Remember the "Three Great Lies"??

A couple of years back, I started talking about the causes for the United States having an educational system that is, not to put too fine a point upon it, a g-dawful mess.

At several levels, it's a classic case of missed opportunities. There was a time (granted, it was in the early 19th Century) when we were getting out from under the divisive influence of a hodgepodge of church schools, private schools, dame schools. academies, and apprenticeships. The standard schools may have started to "teach the children of immigrants [primarily Irish, Germans, and Poles] the proper ways of American civilization," but they rapidly spreading throughout the population, giving the populace a mutual, formative experience. But Congress refused to fund it adequately (sound familiar?) and the system devolved down to locally elected/selected school boards who were given the power to tax the community for funding their school(s).

It took a very few years for these groups of amateurs to establish the principles of "hire the teachers we can pay the least regardless of qualification" and "as the elite of the community, we know what the children of the lower classes require to perform their duties." Meanwhile, they sent their children and grandchildren to schools that were not tainted by the children of the mid-middle class and below.

This theory of education became entrenched in the mid-19th Century in New England and the Northeast, in the late 19th Century in the Southeast, and the early 20th Century in the West. Since then, very little has changed.

So we sit in our "thousands of individual, loosely connected fiefdoms run by selected people and/or community leaders who have no idea about education " position and watch the parade go by. When we do make minor changes, at least since 1950, we tend to do so in line with the Three Great Lies of Education.

I started talking about the Three Great Lies a couple of years back, and events overcame intentions. So I'm returning to the topic with a discussion of the First Great Lie.

School is supposed to be fun.

Please note that third word. It's not that school can, on occasion, be fun. It's not that learning is sometimes a fun experience, surrounded by a reasonable amount of work. The student, according to the current view, has a right to assume that school is a fun place at all times.

Perhaps, in memory yet green, such days were, in some respects, less stressful than adult life. Perhaps not. Make that probably not. I saw a survey some time back where 80 percent of respondents over the age of 30 did NOT cite any part of their K-12 school experience as being particularly fun.

The whole idea that your school years are supposed to be fun is one of the truly dirty tricks that society plays upon its young. Just to make it truly sadistic, we have lately reached a position where we alternate between harping on the many complex dangers and pitfalls of K-12 student life and telling those same people "you'll look back on this time as the best years of your life." Forget bear baiting, the stocks, and public executions. The "best years" routine in TRULY a sadistic cultural behavior.

How would you like to be told you're going through one of the most dangerous, unstable times in your entire life, and IT'S NOT GOING TO GET ANY BETTER? Is it any wonder that K-12 students turn to drugs, violence, re-worked bad 70's rock and reworked 60's styles?

So first we lie about how great the whole process is, and then we tell them it is SUPPOSED to be a lot better. This begs the question "if it's so bloody great for someone, how did I end up with the lower-level seat on the multistory outhouse of life?" But we keep telling them how great life is supposed to be, and they look around at a society where all problems are supposed to be SOMEBODY'S fault, and they get the message. They are not getting the school experience they are owed. So why should they put forth any effort?

Now here comes the really idiotic part. These kids grow up to be teachers, and parents, and (very occasionally) school board members. They then proceed to pass the same great steaming pile of nonsense to their students, their children, and the entire school district. Thus we have the spectacle of the entire school process running briskly in ever-decreasing circles. As parents and educators, we are not to the stage of having run the system up its own nose, but that situation looms over the horizon like a great big looming thing.

NOTHING IN LIFE is always fun. A lot of things are enjoyablel most of the time, but not always. Even if we limit our view to the world of work (You remember work? The thing for which school supposedly prepares the students?), we put these kids into the shocking reality that no job is an uninterrupted joyfest.

So when the kid who most assuredly did NOT think school was all that splendid gets through the system without minimal qualifications, and decides that the next stage is also supposed to be fun, and quits on the whole thing, we wind up with an underclass of bitter, uneducated drones. Given the "victim mentality" of American society, and the firm belief, taught by many religious groups, that violence in a good cause is justified, we now have an armed and dangerous underclass of poorly qualified people.

Let's have a round of ironic applause for the American Educational System.