George wrote:

"Roger Woehl" wrote in message
. ..
Have any of you been in a public school in the last 5 years?
Roger

Yes, and in Biology class I had to teach a bit of Greek and Latin to
help them understand and internalize the vocabulary.

In History I had to remind them that there were more white people
involved in the underground railroad than black, that the preponderance
of invention was accomplished by males, and that assimilation not
separation was how immigrants became Americans.

I answered the question of "what use" in literature by pointing out that
the themes are universal, and tell us a lot about ourselves as human
creatures even when its Hercules or a couple of kids in Verona who are
really the descendants of many others in tales where the parents don't
understand the love of two who should by culture hate one another.

I have to do this because it's not in the books nor the curriculum. I
can still remember my first encounter with the "whole language"
advocates who were going to by God teach Johhny to read using this new
method, and weren't interested at all in finding out how McGuffey
readers, phonics or Dick and Jane, became the basics for generations of
readers. Most of the wholes are out now, but our reading texts still
carry some of their stamp when females are not portrayed as mothers and
nurturers, but professionals, each minority of color is represented as
often as the majority, and Joe and Mary are now a letter longer at Jose
and Maria.

What are we teaching?

You are a better man than I. A bit over a decade I got I had the
great joy of teaching graduate school for a bit. Now grad school
is a place you go "on purpose". Mommy and Daddy are not making you
go, and it takes actual effort and money to get there and survive.

Imagine my horror in discovering that a good many people had poor
writing, spelling, and thinking skills. Even the most elementary
math skills (this was a computer science course) were a stretch
for some of these students - all of whom had undergrad degrees
or the equivalent thereof. And this was at a fairly well-regarded
big city university, BTW, not Swampwater College. Even more
disheartening was the fact that it was almost universally
true that my foreign-born students worked way harder than their
U.S.-born colleagues - not just to overcome the language barrier,
but for the sheer desire to *learn*.

For decades, we've been accommodating the tender sensibilities of
the *students* in K-12, we've failed to hold parents accountable
for their end of the education process, and we've let the NEA
mafia hijack the process to serve their political ends. We now
reap what we've sown. The only fix is to go back to local/private
schools and make the connection much more clear between those
who pay for education, those who conduct education, and the
results they produce.
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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/