Embracing Old-School Education Is The Key To Acing This School Year

[Kamaji]

Embracing Old-School Education Is The Key To Acing This School Year

We need a didacticism based on common sense, on remembering what has always worked, not obsessively inventing anew.

BY: JEREMY S. ADAMS
AUGUST 16, 2023

It’s time to go old school in education.

Enough with the endless torrents of education reform and the modern obsession with infusing technology into every facet of the learning experience. Enough dumbing down of the curriculum, tolerating egregious student behavior, and politicizing the curriculum of the classroom. Enough self-censorship of America’s teachers and administrators who know deep down (but are often afraid to say out loud) their students are graduating with a depleted battery of skills and knowledge that would have been unrecognizable and unacceptable a generation ago.

Going “old school” is much more than a cranky trope or cantankerous canard extolling the “good old days” when kids worked hard and had respect for their elders. Going old school means recognizing that the solution to many of our problems does not require more money, more innovation, or elite schools of education promoting vogue (and usually leftist) notions of instruction and curriculum. It’s time to bring back pencils and paper, teachers who lecture rather than largely facilitate class projects and online activities, discipline policies that actually discipline, and, most of all, adults who are ready to be in charge of the children they are educating.   

While the headlines about education these days are often centered around the razzmatazz of critical race theory and the 1619 Project, the controversies of transgender bathrooms and sports, and the conferences of Moms for Liberty, they pale in comparison to the real crises in American education. These topics certainly make for flashy television spots and viral op-eds, but the hardship for most teachers is rooted in a more banal reality: We ask little of our students and in return get even less from them. Many are borderline illiterate, can’t pull themselves away from their devices, and their attendance is spotty at best.

A Terrible Reckoning
Three years after locking down our schools, we are now reckoning with one immutable and terrible truth: Our students are now fundamentally different, many of them broken in ways we are only beginning to understand. Half of our students now utter sentiments like, “I do not enjoy my life,” or, “My life is not useful.” Every week a new headline seems to blast the unique misery of our young people. A recent Harvard study confirmed that today’s students are the most miserable generation in every category of well-being, even physical and mental health.

If outsiders to the world of education doubt that modern students are often denizens of dysfunction, consider the topics of the various trainings I, and the teachers in my district, am required to complete this summer before this school year begins: grooming, bullying, cyberbullying, discrimination awareness, human trafficking, students experiencing homelessness, and youth suicide, among others. Just a few decades ago, when I began my teaching career, trainings were oriented around prosaic topics like, “How to be a better teacher.” How things have changed.       

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/16/embracing-old-school-education-is-the-key-to-acing-this-school-year/

[Fishrrman]

The writer says:
"Embracing Old-School Education Is The Key To Acing This School Year"

Short of armed revolution (and nothing less), we are not going to see classical, old-school education in public schools again. Certainly not in the blue states.

That future must lie in private education -- private schools that teach a Western Civilization-centric education as it was still taught in most American schools up through the 1950's.

There should be private schools that bill themselves specifically and unapologetically to be "Classical, Western/Euro Centric".

I sense that down south, the "segregation academies" that proliferated after Jim Crow was overturned offered something similar.

There are still a few of them around today, although they are no longer "white only"...