A little learning must be a dangerous thing

I heard something the other day that convinced me that my kid would be sent to a demanding private school with academic standards of the sort that would automatically render its graduates immediate candidates for crème-de-la-crème Ivy League universities of their choice. You know, the sort of place in which Harvard, Yale and McGill would be offering bribes just to get grads from this school into their rosters.

Yes, that would be the case if I actually had a kid who was actually in one of our public schools.

Anyway, what I heard was that one of the local public high schools has availed itself of so-called ‘literacy kits.’ These kits, it has been explained, consist of books with faux covers that make them look exactly like the regular textbooks for a particular course. However, inside the covers, there is a much simpler and easier-to-read version of the standard text.

Let’s say the book is a study of dinosaurs. The regular text might contain such information as: “The Tyrannosaurus Rex was the most voracious predator of the Jurassic Epoch, and reigned terror on lesser reptilians.”

I guess maybe the simpler version might read like: “See Barney. See Barney chase Fred Flintstone. Chase-chase-chase. Oops. Barney has caught Fred. Yum-yum-yum. Poor Fred. Oh-oh-oh!”

The logic behind the literacy kits, as explained by the principal, is to not point the finger at a student who might not be at the same level of literacy as his or her peers by issuing these kids with a text that looks like the real goods. Like no other kid in the class is ever going to look inside that text. As if.

Oh well, I guess it’s a well-meaning idea. A well-meaning idea that, in all honesty, serves nobody particularly well.

You might be excused for wondering why kids who cannot read are sitting in the same class as those who can. I would wonder that, too. But, I know that’s not how things work today. In the name of some sort of egalitarian impulse in our education system, there is no failure. There can be seen to be no academic hierarchy, so all kids advance at the same pace. I know this to be so, because it was even in place when I was teaching.

That means that if there is no failure, then things must be simplified, and then simplified even more to accommodate those who cannot meet the standard. Is such a thing fair – to anyone concerned?

No, because it means that the brighter kids are consistently challenged less-and-less, and the less bright kids are essentially being catered to at a level that, by any logic, they shouldn’t have attained.

Parents (not to mention institutions of higher learning) are distressed because the schools turn out youngsters who cannot attain an even basic standard of literacy – who cannot read or write at even a rudimentary level. Yet, our society lives in a myth that holds we have 90 to 100 percent literacy. The point is, we do not.

I don’t make light of illiteracy here. I think it’s a tragic state for both a society and the individual involved. I think it’s even more of a tragedy when we are told that somebody has completed 12 years of schooling and cannot read or write at the most basic level.

If you doubt my thoughts about this, check out the spelling of younger people on some weblogs and chat rooms. I don’t mean ‘computerized’ argot of the ROTFL sort, I mean the most basic spelling of the sort you and I mastered in third grade.

In the meantime, our best-and-brightest, supposedly, are suffering a woeful lack of scholastic background of the kind that will render them prominent and competitive at international levels.

The ones that will have that level of astuteness will be only those ones from families who can send them to fine private schools. In other words ‘privilege’ will decide who are future leaders are to be, not intelligence. And one of the reasons just might be a misapprehension by our public education system that inclusiveness must be the byword.

A newspaper article recently offered a feature profile of a new young secondary teacher. The article referred to him as being part of the “new breed” of teacher. He was one who professed to be less concerned about academics than he was about the “whole child”, who he or she was, what his or her attitudes were, what he or she thought about various “relevant” issues in the world today.

Quite frankly, I don’t want that guy teaching my kids.

I want the guy or girl who puts academics first and then maybe my son or daughter can offer well-informed opinions about various “relevant” issues in the world today. Maybe my son or daughter, or yours, can then come up with some solutions, since we seem to be doing a pretty piss-poor job of arriving at them.