Long ago, I worked for a supportive principal who concluded our first faculty meeting of the year with this: "Teachers, picture a ship with dolphins jumping on both sides but only one side of the ship has a railing. Where do the passengers want to stand to watch the dolphins?" Then, after a moment he said, "Be a good railing."
Excellent, Ivana. The educational system has little to do with education these days: it’s more of a life-support system for teachers’ unions.
The late Jerry Pournelle published a reprint of a 1914 California sixth grade reader that you can download on Amazon: I doubt that most university freshmen today could handle it. It certainly shows what’s been lost since The day of the one-room school house.
And yet again, Ivana, you have hit the ball out of the park. I used to run support groups for teen moms in high schools. Unpaid. I went to a conference to learn more about helping immigrant kids-paid for by me- and got screamed at for saying ESL (English as a Second Language) rather than ELL (English Language Learners) which had become the new acronym. That was my aha moment when I realized that most teachers don’t give a shit about teaching kids. They just want to look good in front of their peers and be as ideologically “pure” as possible.
Ivana, I must tell you as a former teacher that this is an excellent evaluation. There is a wealth of insight and observation here. However, it is unnecessarily long! Maybe that sounds like a quibble coming from a former educator, or someone - who like far too many people today- just wants a short pithy read. I assure you, that’s not me. I think there is enough material here to warrant a book, or at the very least a series of essays. I’m sure you’re probably a busy person, and I shouldn’t presume to tell you what to do, but your ideas could be supported with statistics, interviews, anecdotes, observational notes from “fly on the wall” school and school board meetings, and it would be one hell of a read. I’d buy the book for sure! You have described to a “t” how I often felt during my career, and expressed it in ways I could not do at the time because it’s hard to define hell when you’re living it.
Ivana, after 2 minutes reading I thought I found the very essence of this piece:
"Because I do not look at children as political raw material. I do not look at them as little identity projects, voting blocs, therapy clients, social experiments, or blank screens for adults with unresolved ideological needs. I look at them as human beings still under construction."
And then I read on and I could have quoted half of your entire piece - as essence. You pretend to write a Post and you´ve written an entire book, no, a scientific analysis of what´s so utterly wrong. And it holds also for other parts of the world because the System is there not by accident, it´s planned, its spread, it´s enforced in many western societies and beyond.
Sad to say, this all mirrors the knowledge that was already present in times of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and others alike. "First you have to capture the children". And with this you build a highway to change the entire society.
An amazing analysis that should be mandatory reading and course study for an Advanced Degree in Early Childhood Destruction . . . er, I mean, Development.
Excellent post! All so true… sadly. A little long, but that’s ok. As I have often stated, a lie is quicksand and once a lie escapes your lips there are forces unleashed that work much like tentacles, or “Ivy” reaching far and wide until it swallows you whole.
“The issue is the lie.
The issue is that the lie is easier.
That is the lesson children are learning: not courage, not truth, not self-respect, not resilience, not independent thought, but strategic dishonesty.”
The family unit must be brought back, revived, strengthened and honored. We’re loosing every battle worth fighting for in our lifetime: the family, true learning, true health, true freedom and true intelligence.
A recent observation: watching highlights of the World Cup and the Knicks vs Spurs, I notice stadiums are filled to the rim and yet church attendance is dwindling. I’m not bashing sports, or promoting religion, but there’s something off balance in society when our moral compass has been tossed aside on important matters while superficial entertainment (with mayhem) are being worshipped.
The direct descendant of the one room school was the neighborhood school, where when you were sent to the principal’s office a parent showed up quickly. We sacrificed these on the altar of desegregation. That was the first instance of community abdicating responsibility to bureaucracy, a trend that has now resulted in only “virtual” neighborhoods, without the risks of actual personal interactions. We can only rebuild communities with their many associations such as church/temple, social clubs, charities not dependent on govt funding, etc. by reestablishing physical relationships with our immediate neighbors. Rebuilding this and deconstructing what you illustrate will take another generation or so. Like politics, all society is local.
Pretty thorough perspective on how it used to be, how it is now, and what the educational system should be in the future. You got most of it right. You omitted the most important factor for today’s woefully inadequate public education system. Teachers Unions!!!
I have children and grandchildren, I’ve been in the trenches standing toe to toe with teachers, vice principles, administrators, principles, and athletic directors. My personal interaction, experience, issues, and scars with every level of public school employees over the last 35 years has been sickening.
The level of narcissism,arrogance, hubris, and condescension is completely off the chart.
Why? Teachers Unions! All public school employees know short of having sex with their students they can say or do whatever they want without any fear of being held accountable or losing their job and they openly flaunt it in your face.
The political bureaucrats and the unions negotiate contracts amongst themselves completely cutting out parents, the actual people who pay the bill through their taxes.
You can’t take the unions on directly to eliminate them, way too politically connected. We need a different, better approach.
What we need is a nationwide voucher system that will return the freedom to choose and the power of the purse to parents, its rightful place.
The voucher system would restore parents to the top of the hierarchy where they belong. In two or three years, you’d be able to repair and eliminate the damage that’s been done over the last 70 years by the mostly communist Marxist leaders of the teachers unions and their members. This is 100% all about money and who controls it. Very little to do with public education.
Regards
PS.
In 1961, 2 and 3 when I was 5, 6 and 7, I attended Portage Park elementary school in Chicago. It’s still there. My mom who was widowed for the second time by my dad dying when I was two and she was six months pregnant with my brother was doing everything she could to keep 3 children housed and fed. When I was promoted to third grade, she discovered that I couldn’t read or write one word nor do a lick of rithmatic. When she confronted the principal and teacher, they blamed me and her.
Needless to say, she was done with their horseshit.
God stops watching and decides to take an active hand in our lives mine in particular.
She talked St. John’s Lutheran school on Montrose Ave into giving her a discount for taking two boys, myself and my younger brother and a discount for my dad because he was a veteran. Too late for my sister she was going to be a freshman in high school.
Gods hand at work.
Mrs. Ebert was my third grade teacher as it turned out her son Jeffrey was also in my third grade class.
So every day during third grade, I would stay after school for an hour and have a one-on-one session with Mrs. Ebert while her son Jeffrey cleaned, erased the blackboard and got the materials ready for the next day’s class. She wouldn’t have been able to spend that time with me without Jeffrey. I ended up doing first, second and third grade in one year to get completely caught up.
Sorry, most of the public school teachers just didn’t care. Half the kids in my second grade class couldn’t read or write much either. I would play with them in the summer as they lived in my neighborhood. They just fell further and further behind.
I could go on and on, but between you, me and your subscribers, we would probably be able to write enough books about the sorry state of today’s public education, and how to reform it to fill the Library of Congress.
The latest is locked, so my 2 cents to that is: young Americans believe in socialism, because they see late stage predatory capitalism failing all around them. While the conservatives are busy defending capitalism, the young have no good choices. Stop defending, and create a better option that the two on offer.
But we need to remember what we teach must matter , and schools have long dovetailed into media and sport, political substitutes for faith.
So we need to agree our content and establish ways of assessing the knowledge on display. Islam has an advantage here. We could learn from its uncompromising stance , Orthodox Judaism as well.
Thank you for this. I NEVER read long essays. NEVER. I did this one only because you wrote it. I was not disappointed. I was saddened by your quiet room(s). You and your husband (I’m a fan) have skills that should be shared. Don’t give up and thank you for an excellent, honest, important essay.
Thoughtful and beautifully written, as always ❤️
Long ago, I worked for a supportive principal who concluded our first faculty meeting of the year with this: "Teachers, picture a ship with dolphins jumping on both sides but only one side of the ship has a railing. Where do the passengers want to stand to watch the dolphins?" Then, after a moment he said, "Be a good railing."
Excellent, Ivana. The educational system has little to do with education these days: it’s more of a life-support system for teachers’ unions.
The late Jerry Pournelle published a reprint of a 1914 California sixth grade reader that you can download on Amazon: I doubt that most university freshmen today could handle it. It certainly shows what’s been lost since The day of the one-room school house.
And yet again, Ivana, you have hit the ball out of the park. I used to run support groups for teen moms in high schools. Unpaid. I went to a conference to learn more about helping immigrant kids-paid for by me- and got screamed at for saying ESL (English as a Second Language) rather than ELL (English Language Learners) which had become the new acronym. That was my aha moment when I realized that most teachers don’t give a shit about teaching kids. They just want to look good in front of their peers and be as ideologically “pure” as possible.
Ivana, I must tell you as a former teacher that this is an excellent evaluation. There is a wealth of insight and observation here. However, it is unnecessarily long! Maybe that sounds like a quibble coming from a former educator, or someone - who like far too many people today- just wants a short pithy read. I assure you, that’s not me. I think there is enough material here to warrant a book, or at the very least a series of essays. I’m sure you’re probably a busy person, and I shouldn’t presume to tell you what to do, but your ideas could be supported with statistics, interviews, anecdotes, observational notes from “fly on the wall” school and school board meetings, and it would be one hell of a read. I’d buy the book for sure! You have described to a “t” how I often felt during my career, and expressed it in ways I could not do at the time because it’s hard to define hell when you’re living it.
Ivana, after 2 minutes reading I thought I found the very essence of this piece:
"Because I do not look at children as political raw material. I do not look at them as little identity projects, voting blocs, therapy clients, social experiments, or blank screens for adults with unresolved ideological needs. I look at them as human beings still under construction."
And then I read on and I could have quoted half of your entire piece - as essence. You pretend to write a Post and you´ve written an entire book, no, a scientific analysis of what´s so utterly wrong. And it holds also for other parts of the world because the System is there not by accident, it´s planned, its spread, it´s enforced in many western societies and beyond.
Sad to say, this all mirrors the knowledge that was already present in times of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and others alike. "First you have to capture the children". And with this you build a highway to change the entire society.
An amazing analysis that should be mandatory reading and course study for an Advanced Degree in Early Childhood Destruction . . . er, I mean, Development.
Two thoughts.:
1) "There are versions of yourself you grieve. There are rooms in the house of your life that stay quieter than you expected."
Life in two sentences. Nicely done... if a bit melancholy.
2) Thank you God for making me homeschool my sons.
Excellent post! All so true… sadly. A little long, but that’s ok. As I have often stated, a lie is quicksand and once a lie escapes your lips there are forces unleashed that work much like tentacles, or “Ivy” reaching far and wide until it swallows you whole.
“The issue is the lie.
The issue is that the lie is easier.
That is the lesson children are learning: not courage, not truth, not self-respect, not resilience, not independent thought, but strategic dishonesty.”
The family unit must be brought back, revived, strengthened and honored. We’re loosing every battle worth fighting for in our lifetime: the family, true learning, true health, true freedom and true intelligence.
A recent observation: watching highlights of the World Cup and the Knicks vs Spurs, I notice stadiums are filled to the rim and yet church attendance is dwindling. I’m not bashing sports, or promoting religion, but there’s something off balance in society when our moral compass has been tossed aside on important matters while superficial entertainment (with mayhem) are being worshipped.
The direct descendant of the one room school was the neighborhood school, where when you were sent to the principal’s office a parent showed up quickly. We sacrificed these on the altar of desegregation. That was the first instance of community abdicating responsibility to bureaucracy, a trend that has now resulted in only “virtual” neighborhoods, without the risks of actual personal interactions. We can only rebuild communities with their many associations such as church/temple, social clubs, charities not dependent on govt funding, etc. by reestablishing physical relationships with our immediate neighbors. Rebuilding this and deconstructing what you illustrate will take another generation or so. Like politics, all society is local.
Pretty thorough perspective on how it used to be, how it is now, and what the educational system should be in the future. You got most of it right. You omitted the most important factor for today’s woefully inadequate public education system. Teachers Unions!!!
I have children and grandchildren, I’ve been in the trenches standing toe to toe with teachers, vice principles, administrators, principles, and athletic directors. My personal interaction, experience, issues, and scars with every level of public school employees over the last 35 years has been sickening.
The level of narcissism,arrogance, hubris, and condescension is completely off the chart.
Why? Teachers Unions! All public school employees know short of having sex with their students they can say or do whatever they want without any fear of being held accountable or losing their job and they openly flaunt it in your face.
The political bureaucrats and the unions negotiate contracts amongst themselves completely cutting out parents, the actual people who pay the bill through their taxes.
You can’t take the unions on directly to eliminate them, way too politically connected. We need a different, better approach.
What we need is a nationwide voucher system that will return the freedom to choose and the power of the purse to parents, its rightful place.
The voucher system would restore parents to the top of the hierarchy where they belong. In two or three years, you’d be able to repair and eliminate the damage that’s been done over the last 70 years by the mostly communist Marxist leaders of the teachers unions and their members. This is 100% all about money and who controls it. Very little to do with public education.
Regards
PS.
In 1961, 2 and 3 when I was 5, 6 and 7, I attended Portage Park elementary school in Chicago. It’s still there. My mom who was widowed for the second time by my dad dying when I was two and she was six months pregnant with my brother was doing everything she could to keep 3 children housed and fed. When I was promoted to third grade, she discovered that I couldn’t read or write one word nor do a lick of rithmatic. When she confronted the principal and teacher, they blamed me and her.
Needless to say, she was done with their horseshit.
God stops watching and decides to take an active hand in our lives mine in particular.
She talked St. John’s Lutheran school on Montrose Ave into giving her a discount for taking two boys, myself and my younger brother and a discount for my dad because he was a veteran. Too late for my sister she was going to be a freshman in high school.
Gods hand at work.
Mrs. Ebert was my third grade teacher as it turned out her son Jeffrey was also in my third grade class.
So every day during third grade, I would stay after school for an hour and have a one-on-one session with Mrs. Ebert while her son Jeffrey cleaned, erased the blackboard and got the materials ready for the next day’s class. She wouldn’t have been able to spend that time with me without Jeffrey. I ended up doing first, second and third grade in one year to get completely caught up.
Sorry, most of the public school teachers just didn’t care. Half the kids in my second grade class couldn’t read or write much either. I would play with them in the summer as they lived in my neighborhood. They just fell further and further behind.
I could go on and on, but between you, me and your subscribers, we would probably be able to write enough books about the sorry state of today’s public education, and how to reform it to fill the Library of Congress.
65 years ago, it’s only gotten worse.
Bravo!
Thank you for this educational and enlightening essay
Shared to local FB pages and to Notes
The latest is locked, so my 2 cents to that is: young Americans believe in socialism, because they see late stage predatory capitalism failing all around them. While the conservatives are busy defending capitalism, the young have no good choices. Stop defending, and create a better option that the two on offer.
Brilliant account.
But we need to remember what we teach must matter , and schools have long dovetailed into media and sport, political substitutes for faith.
So we need to agree our content and establish ways of assessing the knowledge on display. Islam has an advantage here. We could learn from its uncompromising stance , Orthodox Judaism as well.
Thank you for this. I NEVER read long essays. NEVER. I did this one only because you wrote it. I was not disappointed. I was saddened by your quiet room(s). You and your husband (I’m a fan) have skills that should be shared. Don’t give up and thank you for an excellent, honest, important essay.
Your preamble to the subject of school is golden, stand-alone wisdom in it’s own right. Thank you for sharing your life, your heart, and your wisdom.