permission to make any changes to her classroom.
The public school system in America was designed to create good workers.
It was not intended to teach students how to think.
The discussion I’ve had with my wife, on many occasions, revolves around how we learn. I examine something and figure out what makes it work. She remembers something she was taught. If she hasn’t been taught or doesn’t remember, she doesn’t know.
I figure it out. That is, in part, a result of my parents teaching me and of taking engineering and science classes at university.
I asked my wife, “Have you taken a class in critical thinking?”
Her response was that she had. The logical followup was what is critical thinking and what did they teach about critical thinking.
“Critical thinking should be in your lesson plans and should be a part of the curriculum.”
A longer discussion took place before she realized that she had never had a class in critical thinking. See above about how she learns.
The education industry tosses these terms around. They expect people to use these terms in official documents. They don’t know what the words mean to each other. They often don’t even know what it is that they are supposed to teach.
The result? They put it in the lesson plans, they put it in the curriculum, they never teach it. They don’t know how to teach it.
But you and I are the stupid ones because we ask questions.
Comments
5 responses to “The Education Industry”
I “graduated” from the prison others call high school in 1982. the school i went to did not like students questioning teachers even then. if you retaliated to being bullied YOU were the problem, ect.. “zero tolerance”.. one teacher I found out later told my parents I will never be able to do math.. I can’t do algebra or quantum equations BUT I can and do use normal math every day. They never like it when I told them “those who can’t do, teach”. many of the really GOOD teachers ended up leaving (like politics, the good ones get drove out). hard world to be in especially now, many kudos for teaching us new things!
I was taught critical thinking skills in both Primary and High School. Actually it was by Liberals who wanted us to question Constitutional thought processes and accept the superiority of the Progressive agenda. It worked in the opposite way.
My father taught me how to examine systems to figure out how they worked and repair/modify them.
The “education” system ceased worrying about education decades ago. It was deliberately morphed into an indoctrination system. And that’s ALL it now does.
“Critical thinking should be in your lesson plans and should be a part of the curriculum.”
No.
Not the way the education system defines it now. Nope.
Today, the operative word there is critical, not thinking. As in “Criticize everything you see, never acknowledge any positives.”
What the average person thinks when they hear that phrase is the thought process is critical and examines the most important factors. That has nothing to do with critical thinking as practiced. It’s nothing but “look at everything that’s wrong with…”
“critical thinking” like “common sense” has been perverted by liberals.. its a catch phrase to show how smart you are…common sense used to be taught by parents and family… now we have modern parents who do EVERYTHING for thier children except teach them about life and growing up…