Saturday, June 5, 2010

When Institutions Fail

The evolution of home schooling. When schools become venues of social experimentation and brainwashing rather than places to receive a solid education, then parents have to do something. To quote:
With the ’60s, a kind of sloth and indifference and arrogance and mendacity settled over public education like a blanket. General indictments never give general satisfaction. This one won’t either, I confess. We all pretty much know, in any case, what happened. The quest for “social justice”—busing for racial balance being one instance—drew attention away from Bunsen burners and Wordsworth.
Late 20th-century demography hardly helped. Public institutions reflect public expectations. Expectations for the schools declined markedly. As divorce split up families and the job market siphoned off the achievement overseers generally addressed as Mom, families tended to see classrooms as holding pens for underfoot kids. Schools ventured into new terrain, such as sex education and the representation of the American story as a narrative of racist imperialism. God was advised rudely to get Himself off the school ground, fast. Teacher unions rated pay and benefits as more important to them than standards and teaching methods.
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3 comments:

Michelle Therese said...

"...families tended to see classrooms as holding pens for underfoot kids."

I've been given that impression more then once. I've lost count of the times I've heard, "Oh, just wait until they are in school and then you'll finally have some time to yourself!"

If I wanted "time to myself" I whouldn't have had kids. I didn't have children so that I can then get them out of my way...

elena maria vidal said...

I know, really. I had plenty of time to myself before I got married.

R J said...

What destroyed school education (not least "Catholic" education) in Australia was something that happened slightly later than the 1960s events mentioned in this piece: that's to say, the granting of government funds - at the insistence of lay Catholic activists like B.A. Santamaria who should've known better - to all Catholic schools in the early 1970s.

Naturally this meant that heretical teachers were rewarded by the taxpayer just as much as orthodox teachers were. So there was absolutely no incentive to be an orthodox teacher. Fortunately Santamaria repented of his folly in this respect before he died in 1998.

Unless one is a Jew or a Muslim, there are two and only two ways to educate kids adequately in modern Australia: homeschool them, or send them to one of perhaps a dozen remaining schools that still teach something approximating to Christian truth, and that have adamantly refused government handouts for fear of losing their independence. (There are a few Protestant schools like this as well as, to my knowledge, two traditional Catholic schools.)

Sending them to the typical Australian "Catholic" zoo, er, school in A.D.2010 is pure and simple child-abuse, although not child-abuse of the sort that has mass-media pagan bullies shrieking from the rooftops.