EDUCATION

The nation’s education system is in crisis. Tests of various sort show that our kids are dumber than kids in other countries, dumber than their dumb parents, just plain dumber. Schools don’t teach what is needed for a high-tech 21st Century environment. It’s all going downhill.

Well, the cranky old guy doesn’t buy it. For more than half a century, he has been hearing that the education system is failing. His first remembrance of the crisis goes back to the ‘50s when something called Sputnik started circling the earth. Many of you youngsters are probably unfamiliar with Sputnik and a lot of accompanying stuff, such as the Cold War, a world not encircled by man-made satellites, and the cranky old guy is not in the mood to bring you up-to-date. (Cranky is peeved about an article in the March 12 edition of the Washington Post about the National Security Council being staffed by a bunch of youngsters whose knowledge of history is about nil; no wonder they are doing such a lousy job of running the world.)

Anyway, the nation’s reaction to the launching of the first earth satellite by the nation’s then mortal enemy—the USSR—was panic about the educational system. It had to be going to hell. Otherwise, how could the Russkies have beaten us into space?

And we have been bemoaning our educational system ever since. Never mind that we put men on the moon and robots on Mars, that we have created a society based on the technology of computers, that we have mapped the human genome, that we won the previously mentioned Cold War. None of it matters because the nation’s educational system is at death’s door.

In the cranky old guy’s view, the main thing wrong with the educational system is the people who have created professions for themselves by advocating repairs, and the politicians who cater to them, particularly those politicians who barely managed a gentleman’s C themselves.

If you want dumb, one of the dumber educational ideas in recent decades is national testing and its policy implementation, No Child Left Behind. Hey, some children are going to be left behind. We may have all been created legally and morally equal, but we sure weren’t all created economically and intellectually equal. For various reasons, pockets of inequity exist in our society. Penalizing those pockets by holding them to some arbitrary national standard doesn’t, in the cranky old guy’s view, do much more than, well, penalize those pockets. Yes, try to improve the performance of the underperforming. But use carrots, not the stick. Punishing whole states, communities, and schools because individual students don’t measure up makes sense only if you get your jollies from inflicting punishment.

One last thing. In the cranky old guy’s locale, the big thing is AP—Advance Placement—courses. They are such a big thing that some Einsteins want everyone to take AP courses. The cranky old guy recently learned that so-called honor’s courses are not really honor’s courses because AP courses are considered higher on the totem pole. It’s become sort of like Garrison Keillor’s world where every kid is above average.

Well, the cranky old guy thinks some differentiation is needed. So he proposes another layer of courses: SAP, or Super Advance Placement. Just plain courses will no longer exist. Most kids will be in AP courses, and the others, the super few, will be SAPs.

Any spelling, grammatical, or factual errors in this piece are due to the fact that the cranky old guy is dumber than dirt.

DSH