Epidemic of Education Malpractice
Where are the parental, political, or teacher protests over the omission of reading, writing, and thinking skills?
Something is rotten in the state of American education.
Students are graduating clueless about oral or written communications skills or critical thinking. Their knowledge of history or government is slim to none. They are ill-equipped to discharge their duties as citizens. Engagements with brainless encounters with Rap music or athletic statistics do not count. Neither do tribal or hormonal fixations on sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. What counts is content of character and accomplishments.
But instead of moving heaven and earth to enrich an impoverished curriculum, parents, politicians, and educators are preoccupied with what not to teach already brainless students and what not to put in intellectually empty school libraries! This is as lunatic as teaching an obese couch potato how not to exercise. As John Stuart Mill underscored, falsehoods strengthen attachments to truth by awakening the reasoning that unveils the falsities.
With an intellectually demanding curriculum, students would have no time to squander on juvenile tales of sex or violence. Students should be required to devote at least four hours per day reading from a list of 100 great books; three hours per day writing sentences earmarked by an economy of words and brimming with similes, metaphors, active verbs, and evocative adjectives; and, two hours per day debating great issues in American history, e.g., British writs of assistance, the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, the American Revolution, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Articles of Confederation, Shays Rebellion, the Constitution, and President George Washington’s Farewell Address.
The 100 great books should include the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Aesop’s Fables, The History of the Peloponnesian War, the Divine Comedy, Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Montaigne’s Essays, and Huckleberry Finn.
Daily homework should consist of critiquing headline news stories for balance and felicity of expression.
The arts of speaking, writing, and thinking tower above all others by orders of magnitude. They are as rare as the Hope Diamond in all walks of life. A student who has mastered all three will prove monumentally successful no matter which line of business or profession is chosen.
It is a crime to withhold from students a guaranteed place in the heavens by nonfeasance or indolence. Never in history has intellectual brilliance and prosperity been so attainable by so many at such little cost, i.e., access to the internet.
But where are the parents, politicians, or teachers demanding reading great literature, writing incisive essays, debating great historical events, and honing critical thinking as the staple of every school day? They are all AWOL. They have met the enemy of intellectual genius, and they are them. And they shall live in infamy.