Love for learning begins with parental example

You slapped every educator in the face with your editorial “A call for accountability from public education” in the Dec. 8 Frontiersman.

Do we see crime rates fall when law enforcement gets more funding? How about fewer accidents or fires when firefighters get money? Why do you expect students to improve because money has been given to education?

Everyone knows education is important. The importance of education, though, becomes vague when the goals and strategies of education are foggy and confused at the institutional and personal levels. Education has radically changed from when voters went to school last. Failure rates won’t drop because funding has increased.

Everyone refers to No Child Left Behind as a thorn in education. It is nothing more than another cycle reformed through education revised from a version from years ago. It has taken the learning style we all grew up with and focused it more on creating a robotic society we all can conform to, so we must all be created the same. In short, NCLB contributes to a de facto monoculture as schools are forced to commit a majority of their resources to militant preparation for their many assessments. NCLB’s answer is testing them all and weed out the failures — students and teachers. Where is the success in this?

When curriculum mechanics and lawmakers play with the structures and funding issues for schools, their efforts are almost doomed to failure. Society expects to see results without looking at the full picture. What about those students who never show up for class? What about those who are socially promoted? What about the child who has to deal with abuse in the home and still comes to school for security? New tests and textbooks and policies and money can always improve the tools, but they will ever make our schools the facilities of learning we intend them to be without another almost intangible and radical change, one that can hardly be changed with the wave of a pen.

Parents that have failed to instill a yearning for knowledge in their children have tied the hands of educators; moreover, they have effectively blindfolded their own children. Yes, I am a teacher, but I was a parent long before I began teaching, and my kids are succeeding in school.

Education is almost fake unless the participants — parents, teachers and students — really care about education personally, almost religiously. This is especially true in the public schools, where students attend out of compulsion and lack an upbringing that values education. The irony and struggle is that while everyone believes in the value of education, it seems so few actively pursue education. Parents often implore their children to study hard in school, but those same parents have sparse collections of books at home or don’t support their children’s schools. A parent who despises reading is not likely to effectively set reading standards high in the house; a parent who hates to be challenged mentally is not going to set the right standard for children.

The challenge facing modern public education is creating a system of impressing children with the value of education in their lives. Because such a system has to be extremely individualized, it’s hard to create a consensus among policymakers regarding the way to deal with the issue. Until that challenge is met (and I don’t profess there necessarily is a widespread solution), then the dilemmas of ineffective education are not going to leave us. After all, there has never been a school that told a student to drop out; that is the parent’s decision.

Dan Belanger is an eighth-grade science teacher at Palmer Junior Middle School.