written
by
Martin
Cothran
A couple of years ago, I was sitting
down on a Sunday morning reading my local paper.
I was reading a story about the “new”
things happening in education. One of the “new” things happening, said the
story, was that they were going to start getting rid of “rote memorization” and
putting more emphasis on “creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.” I
remember putting the paper down and telling my wife, who was cleaning up the
breakfast dishes, “Dear, It’s coming back.”
“What’s coming back?”
“It.”
“What’s It? I don’t read minds, you
know.” She’s always saying this, my wife. That she can’t read minds. She is
under the impression that I think she should know what I’m thinking without my
having to explain it.
I ask her if it wasn’t one of the
conditions of marrying her that she be able to read my mind, at which point she
stops and, holding a soap-covered knife she is in the middle of washing, she
gives me a blank stare. I obediently go back to my paper, impressed with the
soap-covered knife—and with her stare, which is about as impressive as the
knife.
By the term “It,” of course, I mean the
Education Reform Monster who goes into hibernation and comes out every
twenty-five years or so to eat our schools. I explain this to my wife.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay,” and went on
doing the dishes. We had already been through one attack of the Monster when our
children were young. We had not originally intended to homeschool our children
some twenty-five years ago when we sent our first child, a boy, to the local
public school.
Kindergarten was not bad. He learned
nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and other classic children’s literature. They did
the things in class that you would expect them to do in a kindergarten class.
They learned to recognize letters and do some simple arithmetic.
But by the next year, our school began
to change. Our state legislature had passed a sweeping education reform program
the year before that was influenced by the reform that had been making the news
around that time. It was called “outcomes-based education.” A court case had
been filed a few years previously to try to correct inequities in school
funding from one district to another, but when it got to our State Supreme
Court, the justices ruled that our whole system of schooling had to be changed.
In came the education consultants.
Educational experts from impressive places descended on our Commonwealth to
advise our state’s lawmakers on what they should do to change our schools. The
result was a wholesale transformation of what school was for. The education
system was turned upside down.
By the time our oldest child had
reached first grade, the new educational regime was in place, and the new
education ideas were being implemented.
I had taught our oldest how to read, so
when he arrived in first grade, we figured this would stand him in pretty good
stead; the teacher would be impressed, and he would have an easy time.
So we thought.
But what transpired in the classroom
was very different. Among the newest things at this time was something called
“whole language instruction.” When my son was given a simple book to read by
the new teacher, he began reading and sounding out the words as he went along,
which was what we had taught him to do—to read phonetically. But the new
teacher was not impressed. In fact, she was not happy at all.
