State of the Union: Restoration of Education, Part 2

By Zach Foster

This is one in a series of articles responding to issues discussed by the President in his 2011 State of the Union address.

Continued from Part 1

It has been well established that mediocrity prevails in American education.  Curriculum has been watered down and standards have been lowered in order to advance the radical social agendas of the 1960s and 1970s.  Professor Jack Wood tackles many controversial topics in his book The Voice of Reason, including philosophy, history, and English:

“What [the five paragraph essay] does to the writing skills of practicing college essayists is abominable.  Purveyors of this little Quasimodo or composition like to define it thusly: the beginning, the middle, and the end.  Ahhhh…. Genius…  Once upon a time, students in English departments studied classical arguments that were gathered from the works of classical rhetoric.  The fundamental model of the classical argument (i.e. rhetoric) is the Aristotelian argument—which has five rhetorical movements.  Hear it?  Five movements (not five paragraphs).”

What needs to be done, aside from education standards and grade-level curriculum being raised over a period of five to ten years (to restore the integrity of education without destroying the current generation of students who have been set up for failure), is the re-education or removal of many current teachers.  They need to be given the classical education they were robbed of when they were in school before they can be able to competently build the minds of society’s youth.  Why would one come to such a bold conclusion?  One would come to it after personally sitting through the farce of public education, being forced to choke on political correctness, doctored history, philosophy that has been politicized, and a comedy of errors such including the “five paragraph essay.”

If the Obama administration wishes to increase of funding of education, perhaps they could consider spearheading a worthwhile endeavor: Send the current teachers back to school to learn what they never got to learn and un-learn mediocrity.  Let this re-education be paid for by the government, rather than countless dollars being thrown away on school districts where it may or may not be well spent.  Bring the greats of yester-year out of retirement to teach them.  Many of the older teachers, those who went to college in the late 1950s and early 1960s (before education went to hell), possess a truly higher education that could be passed on to the current generation of students.  There are a great many retired middle and high school teachers and university professors, well-educated and respected individuals in their academic communities, who would love to come out of retirement for a few years, both for the purpose of re-educating the poorly-taught teachers and for filling their empty shoes, teaching today’s students.

Next: “It is the responsibility of the family to instill the love of learning in a child.”