Chapter
5
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Our Education System
"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one
generation to another" - G. K. Chesterton
I feel particularly qualified to write about schools since I was an
emergency substitute teacher in my town for 4 years. An emergency substitute is
someone who has been certified by the state to teach, but not as a regular
teacher. We were called early in the morning when there were not enough regular
substitutes available. Regular substitutes are normally certified teachers who
do not want to teach full time. Furthermore, many are very particular as to what
days they teach, what grades they teach and what schools they teach at. So we
emergency substitutes filled in since there has to be an adult with the kids at
all times. We have to have a college degree, pass a police background check and
supply a lot of references.
Given the
doctrine that there has to be an adult with the kids at all times, before this
program, the principal might have to take a class. PE might be cancelled for the
day and the PE teacher might have to take a class. Front office workers might
have to take a class or they may have to close the library and let the librarian
teach a class.
The mistake
they made by setting up the emergency substitute teacher's program is that it
allows ordinary people into the schools. Normally, those in schools are teachers
who have been indoctrinated by the teacher’s education system. We called them
Kool-aid drinkers. They are always ready to defend the current practices in
today’s schools and always singing the tune that all we need is more money.
Thus, with this program, regular people got into the schools and got to see what
is going on. I was appalled. The attrition rate from emergency substitute
teachers is high as the kids are disrespectful and insubordinate. It is a very
stressful if you try to keep order and actually teach. Many don't even try to
teach and are just baby sitters.
During
those 4 years I learned a lot about our schools. My first day of teaching, and
the first time that I had been in secondary schools in 40 years, was horrid. It
was 10th grade science. I had to threaten to send one kid to the office if he
did not stop playing his guitar. One girl would not get off her cell phone.
Everyone was slouching in their seat and it was a great effort just to get them
to sit up straight. Many tried to sit on the desk part with their feet in the
seat part. It was a horrible experience and I was shocked by the disrespect and
insubordination I experienced.
I am not a
quitter by nature so I told myself that I would give this a week. But if this is
what teaching is like you can count me out. I was an instructor in the Navy and
knew how to present material. But the kids would not behave. I could not believe
what I was seeing. Fortunately, I have a quick wit. I quickly realized that this
was like hecklers in the audience. So I started nailing them. I pointed to one
kid who was acting up. I said “class, this is what happens if the mother
smokes when she is pregnant”. The class roared and the kid, humiliated, sat
down and shut up. I told one kid to behave himself. He continued misbehaving. So
I said to the class in a most serious and sincere way “does he speak
English?” They laughed and he shut up.” It turns out that this is a
violation of the rules. You can’t embarrass or humiliate the student
regardless of what they are doing, including disrupting class. It seems that
that would affect their self-esteem and these days it’s all about the
student’s self-esteem.
In my day
self-esteem came from making good grades but that has all changed. It seems that
there has been a revolution in education starting with the Great Society and
includes the boomer effect. This revolution required rethinking everything that
has been done in schools in 5000 years. Nothing was left unchanged. In fact, the
main thing that changed is that the drop out rate has increased and the scores
on standard tests have declined when compared to the rest of the world.
America’s education system, once the best in the world, is in crisis. There
are many reasons for this and we will examine some of these changes and their
effect on our schools. But it can be shown that this change coincides with
boomers becoming teachers. In effect, the 60’s revolution continued into the
education workplace.
One major
change is the “social promotion”. It was determined by the socialist Left
that being held back to repeat a class was harmful to the self-esteem of the
student. It would be better to go ahead and promote the student to the next
grade with their peers even if they could not do the work. The so called
“social promotion” is now practiced everywhere. Few kids get held back
anymore. For my generation the threat of getting held back was motivation to
study. That motivation is now gone.
But there
is a more insidious reason for the social promotion. First, to hold a kid back
is sure to start a war with the kid’s parents. Parents these days always take
the kid’s side when dealing with schools. It’s the way they show the kid
that they love them. The charge will be made that it is the teacher who has
failed to teach rather than the student who has failed to learn. The parents
will appeal to the principal and even the school superintendent, perhaps even
the school board. If you were a teacher you would find it easier to just promote
the kid and be done with it. After all, if all your kids get promoted to the
next grade, then you must be a good teacher.
Next came
grade inflation. If a kid gets Fs on everything then how can you possibly
promote them to the next grade? The solution to that dilemma is simple – just
give them Cs and Ds on everything.
If fact, you will look like a good teacher if all your kids get As and Bs so
just give all of them good grades. This is called “grade inflation” and it's
happening. The way to accomplish this is to make the tests easy. Rather than
converting 17/31 to a decimal make the question convert 1/4 to a decimal. Easy
tests and high scores. Then when there are standard tests with more difficult
questions, the kids do poorly.
In my state
50% of the 10th graders can not pass the state’s standard math test
which is actually 8th grade math. Yet 100% of the kids pass math class and get
promoted. Hmmmm.
I once saw
a girl on TV who was devastated. It seems that she had made As and Bs all
through school in math. When she got to college, she was put in remedial math.
Grade inflation is real.
So schools
have become a pipe line through which all kids move with social promotion and
come out the other end with fairly good grades thanks to grade inflation. Only
standard tests can show what is really going on. The SAT scores began to fall.
Since these numbers represent averages of all students across the nation, these
numbers are statistically valid. When these numbers show that minorities did
worse than non-minorities, the charge was quickly made that the test was
racially biased. Only white kids can pass these tests because of the nature of
the questions. It’s hard to imagine a racially biased math test. Perhaps
History and English Literature but Math?
The No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was an attempt to fix our schools. It called for
each state to set up standardized tests for evaluating their schools. But the
immediate reaction from parents and teachers was to claim that these tests were
poorly constructed and racially biased. NCLB is currently up for renewal. The
powerful teachers unions in Washington D.C. are fighting it already, calling for
more “reasonable” tests. If you can read between the lines, this translates
to easier tests. The kids have all heard of NCLB and from its name, they may
form the opinion that they will get promoted regardless of their level of work.
The name does imply that. Perhaps we should call it the SGLB test - Study or Get
Left Behind.
The theory
was that the schools work but the standard tests do not show what the kids know.
What a convenient theory if you are in the school business. So many colleges
have stopped using the SAT as a requirement for admission. Nor do they have
their own test. They just accept the grade point average of a student but recall
that we have grade inflation.
I don’t
have a particular problem with this college admission criteria. In fact, I would
say let everybody have a chance at one quarter of college. If they get Cs they
can stay in. But that would soon lead to a system where everybody got Cs.
Colleges are businesses and students are customers. Businesses want as many
customers as they can get. The theory seems to be “if you have the tuition
then we have the classroom seat.”
One of the changes that has taken place is the way we teach Math. It
began as the “New Math”. Everybody remembers when the parents could not help
their kids with their homework. That has been dropped and it has been admitted
that that did not work but not before an entire generation of kids was produced
that cannot do simple Math like arithmetic.
But the New
Math was replaced by more methodologies to teach math. All of this is based on
the belief that schooling should be more than mere memorization. The problem
with that thinking is that the multiplication, addition and subtraction tables
have to be memorized. There is no other way apart from counting on your fingers.
When you ask someone what 3 plus 4 is and they start counting on their fingers,
they look stupid.
There is a
doctrine in academia called “publish or perish. That means that PhDs must do
more than just teach a couple of classes each day. They must write books and
articles. The motivation for this is that universities measure themselves on how
many books and articles that their professors have written. The more books their
professors have written, the higher the tuition can be because the university
has famous professors.
Now suppose
you are a professor in the Education department. What you need to do is to come
up with a new methodology to teach, say, Math. This is where all these new
methodologies come from. Beyond that, it would be nice to have it adopted by,
say, the National Association of Mathematics Teachers. Next it is in schools.
Adopting new methodologies for teaching math, English and even Science is the
way that school boards and state education agencies make it look like the
schools are being improved and by extension, that they are doing their jobs. So
we are paraded by a train of new methodologies for teaching.
Also, those who print text books are always ready to sell new books to
replace existing books. The problem with this, especially with Math, is that
there was nothing wrong with the way it was done in the 50’s. We all learned
to do arithmetic with fractions, decimals and make the necessary conversions.
But that
required memorizing the multiplication tables and the algorithms for this
arithmetic. When you buy into the idea that school should be more than
memorizing, then you buy into dropping the way that worked for centuries and
substituting these methodologies – New Math, Reform Math, Discovery Math,
Constructionist Math California Math and Integrated Math, to name a few Math
teaching methodologies. The problem with these methodologies is that kids
can’t do math these days. Think I’m crazy, think I’m exaggerating? Ask a
kid you know above the 5th grade to convert this to a decimal.
1/7 + 6.126/.056 - .32 x .83 – 1/3
See if the kid can do this
simple arithmetic problem. To make it harder, ask him/her to carry the answer
out to 5 decimal digits. Few kids today can do this. Today and especially in the
future, few adults will be able to solve this problem.
Kid’s
math skills today are pathetic. Ask a kid you know to add 5/6 and 1/4 and again
see for yourself. Ask them to find 17% of $35. Ask them to divide 13547 by 167
and carry the answer out to 5 decimal places.
If kids
can’t do arithmetic then they can’t do Algebra or the calculations required
in Science class. So they fail at Algebra and Science as well.
Still
another change in the education system from say, the 50’s, is the basic
relationship between the teacher and the student. In the 50’s the teacher was
an authority figure. The teacher presented material, the student learned it and
there was a test to see how well the student learned it. It was a simple process
and those who misbehaved were sent to the principal’s office.
Then a
theory came along that said that the teacher should be the student’s friend.
It started with discipline problems. The thought was that the student would
behave if the teacher was their friend. In theory it should not matter. So
teachers made special efforts to have a personal relationship with their
students. Notice that is does not happen in college. This may or may not work
but it shouldn’t be necessary. The kids should behave or be sent to the office
and their parents called to let them know that their child has been kicked out
of class for misbehaving. Then the parents should take away the kid’s cell
phone and Ipod. But this is far too drastic for liberal thinkers. Thus, many
schools have hired psychologists to have a touchy-feely talk with the
misbehaving student. This is not discipline.
And the
folks in the office claim that they are busy and do not have time to deal with
discipline problems. Most principals tell the teachers that he/she expects the
teacher to take care of their discipline problems and not to send kids to the
office. If I were a principal I would say the exact opposite. I would say
“Don’t take time away from your teaching to deal with discipline problems.
If you have any ongoing problems with a kid, just send them to the office and I
will take care of it. You teach.”
But that is
not how the system works. This did not really come up in the 50’s because the
kids behaved. I was sent to the principal’s office on occasion. I once, as a
substitute, sent a kid to the office and they sent him right back. He walked
back into class like the winner of our dispute. He was a hero to the other kids.
I was appalled.
Yet we are
putting more money into education than at any time in history. So what isn’t
working? All we hear is that schools need more money. If we had more money to
pay teachers then we would have better teachers. That very statement has a
problem since it implies that after all the education, after the rigorous
teacher certification process which includes practice teaching, many teachers
can’t teach. Before we go any further with this, we should ask what is wrong
with the education and certification process now in place? Maybe that is what
has to be fixed. It is apparently producing teachers who can’t teach.
But there is a bigger problem with this approach of more money produces
better teachers. First, if we even doubled the teacher’s salaries, it would
take at least 20 years to replace all the current teachers through retirement
and attrition. Can we wait for 20 years? What would happen is that the current
teachers would get a big pay increase. Would this increase in pay make them
better teachers? If you say yes then you are saying that today’s teachers are
holding back and not teaching as well as they could and that they would give it
their all if they were making more money.
Is that
what is happening? I doubt that the teacher’s union would agree with that. We
can presume that they are doing their inadequate best. So how about this? New
teachers coming into teaching get higher pay than those already teaching. This
will attract better teachers. Well what do you think the teacher’s union will
have to say about that idea?
So the real
problem seems to be the teacher’s unions. The unions protect weak teachers.
It’s almost impossible to fire a teacher. Union contracts say that they be put
on probation and observed with the observations documented. That's a lot of
work. Then they should be sent for more training, while drawing their full
salary of course. But wait. Didn't they get a degree from college in education
and pass a rigorous certification process? The unions fight any changes to
reform education. They fight any efforts to evaluate teachers for performance.
Teachers are the only workers in the American economy who are not evaluated. Few
are fired despite the dismal performance of schools.
I am
currently trying to get our school board to establish the following policies.
Policy 1. It will be the
policy of the school district to use the police department’s drug sniffing dog
to randomly sniff lockers at middle schools and high schools which have lockers.
This sniffing will include gym lockers. The school district will enter into an
agreement with the police department to arrange for scheduling. It has been
previously determined that there is no cost required for this. This is legal and
has been tested in the courts.
Policy 2. It will be the
policy of the school district that teachers will dress as professionals when
teaching class. For men this will require a dress shirt and tie. For women this
will include dresses or pants suits. Forbidden will be blue jeans, T shirts and
sneakers.
Policy 3.
It will be the policy of the school district that teachers will not cover
up the window of their classroom door to the hall. This will allow the principal
to view the conduct of students and the teacher in the classroom if the door is
closed.
Policy 4. It will be the
policy of the school district that principals will patrol the halls several
times each day to look for infractions of school policies. Students in violation
will be taken to the office and their parents will be called.
Policy 5. It will be the
policy of the school district that students will not use their cell phones
and/or music devices during class or during change time. Cell phones may be used
anytime there is an emergency.
Policy 6. It will be the
policy of the school district that tests which will have an impact on grades
will be taken home, signed by the parent(s) and returned to the teacher the next
day to engage the parents in their child's education.
Policy 7. It will be the
policy of the school district that pictures and posters hung in the classroom on
a permanent basis must have something to do with education. Forbidden are
pictures and posters of movie stars, sports figures, popular contemporary
musicians and singers. Acceptable are maps, the multiplication tables, the
periodic table, pictures of historically famous people, geometric shapes, the
solar system, famous quotations, and the like.
I am meeting great resistance to establishing these common sense
policies. Our school board will not even allow these things to be discussed in
public at school board meetings.
They claim
that they are discussing these things in their work study meetings. They refuse
to put these things on the agenda for public discussion.
The
teacher’s union seems to feel that they have to nip in the bud, any changes to
the way they have things set up. Otherwise, there may be a plethora of changes
coming down the pike. These ideas have to be stopped in their tracks is the
thinking.
Our school
board President said in the newspaper that requiring professional dress for
teachers would be a change in “working conditions” and would require union
approval in accordance with the wording of their contract. Fine, I say. So
let’s force the issue and force the union to take the public position that
they do not want to wear professional dress to school while at the same time
calling themselves professionals and insisting on being paid as professionals.
Let’s let the pubic hear that.
But our
school board members, like most school board members, are not exactly profiles
in courage. All they seem to want is peace in the family and not to rock the
boat and ruffle any feathers, especially the feathers of the powerful
teacher’s union.
So it’s
hard to believe that more money is the answer to our woes. This solution is
popular because governments cannot envision a solution to any problem if more
money is not the solution. If more money can’t fix it, then it can’t be
fixed is their thinking.
Colleges
have long felt that they are apart from society in general. They have their own
campus police and feel that there is no room for government interference. Lower
schools are starting to adopt this attitude. Using the excuse of sexual
predators, the public and press are kept out of schools, the schools they pay
for with their tax dollars. You have to check in at the desk, which is OK, then
you are asked what you want. Just say I want to look around and see what is
going on in the classes. Lots of luck.
Now we are
being told that all this is the parents fault. The latest theory is that the
parents do not motivate their children to learn. Yet we hear that teachers do
more than teach. This is their defense when it is suggested that teachers be
evaluated with tests. They are on record as saying that tests do not test what
you know. When this happens the teachers say that teachers do more than teach.
They motivate and inspire students which can’t be tested for. Well, that’s
all well and good but it does not fit with the notion that the parents are not
motivating their children. It sounds like here that the teachers are supposed to
be doing the motivating. This is why we can’t evaluate them on merely how well
they teach.
I think
that it is possible to teach kids that are in orphanages and who don't even have
any parents.
Also, we
are told that the parents do not help their kids with their homework. One parent
told me this. “They have my kid for 6 hours a day. Isn’t that enough time to
teach my kid fractions? Now I am being asked to teach them fractions at home.”
That is a valid point so why are we blaming the parents?
Well the answer to that is simple. If we don’t blame the parents then we have
to blame the schools and the teachers. The teachers have a union but the parents
do not.
It
may well be the parent’s fault to some extent. They should motivate their kids
to study and to go on to college or trade school for example. So a compromise is
forming. We now hear that the education of children requires a partnership
between teachers and parents. Parents who fall for this are simply enjoining
themselves in the problem and setting themselves up for sharing in the blame.
I
happen to believe that the schools have the kids for enough time to educate the
children even if there were no homework at all. But I do believe in homework
because we learn through practice. Practice, practice, practice is how we learn
arithmetic and the multiplication tables. Homework provides an opportunity for
practice. But even without homework it should be possible to teach these things
to kids having them for 6 hours a day.
I decided to look at a typical teaching day in our district. Let me warn
you that these numbers may vary from district to district and state to state.
As a
substitute teacher, I was amazed to find how easy it was to teach elementary
school. In high school teachers teach 5 periods of different students with 30
minutes for lunch. That makes for a long day especially when you add in the
discipline issues. Here is the breakdown of a typical elementary school
teacher's day in my district. Every time I turned around I was on a break. (This
will vary slightly from school to school, that is, some schools may get only 45
minutes for lunch and some schools may have only 25 minutes for recesses. But in
general the following is true.)
First, teachers work a 7 1/2 hour day. So how much of that time are they
actually delivering educational material – “teaching” as the word is used
herein? Well, they are required to be there 30 minutes before school starts and
stay there for 30 minutes after school ends. The kids are not there. So that's 6
1/2 half hours of possible teaching. But the children get a 30 minute recess in
the morning and in the afternoon. So that's 5 1/2 hours of possible teaching.
But there is a one hour lunch break where the children get another recess after
eating. So that's 4 1/2 hours of possible teaching. But the children take a 30
minute class in music, PE or the library each day so that leaves 4 hours of
possible teaching. Then our district emphasizes reading so the children do 30
minutes of silent reading each day. (The teacher is there but not teaching). So
now we are down to 3 1/2 hours of possible teaching each day. I take away
another 15 minutes in the morning when the children are putting away their back
packs and sitting down, getting organized, the teacher is taking attendance,
doing the lunch count, collecting homework, listening to the morning
announcements, saying the Pledge of Allegiance and 15 minutes in the afternoon
when the children are cleaning up the classroom, collecting their books and
papers, putting on their jackets and back packs before being dismissed. Now we
are down to 3 hours. Add to this the 5 minutes here and there when the kids are
getting in line to go to recess, music, PE or library, and lunch and being
marched to their destination by the teacher. It adds up to at least 15 minutes a
day. So now we are down to 2 hours and 45 minutes of possible actual teaching
time – delivering material.
Imagine
that. Out of a 7 1/2 half hour day, the teacher is actually delivering material
to the students for less than 3 hours. What is wrong with this picture? Actual
teaching (delivery of information) has become a part time job. Then they get all
national holidays off plus a few personal holidays plus a long Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and Spring break and they are off for three months in the summer
while receiving a nice salary and healthcare and retirement benefits, sick leave
and wear casual dress to work with little or no supervision and expected to work
independently. It’s hard to imagine a better job than that.
Now I wish
to point out that teachers do work all day long. Even getting kids organized in
the morning is work. Then there are papers to grade and work sheets to make up,
but they do have nearly 5 hours a day for this by the above numbers. I am
talking about the delivery of information. Check with your kids and do the math
for yourself. In that 2 hours and 45 minutes each day they have to teach
English, Arithmetic, Spelling, Social Studies (includes History and Geography),
and Art. That is about 30 minutes a day for each subject.
This bodes
well for home schooling. If there is only 2 hours and 45 minutes of actual
delivery of material each day, then parents can easily do that in the evenings.
Many parents are doing just that. Having lost faith in the schools and not
wanting their kids subjected to today’s school environment, which now includes
drugs, they keep their kids at home and home school them. There are many
websites that offer lessons and tests for this.
But this
assumes that at least one parent does not work and stays at home. In today’s
economy, unlike the economy of the 50’s, both parents usually work. School
then becomes daycare for their kids. The strictest rule I found when I was
teaching was that there had to be an adult with the kids at all times. This too
is a change from when I went to school. I clearly remember the teacher leaving
the class room to go to the office or to go to mimeograph a test or work sheet.
We sat there and did our work knowing that if she walked in and caught us
misbehaving we would be in big trouble. This might include no recess for a few
days. But today’s teachers do not like to withhold recess as punishment. Why?
Because during recess the teacher gets a 30 minute break. If you withhold
recess, you lose the 30 minute break. I was surprised that our teachers send
kids on recess when it is cold and even when it is raining or at least
drizzling. I have seen kids in recess standing up against the building and under
the eve of the roof so as not to get wet while the teacher is on a 30 minute
break.
Getting
held after school is out as punishment also since nearly all the kids now ride
the bus to school. They can’t be held after school since they will miss their
bus.
Since there
are now many options to public school, parents with a significant amount of
money use them. There are parochial schools, private schools and now charter
schools as options. This of course creates a two tier school system, one for the
rich and one for the poor. Later, this will create a rigid class system with the
kids of the rich running things while the kids of the poor will not be able to
add two fractions together.
This trend
of a two tier education system will have political ramifications in the future.
Now we can tell the losers in society that their lot in life is their own fault.
We can say that you went to the same schools and had the same teachers as
everyone else. They succeeded and you failed.
But in the
future that will not be true. They will argue that they went to public schools
while the successful citizens went to parochial, private or charter schools.
They will argue that they did not get a good education and as a result, they are
poor. They will argue that they never had a chance. And they will be right.
So are we
stuck with this situation? Well in theory we can fix our schools but in practice
we cannot. The problem is the teacher’s unions and the bureaucrats in the
school districts. Let’s start with the bureaucrats first. Bureaucrats are, by
their very nature, delegators. They want to keep the work day easy. So they
delegate things down to the principal at the individual schools. Each school
becomes a self-contained unit. Principals, at least in my district, set policies
for everything in their schools.
This, of
course, results in every school being different which results in good schools
and bad schools, depending on whether or not they have a good principal or a bad
principal. The thinking amongst the bureaucrats is that the principal, teachers
and parents through their PTA can run the school as they see fit. This is the
doctrine of local control of schools carried to the extreme. Any problem at the
school is answered by “you have total control so it’s your fault.” That
lets the highly paid bureaucrats off the hook.
But it gets
worse from there. Most principals, if they have any effective policies at all,
leave everything up to the teacher through more delegation. Thus, each classroom
becomes a self-contained unit. Teachers are free to decorate their classroom any
way they like claiming that this is their office. I once taught in a classroom
that had pictures of basketball players hung everywhere because the teacher was
a basketball fan. I taught in a classroom where there were sofas and arm chairs
everywhere instead of desks. It was like being in someone’s living room,
complete with lamps instead of the overhead lights which were turned off. Throw
rugs on the floor completed the informal environment.
Then
teachers are free to seat the kids anyway they like. In the 50’s we sat in
rows and there was a sense of individuality. Now the kids are organized into
pods, 4 kids to a pod. These are little teams and not individuals. Usually the
smartest kid in the pod does the works and the other kids copy it. With the pod
arrangement one kid at the pod has his back to the front of the room and thus to
the teacher if the teacher is standing at the front of the room.
I once was
having a terrible time with a 4th grade class. When they went to recess I
rearranged their seats into rows. Returning they were shocked. They were all
forced to look to the front where I was standing. I had no more trouble with
them since I had thrown them off balance. Eliminating their social pods, they
were individuals.
Other
seating arrangements I observed were to have the kids sit in a circle or
semi-circle. I rarely saw rows like we experienced in the 50’s. But it seems
that it could be argued that there is a best way to seat kids to achieve the
best learning environment. Once that is identified, then all classrooms should
be organized that way. Seems like a good idea so what is the problem? The
problem is the teacher’s unions who would fight any such proposal as they
fight any proposal to evaluate teachers for effectiveness.
So although
it is theoretically possible to fix our schools, it is not practically possible
because of the powerful teacher’s unions. Thus the two tier school system is
our only choice.
Yet another
change in schools is the relationship between the kids themselves. In my day the
smart kids were admired. The goal was to have smart kids. Today, the smart kids
are called geeks and nerds. The goal is to focus on the majority of kids which
are the average kids. I appreciate addressing the needs of all the kids but the
thinking seems to be that the smart kids can take care of themselves.
Fortunately, most schools have advanced classes where the smart kids can reach
their full potential. Some argue that this is discrimination against the poor.
The most
alarming thing about today’s schools is the fat child epidemic. This is not
entirely the school’s fault but they do play a role. The fat child epidemic is
worrisome because it has been predicted that many of these kids will have
diabetes when they grow up and more health problems in general. Obesity is a
direct cause of many illnesses like heart disease. So what role do the schools
play?
Well first
it’s the lunches the kids are served. When I began teaching, I would buy the
student lunch. I quickly ended that practice. There is pizza served at least
once a week. Pizza, at its best, contains a lot of fat but this pizza was little
more than doughy bread, topped with spicy ketchup and loaded with cheese. Then
there were hot dogs and you can bet that they were not all beef probably not
even all meat. Then fried chicken. Nearly everything was fried since the central
kitchen has to prepare thousands of meals a day and frying is the fastest way to
do that. To the school’s credit, each kid gets a piece of fruit and a cartoon
of milk each day, but a small carton and only one carton even if they ask for
another. I would say give them all the milk they are willing to drink and all
the fruit they are willing to eat.
In high
schools there is a deli where one can get a healthy turkey sandwich but there is
also a pizza stand where one can get a greasy pizza. Most students choose the
pizza.
Then there
are the vending machines in middle and high schools. Rows of them selling soft
drinks and candy bars. The kids just
fill up on sugar and many get fat. At school we have an opportunity to give
every kid in America at least one healthy meal each day but we do not do that.
Fast food
restaurants are trying to get into schools to sell their unhealthy meals there.
The schools need the money which is why the vending machines are in the schools
in the first place so we can be sure that the hamburger joints are soon to
follow.
Finally, there are the toys used to teach kids. The idea is to make
learning fun. Well learning is work and should be seen as work. This is OK for
kids under 5 but school should be seen as a serious place. We do not need Mickey
Mouse teaching the kids the multiplication tables. We need teachers teaching the
kids the multiplication tables. There is a danger of kids learning everything
through computer games and other software. There is a place for this software
but it’s not to replace the teacher.