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Schools have replaced family’s role in teaching

The biannual appearance of “report cards” for the schools iterates the continuing dilemma of education: Effort and funds expended aren’t producing better-educated students. The cards purport to measure the effectiveness of the schools, much like the score card for a baseball game. However, they mislead and confuse the purpose and importance of public education. The fundamental problem is societal, i.e., we have not distinguished between education and training.

Public education becomes ever more practical in nature, which is the main reason most public schools tend to become vocational, i.e., to prepare certified graduates for employment in the workforce. Teachers have become instructional functionaries. Whatever their personal dedication to their jobs, the teachers are highly organized in trade unions, often with tenured tracks of employment, and frequently make significant demands for ever greater autonomy in their teaching venues. The bureaucratization of the public schools has become an impediment to the professional development of teachers and the maturation of the students.

To teach is to perform an instructional act, of a highly prescribed nature, in order to produce a specific effect in the students. This prescription is highly politicized and often highly contrived to reflect the current political consensus and popular philosophy. The prescription is also required to conform to national, statewide and regional norms, demanded by political authority as justification for further disbursement of funds.

Public education has also become highly commercial. The organization, curricula and presentation of material in the classroom, and the effects they produce, are usually measured with materials and techniques provided by commercial publishers in great profusion.

Education, and much training as well, begins in the family and remains there during the maturation of the student. Schools are meant to aid the parents, not to substitute for them. We seem to have lost this vital fact.

Joseph Haggin

Arlington Heights

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