Give the Children what they Need Needs should trump Wants

The following is written by Charles R. Hoff former school director in Federal Way.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend my 50th year high school reunion. About half of our class was in attendance, and there were still some who I could recognize without a name tag!

Also in attendance was my high school Latin teacher who began teaching in 1947 and quit in 1970 “when discipline became an issue!” One has to wonder if she thought “discipline” was an issue in 1970 what she would think of today’s students!

There were several other members of my class who had been in educational systems, mostly in the East, who also echoed my Latin teacher’s observations.

While back East I also had the opportunity to visit with a former teacher colleague who spent his entire career teaching mathematics at one of Newsweek’s best rated high schools. He retired in 1994 and his comments on his students, AP Calculus, were very similar to my high school Latin teacher’s! Based upon these observations we are looking at a decline in classroom decorum from 1947 to 1994, or 47 years!

How much worse can it get? From 1994 to the present we have seen countless examples of what used to be considered inappropriate conduct by our youth and, in some cases, parents.. In the Federal Way district one student, caught in an illegal act was disciplined for this, this student’s parent’s promptly appealed the case to the School Board who upheld the punishment. The parents immediately took the student to Hawaii to serve out the suspension and took time to write the school a postcard extolling the life on the beach!

My friend, the Calculus teacher, suggests that all of this as came about due to “parents’ infatuation with their children.” Perhaps he has something there. In the 50’s, for sure, any discipline meted out by the school would be “refreshed” when the child came home. In fact many kids dreaded arriving at home far more than being at school.

Today’s parents are almost always defending their children, even when they have to know that their child’s behavior was inappropriate.

We have come to the age of “accommodation” in education where the preferences of the child, immature as they may be, take precedence over the wisdom and common sense of adults. In the past year a national poll found that parents’ top priority in a school was that their children be “satisfied.’

It would be much easier to “satisfy” kids in school with a mixture of Disney and action movies, than with Trigonometry and Algebra.

In one of our local papers there was an article about increasing achievement in some of our minorities. In this article it was suggested that “some minorities learn differently.” The facts may dispute this and certainly “Brown vs Topeka Board of Education” established that “separate but equal” was not the law of the land. However, educators are supposed to “accommodate” different styles of learning?

Just how many “styles of learning” are there to be accommodated to? Or could this be a very convenient excuse for simply not applying oneself? Could this be that the adults in this child’s life have not told the child the “secret” that learning is hard work, and they need to buckle down to this or the consequences will be very significant?

Are there a group of parents who would not want to destroy their children’s happiness with such a harsh discussion? I think so. How often have you seen a child who comes from a well educated family not follow this path? How often has this been attributed to an unstructured childhood where consequences were never an issue?

In most of the countries which have overtaken us in education, this infatuation with children has not overtaken common sense about youth and the regulation of their choices. In those countries the idea of children being “satisfied” with their schools probably isn’t a topic for discussion.

Will we ever wake up to the damage this is causing our children and our
society?

The Washington League of Educational Voters has posted the following facts:

“We’re behind as a state and our kids are paying the price:

* Only 41% of high school graduates meet college entrance requirements in Washington.
* More than 40% of students need to take remedial classes in college.
* More than half of firms surveyed reported difficulty finding qualified job applicants in Washington.

Could this be because children got ....
the education that they “wanted”
rather than the education that they “needed?”

by C.R. Hoff