Commentary: Not Being Taught

A Deficient Curriculum
#1353c
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 03-Dec-16; 15 minutes

Many of you have seen on the Internet the late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century final exams (one from Salina, Kansas) given to eighth-graders of the time. Most of us who go through the questions shake our heads at what was expected of the students of the day. We're talking about eighth-graders, 14 years old or so. They were expected to know so much more than what we think our eighth-graders need to know. If you haven't read any of these things, here is a sampling of the test’s questions:

• Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
• Show the territorial growth of the United States. (Just as a little bit of a digression, David McCullough, the famous historian who wrote John Adams and 1776, gave a lecture at a university about 1776, and a young lady came up to him afterward—a college student—and she said, "Mr. McCullough, what you have is just amazing. I never knew that all 13 colonies were on the East Coast!" It just shows you the lack of geography—an idea of where the United States actually is in the world.)
• Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
• What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
• Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
• Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

Liberals, like the people who run Snopes.com, say that such a test’s dissimilarity to modern education means nothing. What they say is that students then thought that this test was just as difficult as we think of it now, and they just had the advantage of having been taught this over the last several months of their education. They say—these liberals—that the test’s questions were too fact-and-date oriented—and terribly U.S.-centric, and that it asks nothing about music, art, and other cultures. In the end, their criticism amounts to just a bit of folderol because it fails to address the heart of the problem: that American education is failing to teach its students both basic knowledge and principles of sound reasoning.

My primary education bridged the 70s and early 80s, and I know that if I walked into a classroom today at any public school, I would realize very soon that many of the things I was taught that were considered to be solid, basic, fundamentals of U.S. education are no longer part of the curriculum today. For instance, I remember in elementary school—Raymond Temple Elementary School in Buena Park, California—having to do handwriting every day. The first- or second-grade teacher had us write in the dotted lines, and make sure all of our cursive handwriting was up to snuff. But they don't even teach cursive any more in most schools. They don't consider it to be necessary because we have computers and tablets, and we have cellphones, and we text, so we don't need to write any more. We don't need to have legible cursive handwriting because most everyone prints anyway. So they just get ride of it.

Dodgeball is gone, too. What was better than getting smacked by that rubber ball? It's a rite of passage, isn't it? And any kind of home economics curriculum because it is thought to be unnecessary. I am not saying cooking and all that, but they don't even teach kids how to write a check anymore, or any kind of thing that you would use in normal life. If you want shop or band, well, you're out. Most of those things are gone. They are still there in some places, but they are being taken away.

More alarming is the fact that the teaching of phonics and memorizing times tables is also going the way of the dodo. Children are taught to learn words by sight and read lists of words by rote rather than learn how to sound things out for themselves and memorize the exceptions. We used "Hooked on Phonics" with our kids, and it did great. We larned 'em good.

Spelling tests are rare, too. They don't ask kids to learn how to spell as much as they did in our times. We had a test at least once a week, where the teacher would stand in front of the class and call out twenty words, and we had to spell them and turn them in and have them graded. I remember hating those tests, but they did help me to learn. For some reason, I could not spell women. W-O-M-E-N. I always wanted to put an I in there for some reason, because that is how it sounded.

Times tables are considered “old-fashioned” and “needless memorization.” Drills and timed tests are even worse. Do you know why? Drills and timed tests are are out in most schools because they create “math anxiety” that ultimately leads to mental paralysis, and they say it leads to low math scores because kids freeze up and cannot think any more.

Phonics and memorized math, though, are basic skills, if you think about. Learning the times tables, learning how to sound things out if you see a word on a page that you don't know—that's a basic skill that, once learned, sticks in the mind forever and they prove very helpful all through the rest of life. They are really life-skills. If you can pick six cans out of the grocery store, and they are all 39 cents, you can do a pretty good quick sum to find out how much it is going to cost you. That's gone, though. Our kids don't need that.

History and social studies are going by the boards, too, as far as we knew them. But they are going by the boards in a different way than math, reading, and writing. Both of these have been yanked sharply leftward in terms of political view, so that they now emphasize prevailing social views rather than traditional (a taboo term) norms. Rather than teach the Civil War as something that occurred, and talk about it just plainly, they have to inject all of the modern social feelings about the Civil War and the things that led up to it and the things that came out of it.

As another example, a modern elementary or middle school history text would not feature the accomplishments of the Continental Congress other than a mere mention of it having taken place. Instead, it would—over probably several pages of text—point out the hypocrisy between the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” and the Constitution’s “racist” compromise position that slaves count as 3/5 of a person in a state’s census. That would be the big thing that come out of 1776-1789.

Other than band and art and music class—and sometimes even physical education—another area that has been in decline is teaching government/civics and economics. In my day, that was covered in two semester-long classes in my senior year. We learned how local/state/federal government are supposed to work. They taught us things like the beauty of federalism, checks and balances, and the Electoral College, and how all that is supposed to work, as well as principles of a sound economy (like supply and demand, or the difference between the national debt [nearing $20T] and the deficit [our yearly shortfall, at $590B]). We learned about gross domestic product and what it meant for the economy, and the differences between capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Instead, our children are learning how to take standardized tests. It is about what it has come down to. The students are taught to score as high as possible on certain tests that will, in aggregate, show how high the U.S. ranks in the world in education. So now the teachers, under "common core" and that sort of thing, are teaching to the test rather than trying to teach the children knowledge and principles and processes that they need to know for life.

So, in the “common core” standards, they emphasize “analysis” (even as low as kindergarten and first grade) rather than reading and writing. On the math side, they concentrate on “concepts” rather than math fundamentals. What they are trying to do is link all these things up through the years so that the concepts you learn in the first grade are linked to the ones you learn in the second grand, the fifth grade, and on and on it goes. It sounds nice when they present it on their websites and say, "This is what we are trying to do," but then you look at what common core is trying to teach in, let's say, math, and this looks like a bunch of confusion. Parents cannot figure it out. It is almost like the parents have to go back to school to figure out what exactly the teacher wants them to learn. It is turning things upside down. In history/social studies, the focus is on inculcating current social beliefs rather than instructing students on the basics of mankind’s past and progress to give them a sense of themselves as they are in time and place.

Where does this take us? We are seeing some results in a segment of our young people who cannot do anything without a computer. The first place they would go for anything is Google. If you ask them to put two sums together, they have to have a calculator. It's got to be something outside themselves rather than knowledge they have in their own minds. Too many can barely read by the time they get into college, and a high percentage have little idea of how to construct a logical argument for or against something. The reason is that they have always been told what to believe rather than link proofs together to come up with a conclusion of their own. They know little about the principles of America’s founding, the Constitution. Most of them are not aware—and you can tell by the current state of things after the election—that we in the United States are a Republic, not a Democracy.

In the end, this situation is producing a nation of people who can be led by the nose in any direction a strong leader would like to take them. And that can lead to very grave consequences.

RTR/aws/dcg