January 27, 2016 Article

The Old Coot is a “Go Slow” fan.

By Merlin Lessler

I don't get it. What is it about today’s culture that makes people in such a hurry? I get it for my crowd, old guys. Our time is running out and we have to get doing stuff. But, the rest of society seems in such a hurry they never stop and smell the roses. “Have stuff to do, you know!” Take how we educate kids these days. We used to send them off to school when they were five. Kindergarten was a place to learn social skills, to cut with scissors and to memorize the alphabet. If you wait that long to start your child’s education these days, you're considered an unfit parent. Kids spend two years preparing for kindergarten. They have to know their ABC's, their colors, how to tell time and could, if asked, write an essay on political correctness. If you ask parents and educators why they are in such a hurry, you get the "We’ve got to compete with the rest of the world" speech.

I don't think this is the way to compete, to skip past the different phases of development in a mad rush to the finish line. The kids graduating from high school today are less educated than the graduates of 50 years ago. The hurry-up strategy isn't limited to giving kids a head start. It continues all through their school years. The system is in such a rush to teach reading that they don't "waste time" with basic phonics. Kids aren't taught to sound words out.  “No time!" Educators put a fancy spin on it. They call it progressive, but us old coots know that the "whole language" reading concept is a crock. The same thing is going on in math class, no time to learn the multiplication tables, no need. Professional Educational innovators in Washington and Albany tell us it will click in the kids' heads, like magic. They just have to sit in math class for six weeks, and presto, the multiplication tables will be implanted in their cortex (by osmosis, I suppose). No need to memorize anything!” Not math, and certainly not poetry. That “artsy” educational exercise fell out of favor long before the multiplication tables got plowed under.  

A lot of kids don't graduate with just a high school diploma these days. Some are halfway through their freshman year of college. They take the courses in high school, to get a leg up, which makes you wonder what's going on, or not going on, in the school that kids have free time for college courses. Why aren’t they spending it in regular high school classes? I ask again, "What's the big hurry?" Even the D.C. politicians have jumped on the bandwagon. They stuck their nose under the tent with the "No Child Left Behind Act" and then came in for another attack on traditional education with the Common Core. School administrators and teachers are shaking in their boots. They devote all their energy to improving the school's test scores. In fact, they teach to the tests. No time for fundamentals. The poor kids are told in September that for the next six weeks they will spend five hours a week learning to beat the system, so they can score higher on the tests. If you ask them how many hours that will add up to, you get a blank look - they can’t figure it out. They don’t know how to multiply five times six without a calculator because they haven't been “forced” to memorize the multiplication tables. It’s probably just as well; they can’t pronounce multiplication anyhow; they don’t know how to sound it out. The system is in such a hurry that kids are at risk of getting stuck on stupid. What's the hurry? I got stuck there the old fashioned way; I did it at a slow pace.