What is wrong with public education today? How is it different than twenty or thirty years ago? Relatively speaking, are there fewer students who can read, write and do arithmetic today than thirty years ago? Were there the same concerns for education thirty years ago as there are today? Was education effective in the 1950s and 60s but then became ineffective in the 1970s?
Is education today doing anything right? Everyday (Every day) multiple tens of millions of students go to school. What goes on in those classrooms everyday (every day)? How can that many students going to so many classrooms everyday (every day) be so screwed up?
I went to elementary school during the 1960s and to junior and senior high school in the 1970s, what was different then than education in the 2000s? Let me reflect on what I remember from my school days and what I know now as a high school teacher.
In the first and second grades I remember a series of textbooks with the characters Dick, Jane, and Spot the dog. Father, mother, and baby were included in the books. Dick and father were the quintessential male figures, looking and acting every bit the males of the family. Jane and mother satisfied the female roles in every stereotypical way. Spot was the family dog and baby was, well, the family baby.
All the roles of the family members were neatly stereotyped so the reader need not spend time figuring out who was who. The class could get right to the reading lessons. Those lessons were simple and repetitive as the reader saw Jane run and Dick did equally mundane activities. Mother was subservient to father and the children were well behaved for Mother and father. That is how my classmates and I learned to read. I don’t know when I began to read but cannot remember ever not being able to.
In the third grade we began to learn cursive writing. (Surprisingly today, many students in high school cannot read or write in cursive.) By the time I was in the fifth grade I was very capable of writing in cursive as well as printing. Also, in the third grade I remember learning the multiplication tables. We had to memorize them up to nine times nine. We actually devised a table with the digits one through nine across the top and down one side. In the middle where each number intersected the answer was filled in.
In junior high school I remember getting into to science and we actually dissected frogs to study their innards. We worked in teams, two students with one frog among them to dissect. I also learned in the seventh grade that a single drop of nicotine on a mouse’s lips would send it into convulsions and it would expire within seconds. (I can’t say if students today experience any of these things.)
Another exercise we did in junior high school that students today do not do was diagram sentences. (Teachers must have stopped having student diagram sentences years ago for some reason. Perhaps, for the same reason that they stopped making students learn cursive writing.) We spent all of seventh grade English classes learning to diagram sentences. I don’t know how students effectively learn parts of speech without it—obviously they don’t. The rest of junior high school was spent learning science, higher orders of math like geometry, and social studies.
High school was left for algebra, literature, and writing essays. We learned to type in high school and took other elective classes. In high school we took all of what we learned before and used it to study subjects like computer programming and chemistry. All the time spent in elementary and junior high school learning to read, write and do arithmetic was put to good use in high school as we read books like “The Hobbit” and learned to write code for computers. Social studies classes were more in depth in high school where we learned much of American History, Geography, and Economics.
That’s how education was accomplished in the 1960s and 70s for yours truly. I turned out alright (all right). At least I can put two sentences together coherently and know how to figure the area of a square.
This brings us back to the same questions as we asked previously. What happened to education over the years? Why can’t students read or write today? Maybe the answer is ominously simple. We tried to fix education that was not broken in the first place.
Well, if it wasn’t broken then it sure is now, so at least today we have something to legitimately fix—good for us.
Sphere: Related Content
You wrote “everyday” where standard English uses “every day.” (In standard English, these “everyday” and “every day” sound alike but mean very different things.)
Similarly, you wrote “alright” where standard English uses “all right.”
This may affect how others regard your statements on the presumed unbrokenness of your education.
Kate Gladstone
5 Jul 09 at 7:58 pm
Kate Gladstone—
Thank you for the editing. One of the first things I tell my students is I am a terrible speller and to feel free to correct me. If it weren’t for “Spell Check” I’d come across even more illiterate. I guess that is why even the most prolific writers use proofreaders. Nevertheless, out of 750 plus words a less than one percent error rate ain’t too bad.
Perhaps you have highlighted a reason why teachers are often skewered as a group for being the primary cause of our educational downfall. A teacher is “onstage” for hours every day, which is an everyday occurrence—sorry had to slip that in there. Is it any wonder a teacher, the single person responsible for millions of words in an academic year, would mess up every now and then? Even the greatest of teachers, Harry Wong himself, is bound to slip up from time to time. The very nature of the teacher being center stage so much of the time places a target on the backs of all teachers. This makes them easy prey as scapegoats for educational reformers. This is a topic for another commentary on another day.
Thanks again for reading and taking the time to reply. I hope you continue replying often. Many times it is in the replies where the greatest nuggets of knowledge reside.
Goader
5 Jul 09 at 9:13 pm
Beyond the homophone problem pointed out by one writer above, Ms. Gladstone needs help with punctuation and grammar.
Inviting the reader’s indulgence of her slapdash performance is graceless and unprofessional.
A comma goes after “Spell Check” inside the quotation marks for the introductory adverbial clause. In addition, “750 plus” and “less than one percent” are hyphenated adjectives before a noun.
There exists no justification for the quotation marks around “onstage.” Ms. Gladstone does not use the word in a special sense; she uses it in its ordinary sense.
“The teacher being” should be “the teacher’s being”: possessive before the gerund.
“This” in the next-to-the-last sentence of the second-from-the-bottom paragraph has no antecedent.
I consider Ms. Gladstone’s breezy, self-indulgent excuse for illiteracy in herself and in any teacher unacceptable. There is no reason why this teacher or other teachera could not have learned grammar and punctuation in their formal educational career of twelve or more years.
Ms. Gladstone’s error-ridden performance shows that she should get out her 9th-grade grammar primer and study it from cover to cover. To teach, she must catch up on what she failed to learn during her education years.
The correct use of language forms the basis of education. If a person cannot master grammar and punctuation in classrooms over the years of his or her formal education, that person does not belong in the classroom as a teacher.
Illiterate teachers produce illiterate students.
However, to add bonhomie to this criticism, I will join Ms. Gladstone in her moldy solecism: I ain’t kidding, folks.
Lee Drury De Cesare
lee drury de cesare
6 Jul 09 at 1:06 am
Mr. De Cesare’s vast store of information on standard English usage will, beyond doubt, permit him to explain convincingly how this “illiterate” scored 790 points out of 800 on the verbal section of the SAT in 1974, or achieved straight “A”s in English (including straight “A”s on examinations in grammar) throughout the years preceding and following that examination. Passing examinations in the formal standard variety of ourlanguage, of course, does not render one incapable of using an informal variety of the same language outside the examination room. (Perhaps Mr. De Cesare defines illiteracy as the ability and willingness to use more than one variety of our language. If so, he will have a difficult time persuading lexicographers to accept his definition of the word.)
Kate Gladstone
6 Jul 09 at 1:41 am
The important thought to take away from the dueling grammarians is that grammar is no longer taught in high school. I do not speak for middle school, which used to be junior high school, but I doubt it is taught there either. Therefore, if yours truly dreams of writing yet struggles with spelling and grammar, what hope is there for future writers that never studied grammar in the first place?
Why did educators stop teaching grammar? Did education get so wrapped up in the reform movement it cut off its nose to spite its face?
Goader
6 Jul 09 at 4:50 am
I loved my grammer’. She baked some awesome cakes.
My head spins along with the different spins that are offered about what is right with our education system.
Some say the greatest predictor of student achievement is teacher effectiveness while others claim that the socio/economic level is the greatest predictor. There are some who use both of those claims at the same time. using the former to promote the system for success and the latter to excuse the failure of the system.
Perhaps the education system is influenced the same as many other aspects of our society. Planned obsolescence, mass marketing appeal and contrived need for reform keeps the education economic engine running.
Goader, my recollection of my 1-12 education is very similar to yours, except a few years earlier.
PRO On HCPS
6 Jul 09 at 8:11 am
Pro—
We have a consumer driven market based economic system that must grow or it will stagnate like it is doing now. For it to grow the current products and services must become obsolete—as you state. This makes room for the new products and services. Products must be forever new and improved while services provide the customer with more.
Education is not these things. It is not a label proclaiming bigger and better. It is not the barker hawking the newest contraption or elixir. Rather, it is the capacity within which the planned obsolescence resides. It is the ability for bigger and better to exist. It is the possibilities without which nothing new could ever be improved. Education is the reality of that which does not yet exist. Education is potential from which products and services are born. Education is not a commodity like soap or refrigerators. It is not something that a salesperson can quote and deliver just in time. Education is the means by which our economy is possible. It is everything that business is not and everything that is business.
Goader
6 Jul 09 at 9:37 am
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I plead guilty to knowledge of language. I was a teacher and believed that I needed to know language to teach students. I still have that belief. Teachers know language who are worthy of standing in front of a classroom.
You express my skill as a “vast store.” The description is accurate. Few could trip me up in tearing up and putting back together a sentence.
I use “illiterate” in your case in the sense of “violating approved standards of writing and speaking.” Accept my condolences, but I am more concerned about your students if you teach. Students deserve a teacher who is literate.
I suggest your record in English bespeaks grade inflation, dumbing down of text books, and watering down of standards.
My mother once showed me a grammar-and- punctuation test that she took in the fourth grade over a century ago. It was a killer. A college graduate would have trouble passing it today. My mother attended a two-room school house in a farming community. Yet the language sophistication of the two teachers in that little rural school was such they knew how to teach Standard English to their students.
Something has happened to diminish standards between my mother’s day and today. Language has declined. Demand for literacy has declined except that today’s employers’ most frequent complaint about applicants is that they can’t write literate language.
A person such as you can argue on a blog with expectation of approval that you don’t have to bother to be literate. Heck, who is literate these days? is your attitude. Let’s just all wallow in the mud of illiteracy together, gang. To hell with snobs who think teachers have to be literate.
Don’t worry about me and lexicographers. I wrestle them to the ground with ease.
I bested the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He made the mistake of talking down to me on a grammar question because I am a mere girl. I sent copies of our battle to Oxford with his errors marked. I advised the publisher to find a competent editor for the North-American edition. I said this North-American editor shouldn’t have to wear English rump-sprung tweeds but that he should demonstrate competence in grammar and punctuation to have the honor of being the Oxford Dictionary’s American editor. I haven’t heard from Mr. Sexist Lexicographer again.
In your above riposte to my previous comment, you run together “our” and “language.” You said you used the spell checker with aplomb. What happened that you omitted using it in this case? Your comma after “1974″ splits a compound verb. The most frequent error of students testing into remedial English when entering college with A’s and B’s in their high-school English courses is redundant commas.
This is not an abstruse error that you make in common with candidates for remedial English. It’s a low-level error. Your “standard English” should be “Standard English.”
I would write “sentence sense” before your last two sentences were I grading your paper. Your meaning is unclear. Clarity ranks a writer’s chief duty. If a person of average intelligence can’t understand what you write, you must rewrite so that he or she can understand. The purpose of any writing is to communicate.
You have not turned in a satisfactory paper. See me in my office after class.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Note: I can’t italicize the Oxford Dictionary because the blog doesn’t let me. ldd
lee drury de cesare
6 Jul 09 at 3:51 pm
Lee—
FYI, you should be able to italicize text on this blog by using the following HTML Markup Language tags. <em>the text you want to italicize goes here</em> In otherwords, use this tags <em> </em> and place your text between them and it should look like this: Oxford Dictionary.
BTW, does anyone agree or disagree with the crux of the commentary, which is to say educational reform has been mostly about fixing that which was never really broken in the first place?
Goader
6 Jul 09 at 4:23 pm
I don’t know if it broke, but it certainly changed. When you were at school, you didn’t have to send an email or research information on the internet, and any free thinking you had outside of the Dick and Dora stereotypes was quickly squashed.
Today, the ability to italicise using HTML code is a skill that could come in handy for many bloggers. The ability to conduct an internet search to locate the information (which would take less than a minute) is another skill that today’s student could need.
That’s why I am surprised at the emphasis on grammar and punctuation that some people have. Lee tells us that she has this vast store of language knowledge, but she can’t work out that the post that she is tearing apart is actually Goader’s. It is her prerogative to insist that Goader is illiterate, that he doesn’t belong in a classroom if he can’t write clearly, and that she pities his students, but we all know that she wouldn’t have typed a stroke if she had worked out who had posted what.
Kate’s and Goader’s posts are not so poorly written that anyone with average intelligence can work out whose was whose. What is the more important skill in modern education: the ability to cut people down grammatically or the ability to comprehend what you have read?
Kate, you might be interested in the analysis of some of Lee’s writing here.
John__D
7 Jul 09 at 12:16 am
John_D—
Who was skewered was not lost on me. Punctuation can be difficult, not to mention that commas can be elective. I think commas give writing its personality since they are not always mandatory. I am willing to give some leeway with punctuation. I am not so generous with grammar.
Except that someone is learning a new language grammar needs to be correct. Grammar reveals a person’s sophistication and that does matter in the world of business. If I am prejudice it is with grammar. I determine how seriously to take your replies based on your grammar. You have good grammar. If you sounded more like a country bumpkin I would be less incline to take heed to what you were saying.
I am glad that, finally, someone has addressed the content of the commentary. You seem to be saying that the age of computers and technology have changed the way education should be delivered. I agree to an extent. It certainly has changed education; however, the reformers of the world claim that education is indeed broken. They say the curriculum is wrong, that teachers are inept, and students are being shortchanged. I am not so sure these things are the case. No one is calling the reform movement a sham. Instead, people sit idly by while the profiteers dictate what is and is not good education.
Goader
7 Jul 09 at 6:58 am
OK. Ok. The illiterati of the tractor-pull doxology of language have won. They have convinced me that literacy is too hard, that we must go back to prehistoric times before human’s expanding brain invented language.
We will sit around the caves and pick fleas off each other and dump Standard English for the grunts, snarls. and hiccoughs of our prehistoric ancestors. In moments of high emotion, we will punch each other in the nose.
For state occasions, we will invoke burps and click our teeth with emphasis on our incisors. Intellectual cave people will sneeze at moments of high inspiration.
We will keep the grunt-snort-sneeze vocabulary down to a minimum so that even dummies and the self-indulgent obtuse too lazy to move beyond grunts can master the vocabulary as they go scavenging for the leftovers of animal predators and continue rooting for grubs and tubers for subsistence from dawn to dusk.
What we eat will match the sophistication of how we communicate.
Here’s the way the linguistic cave-dwellers will chat:
One grunt: “What’s for dinner?”
Two grunts: “Fricasseed baboon parts.”
One ugh: “Will you scratch my back?”
Two ughs: “I will if you will pick the cockleburrs out of my fur.”
We will keep vocabulary down to under twenty-five sounds.
That way the majority of indolents will stop caterwauling about how learning language is too hard.
In a million years or so, Darwin’s natural selection in reverse will have kicked in; our brains will have given up and shrunk back to orangutan size.
Then we hominids rejoin the orangutans, whom we split off from five million years ago as our brains grew and we acquired language.
We will be one big inarticulate, dumbass family again before language ruined our Eden of pre-hominid blissful ignorance.
Progress is too taxing. The illiterati who claim it’s too hard to learn grammar and punctuation will have won.
And we will grunt happily ever afterward.
lee
lee drury de cesare
7 Jul 09 at 10:31 am
If someone would be so kind as to proofread the following passage I would be most grateful. Pay close attention to the punctuation. I think the grammar is strong so you needn’t bother with it—unless you see something obvious. In case you don’t know the following reply is written in Yeebshee, which is one of the original languages from our cave dwelling era. You probably recognize it now that I said that. If not search your subconscious mind.
Ugh ooowaaa rahwah oogaa bog watah magooo. Ting, yabaa oomow tow monga. Eyett maw suhaw tangee? Owaa tuhe sawah, latah, ying mumba. Mingtow labala sooty pahfug zapota; bepung, estah yameemee woolah ha sohawa kiss.
Yowmaha, bingata tuey sabotonga, “Yip sha piloah zig muwala poingo.” Yaputah masing elaho pali genga mo. Halogaha shupa pus “gahava” nintow my.
Alohab yetshi dong palah ooho. Pish nah hawpee kinzala moo pah ish sohabatingo. Elata dow woosap comah yat foohalawbacaba sito zi. Gapahaw nawspah hiya oogah justax peepee lo. Hoobshla pattai lahwa towgasheema gingkapa towee mufagabingohato arse.
Goader
7 Jul 09 at 4:38 pm
Document your Yeebshee source, Goader. You are pulling our legs. Knock it off.
You do not deal with linguisticparvenus in language or in leg pulling.
This is a clumsy riposte. We deserve more adroit retorts. Lee
lee drury de cesare
7 Jul 09 at 5:13 pm
Doover because this site does not allow a contributor to edit his or her work:
Document your Yeebshee source, Goader. You are pulling our legs. Knock it off.
You do not deal with linguistic parvenus in language or in leg pulling.
This is a clumsy riposte, unworthy of a host of the site.
We readers deserve more adroit retorts. Lee
lee drury de cesare
7 Jul 09 at 5:17 pm
Lee—
I am so good to you.
Ask and ye shall receive. You now should be able to edit your reply. You will have thirty minutes to do your edit and then it becomes indelible.
Try it to see if it works.
Goader
7 Jul 09 at 6:07 pm
Is this Goader? Go stand in the corner, Goader. lee
lee drury de cesare
7 Jul 09 at 11:24 pm
“Doover because this site does not allow a contributor to edit his or her work:”
This sentence fragment contains an example of when a hyphen helps. “Do-over” is readable.
John__D
9 Jul 09 at 7:53 am
No, John D, you err. I use the phrase as a lead in to a list that makes it a sentence. Ugh, ugh, and ughaboo-de-do-dah to you. lee
lee drury de cesare
9 Jul 09 at 4:28 pm
Goader, as a chivalric editor, put in an “a” before “list” in my last submission. I still don’t know how to do the mark-ups. Tell me how again. And change “make” to “makes.”
Is John a polymath, or is he just beating his chest and pretending to be one? I have met my share of machno grammarians in the faculty lounge who didn’t know their ass from their elbow.
See how many posts you have gotten on our grammar tussle? Doesn’t that fact tell you something?
People want to know grammar and punctuation. They sense deep down that unless they master language, they are not educated people. Their intuition is right. They are just ashamed to say what they deep down believe.
You serve a significant need by publishing this grammar agon. lee
lee drury de cesare
9 Jul 09 at 4:43 pm
Lee and others interested–
To edit your reply simply look above your name and next to the date at the top of your reply. You will see a link to click that will let you edit. Remember, you have thirty minutes from the first time you published your reply before it becomes permanent.
Goader
9 Jul 09 at 5:53 pm
To all those of the Goadorian flock it is I, Goader, who speaketh before you now. Listen with your two ears and behold before your eyes my message to you. Make silent your carnal stirrings and hear only what I sayeth unto you.
Speak not ill of your brethren or sistren. Rather, do good in your brother’s eyes and speak kindly in your sister’s ears. Let not evil discourse blacken the hallways of your souls. Leave to me your petty punctuation, your periods, commas, and marks of question. You can never place a perfect period or correct comma, as you are imperfect predicates in the guise of puffed-up participles.
Who are you to speaketh of the subjunctive in your brethren’s eye when a prepositional phrase is in your own? Is it not better to removeth the prepositional phrase from your own eye before you speak of the subjunctive in your brother’s eye?
Amen.
Goader
9 Jul 09 at 6:01 pm
“The illiterati of the tractor-pull doxology of language have won.”
You must be talking to me, right? Pull your head in.
You write much about illiteracy, but “illiterate” is often defined as an inability to read or write. You focus on the writing and have never written a thing about reading unless it’s to scorn someone for not having [you allege] read Machiavelli. What is the point of punctuating something correctly when dolts like you can’t comprehend the content anyway?
“No, John D, you err. I use the phrase as a lead in to a list that makes it a sentence. Ugh, ugh, and ughaboo-de-do-dah to you. lee”
Grunt all you like, cavewoman, and reflect on every time you have taken the piss out of someone while writing that a complete sentence always precedes a colon. Plus, it’s a clause, not a phrase.
That was an interesting post, Messiah Goader. If your brothers and sisters sin grammatically against you, rebuke them; if they are truly sorry, forgive them.
John__D
14 Jul 09 at 9:30 am