Ok, I recently completed the book ``From Crayons to Condoms : The Ugly Truth About American Public Schools’'. (http://www.amazon.com/Crayons-Condoms-Americas-Public-Schools/dp/0979267110). Please note, I’m not bashing the United States at all. I read such books because we have similar trends in Britain, and I want to prepare myself completely and knowledgeably for the future. I want to know what exactly is going on in those classrooms, as it is difficult to know except you are in the system.
So I read the book, and was outraged. Thomas Sowell’s ``Inside American Education’’ had unveiled most things for me, but it was still shocking to read the true live stories of parents and children who were made to pass through the entire rubbish called modern ‘‘education’’. As a senator of California was quoted in the book as saying: “An educational heresy has flourished, a heresy that rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills…the heresy of which I speak regards the fundamental task in education as therapy.†Simply put, education has passed from the realm of imparting knowledge and skills to the realm of therapy.
I quote an excerpt from ``From Crayons to Condoms’':
EVERY DAY, parents confidently send their children to school trusting that they will spend the day learning their ABCs. For far too many, that trust is woefully misplaced. Unfortunately, unsuspecting parents don’t know that many children are psychologically molested by classroom exercises, many of which focus on death and suicide, graphic sex, and invasive surveys......Sometimes these exercises conclude with the admonishment not to discuss what happened with anyone outside of the classroom. One in-service facilitator told elementary school teachers that he would show them fun ways to teach children “confidentiality.†(He failed to say from whom the children were supposed to keep these confidences. Was it Mom and Dad?).''
The above excerpt echos exactly what I had read in Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education''. Yes, schools no longer teach. They are now therapy centres, asking children to sign confidentiality forms’’ promising that they will not tell their parents what was done during the therapy'' sessions. No wonder children are more illiterate than ever, inspite of the long hours they spend in school each day. Rather than using the 7-8 hours of class time to teach kids how to read, write, and do math, schools waste precious hours on values clarification’’ and providing ``therapy’’ for entire classrooms etc.
Robert Levy once made a comment about avoiding math books with Nelson Mandela on the front. It was funny to me at the time. Now I understand why - it is all the so-called multiculturalism. What multiculturalism has to do with math I cannot tell. Here is an excerpt from the book:
``Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, in a speech before Congress on June 9, 1997, pointed out the controversial social issues integrated into today’s textbooks. In what he referred to as “wacko†algebra, the senator gave one of the best examples of this new integration technique. Quoting from the algebra textbook Secondary Math: An Integrated Approach: Focus on Algebra, Senator Byrd said:
`` Let me quote from the opening page. “In the twenty-first century, computers will do a lot of the work that people used to do. Even in today’s workplace, there is little need for someone to add up daily invoices or compute sales tax. Engineers and scientists already use computer programs to do calculations and solve equations.†What kind of message is sent by that brilliant opening salvo? It hardly impresses upon the student the importance of mastering the basics of mathematics or encourages them to dig in and prepare for the difficult work it takes to be a first-rate student in math…
Page five of this same wondrous tome begins with a heading written in Spanish, English and Portuguese… This odd amalgam of math, geography and language masquerading as an algebra textbook goes on to intersperse each chapter with helpful comments and photos of children named Taktuk, Esteban and Minh. Although I don’t know what happened to Dick and Jane, I do understand now why there are four multicultural reviewers for this book. However, I still don’t quite grasp the necessity for political correctness in an algebra textbook.
Nor do I understand the inclusion of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in three languages… …By the time we get around to defining an algebraic expression we are on page 107… From there we hurry on to lectures on endangered species, a discussion of air pollution, facts about the Dogon people of West Africa, chili recipes and a discussion of varieties of hot peppers… I was thoroughly dazed and unsure whether I was looking at a science book, a language book, a sociology book or a geography book. This textbook tries to be all things to all students in all subjects and the result is a mush of multiculturalism, environmental and political correctness…it is unfocused nonsense… Mathematics is about rules, memorized procedures and methodical thinking. We do memorize the multiplication tables, don’t we?‘’
Elsewhere it says:
``The practical result of these universal reforms is that they “dumb down†the curriculum. Under these reforms, students know they aren’t being educated. One angry ninth-grade girl, with tears streaming down her face, told how she had been asked to determine the circumference of a circle. She said each student received a piece of string, along with instructions to place the string around a circle and hold it up to a ruler. The teacher then required them to write about the process! “I did that in elementary school. How dare they treat us like first graders! I’m so mad! I know there’s a way to use math to figure the circumference of a circle but they won’t teach me!â€â€¦..
Most parents, many educators (considered maverick because they adhere to the principle that schools should actually educate children), and a handful of school board members hold an alternative view: that schools perform poorly because they no longer focus on academic achievement. Instead they pursue faddish educational practices such as inventive spelling, whole language, constructivist math, cooperative learning, self-esteem programs, and death education. Indeed, it is a common view among educators that public schools exist, not so much to teach academics, but to shape our children emotionally and psychologically in the proper politically correct image. Moreover, public schools are inundated with social studies curricula containing false and misleading concepts, and sex education programs whose main purpose apparently is to challenge societal norms. Academics take a back seat to social engineering…
Thomas Sowell wrote about a lot of these things, and the book ``From Crayons to Condoms’’ provides complementary evidence from parent and student interviews. And watch out, most educators will never accept that it is the time wasted on social engineering that actually leads to low performance. I once cited a research article by Harold Stevenson which showed that while Asian schools spent 94% of class time on academic activities, American schools spent only 64% of class time on academics. And that article by Stevenson was published a long time ago. Who knows how much time is wasted now?
I won’t even go into the very, very inappropriate material students are exposed to in the name of English classes and school reading. It’s disgusting and shocking. May my kids never pass through such places.
) after reading this thread, I’m worried in a few years time you only get some modern version. I experienced this with Latin textbooks. i loved the Latin textbooks introduced at my school when I was 10, it had 50 lessons, everything was in Latin, black on white with a small beautiful drawing depicting the story. it started out with simple stories like Aesop’s fables and other short Roman/Greek myths, then went into the history of Rome, then short excerpts from comedies and poems, and then legal texts, Seneca’s letters and so on. This was good for about 4 or 5 years, doing one lesson per week. it was so perfect and no-frills that last year I decided to buy it before it is phased out. to my horror, I found out it’s not available online and probably out of print. Then I went to the bookstore that sells the Latin textbooks for the school I went to, but they only had modern textbooks. I checked them to see if they were equally good and was horrified that it was full of colours, text boxes, all in English with little pieces of Latin here and there, and texts written by the editors (rather than real Latin texts) about things like “going to the market”, “what houses in Rome looked like” and everyday things like that, just like modern language textbooks.Luckily I found my old edition of the textbook back home when I visited my parents and took it to London with me (along with an old school Ancient Greek grammar book). It’s so sad that they are trying to make everything more interactive and fun and in the process, they just confuse everyone. I don’t know how I would ever learn Latin with a modern textbook. In my time, you could pick up a Latin grammar book of 90 pages, and it was so concise that when you had memorised all 90 pages, you knew all there was to know about Latin grammar. Now you can read 300 pages and still have no clue about anything. So I decided to teach my kids Latin myself with my old textbook because I am sure even at the nicest private schools it’s going to be a total disaster nowadays.
I would be devastated if I was spending money on education and my 9 year old count work that one out in her head!