A large number of school levy issues were on the ballot throughout Ohio this past Tuesday. Most of them were rejected by voters. Reading the comments on Facebook, I noted that those who voted against the levies were largely unapologetic.
There is a general dissatisfaction throughout America with public schools: their management, their methods of (taxpayer) funding, and the instruction that is taking place within them.
This dissatisfaction with public education has fueled a concomitant rise in homeschooling. When I was a kid, during the 1970s and 1980s, one never met anyone who was homeschooled. (Fewer than 1% of Gen Xers receive their education this way.) But nowadays it seems that every other young adult one meets is the product of homeschooling. Every young couple with children is at least talking about educating their kids at home. The percentages rise as the neighborhoods become whiter and more affluent.
I understand the dissatisfaction with twenty-first-century public schools. It seems that no news day is complete without a fresh report of some weirdness being taught in public schools, or some flagrant example of teacher misconduct.
And yet…I had a very different experience in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended both public and working-class Catholic schools, both at the grade school and high school levels. I received an excellent education. And while I liked some of my teachers better than others, almost all of them were intelligent adults who were deeply committed to their calling.
What happened, then? Sometime during the mid-1980s, one began hearing the catchphrase, “if you can’t do, then teach”. The careerism of the 1980s taught young people that teaching was a second-rate profession. If you were smart, if you were a capable student, then you didn’t want to be a teacher. No, that simply wouldn’t do. You had to be an attorney, a CPA, or a CEO.
Another important trend occurred during the Gen X growing-up years: a decline in the number of capable young women entering the teaching field.
As recently as the 1970s, teaching was considered a top career choice for the most capable young women. While some of my teachers were male, they were disproportionately female. Many of my female teachers were absolutely brilliant. My junior high science teacher, a woman named Mrs. Tierney, was as knowledgable as many college professors.
That all began to change in the 1980s, with the rise of “girl power”, and the idea that the brightest young women must compete in all traditionally male careers. The result was more intelligent young women working in law and finance, but fewer intelligent young women becoming math and science teachers.
Did society benefit most from more intelligent young women entering law firms…or from more intelligent young women entering the field of education? I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions on that one. (I don’t want to deal with the hate mail.)
What I will say is that there are trade-offs to all societal changes. Forty years ago, we began subtly denigrating the teaching profession (“if you can’t do, then teach”) and we began telling young women that they were passively accepting the patriarchy if they didn’t go toe-to-toe with their male classmates in the corporate boardroom.
Forty years have come and gone since all of those trends began. The excellent teachers who provided my education during the 1970s and 1980s are all retired. After casting the teaching profession as a second-rate career choice for four decades, many people are shocked to discover that—lo and behold—the field is now populated by mostly second-rate people. (In one of their Freakonomics books, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner documented the decline in teacher IQ within my lifetime.) Many parents are also shocked to discover that a disproportionate number of those teachers are left-wing ideologues who shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s children. But that tends to go along with the second-rate thing.
And now many of those affluent white suburbanites have decided that public schools must be abandoned wholesale. Parents who once believed that a teaching career was beneath them have decided that they should take a break from their law firms and corporate offices to…educate their children at home. Can no one see the irony here?
I reiterate: I experienced public, industrialized education during the 1970s and 1980s. It really isn’t that bad when the right adults are in charge. The problem is that the right adults are no longer in charge, because the right adults are off doing other things. Among those other things (note irony once again) is now homeschooling their kids, because they no longer trust the people working in education.
I am grateful that I wasn’t homeschooled. I loved my mother dearly, but she would not have been capable of teaching me Spanish and algebra at home. In my experience, very few parents are well-equipped to provide competent instruction beyond the fifth- or sixth- grade level. Teaching at the junior high level and above really is a task that is best left to trained professionals.
The proof is in the pudding. I’ve met many of these young adults who were homeschooled in recent years. Most of them are nice enough, but there are noticeable gaps in their knowledge and social development. I would not have wanted to trade places with them.
Another important factor is the socialization and people skills that the organized educational experience provides. I was neither the captain of the football team nor the most popular kid in my school. But my high school experience was anything but four years of living hell. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.
More germane to our discussion here, my school years taught me about friends, enemies, rivals, and conflict management. These are skills that many screen-bound Gen Z young adults sorely lack.
The solution to the crisis in public education is not for a million concerned parents to isolate their children and retreat behind suburban walls. The solution is for a million concerned parents to become involved and take back their public schools.
This is not like trying to take back the national government. Education is still largely managed at the local level. It is possible for organized groups of adults to bring about substantial changes.
This would be a lot more beneficial (for their children, most of all), and practical, than for every parent to try to become a do-it-yourself calculus teacher.
-ET
