Ramona's teacher has observed that, first among Ramona's many shortcomings, is Ramona's tendency to make up words and to make up her own spelling of real words. Ramona's defense is at once both irresistibly cute, and a telling commentary on how her public education was already beginning to fail her: "They make us all learn the same words!"
Now, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that vocabulary and spelling are open to interpretation, as Ramona would prefer. Rather, I'm suggesting that Ramona's complaint that they all have to learn the same words is valid, and reveals a much larger problem. To assume that a classroom of 25 or 30 children of various home lives, maturity levels, intelligence levels, interests, fears, and likes & dislikes would all be equally well-served by learning the same vocabulary words is patently ludicrous. On a larger scale, the idea that the entire third grade curriculum for Ramona's school district will equally serve every child is even more ludicrous.
If you're a parent of a child in a public school, consider for a moment his or her curriculum. It was decided upon by a committee of which you were not a part and into which you probably had little to no say. As I said in this post, it was most likely developed by persons with ideology that differs from yours. It may well have been decided upon before your child was even born. It conforms to the standards of your state - standards which were developed by unaccountable bureaucrats - and developed to meet federal guidelines, under threat of the withholding of federal funds. And you can rest assured that your child was in no way considered when the curriculum was developed, and anything he or she has to say about it will be summarily ignored. Your child will be expected to learn the curriculum, or fail.
This system fails on multiple levels. Let's take a look.
1. Exceptional kids are left behind. At first glance, this claim looks ridiculous: schools across the country are full of straight-A students; your child may be one of them. The problem is that a straight-A student is excelling only within the system. Kids with exceptional talent, exceptional intelligence, exceptional imagination, or exceptional whatever, can only go so far as the system will allow them. A third grader who makes an A+ in Vocabulary may or may not have an exceptional vocabulary; it just means that she's met the government's standard of third-grader vocabulary. She may well have the vocabulary of someone twice her age (for example, when I was in third grade I was reading at a grade 9 reading level); but in the one-size-fits-all model of public education, she won't have any opportunity to exercise or expand her vocabulary because she'll spend the rest of the school year learning words she already knows.
Not all exceptional kids in public schools are readily identifiable by their excellent grades on report cards. In fact, many bright and gifted kids do poorly in school simply because they're bored. Can you expect a first-grader who has already read every book that his teacher reads to the class to pay attention? This one-size-fits-all method doesn't even consider this possibility. The problem is even more pronounced in high school, where thousands of kids across the country show up daily for no reason other than they're expected to be there. I, for one, more or less "floated" through high school simply because I found it indescribably pointless (there are other reasons for my failure in high school as well, but they're not relevant to this column). Or, consider the words of a friend on an internet message board: "I really didn't know why I was there, I wasn't clear on what the guidance counselors were for, and I just washed out."
2. Special-needs kids are left behind. The debate continues to rage: should kids with special needs be mainstreamed into the classroom with the rest of the students, or should they be segregated to learn on their own? The sad fact is, within the one-size-fits-all public education model, both methods have extreme disadvantages. Mainstreaming special-needs kids may lead to disruptions in the classroom, and a disproportionate amount of the teacher's time being spent on them, to the neglect of the other kids in the classroom. Segregating special-needs kids draws attention to them and quickly makes them targets of derision from the other kids. Needless to say, in the public education model there seems to be no right answer.
But what about bright, or even average, kids who struggle in one or two areas? For example: I was an exceptionally bright and gifted kid in almost all areas, except math. As the school years marched ahead, I continued to struggle with math, getting worse and worse grades and getting more and more frustrated and bogged down in concepts that I simply could not understand. Special tutoring? There was no money in the budget. Special attention? There was no time. The expectation was that I would learn the exact same amount of math as every other kid in my grade year, or I would fail; there were no other options. To this day I can barely do simple calculations such as balancing my checkbook. Or consider a friend from church, whose son struggles with reading. In most areas of his education he does as well as can be expected, but in reading he lags behind the other kids. While his peers will progress through their educational careers, my friend's son will be left behind unless and until someone comes up with a way to get him caught up. It won't happen; there is neither money nor time, in the one-size-fits-all public model.
3. Average kids are homogenized. I considered long and hard what word I wanted to use in the headline to this paragraph, and with much regret I settled on "average." "Average" is a loaded word: no one wants to hear that their son or daughter is "average." And in reality, no one child is average! Where one child may be exceptionally bright, another may have average intelligence but have a knack for art. Another child may struggle with math or science but may have a knack for reading or vocabulary. One child may struggle academically but be an exceptionally talented singer.
By design, the one-size-fits-all method of public education ignores those differences, insisting instead that every child must meet the same standards in the same subjects in order to advance. So a child who is interested in caring for farm animals is going to learn about the Bay of Pigs Invasion, regardless of how much or how little she cares about it, because someone she's never met has decided that she needs to know about it. A teenager who is interested in building machines and computers is going to learn about Byzantine art because someone he's never met has decided that he needs to know about it. The interests and skills of the kids are ignored in the name of making sure they meet arbitrary "standards" set by people who have never met them, who don't know them and most likely don't care about them.
Homeschooling, un-schooling, and private education continue to offer far superior alternatives to public education. The way to assure that your child receives the best education possible is to build an educational plan around their needs, desires, interests and goals, in concert with your goals as well; instead of one designed by bureaucrats who have never met you or your kids. This can't, and won't, be done in a public school.
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