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Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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We’re Taxpayers. It’s Our Money. |
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Competition: Where Did It Go? |
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Anyone who is still breathing knows that the world runs on competition. Look around and the evidence abounds. In the REAL WORLD we are all motivated by competing with our peers, co-workers, spouses, and enemies. Children don’t amble out the schoolhouse door hoping to be the “last” one on the bus. We aren’t gearing up for six months of Olympic endeavor to enjoy the scenery of the locale. Buying a nicer car than your brother has doesn’t happen because you like the hood ornament. Playing a soccer game where no score is kept doesn’t mean that the players don’t know how many points their side made and who made them. Katy High School doesn't live for football season because the students enjoy the cooler weather. Belaboring the point, competition drives just about everything we do. Why then, have public schools done everything they can to get rid of competition? If, as they claim, they are readying our children for life in the real world, why would they substitute activities, curriculum, and methodologies that undermine the one attribute that drives all of us? Perhaps as parents you have not looked closely at the changes in public schools over the last twenty years. You probably have some sense that schools aren’t like the ones you attended as a child, but you can’t quite put your finger on the differences. Such clever camouflage of the schools' activities is by design. Administrators do not want parents to even realize that things at school are decidedly different. You may or may not have heard the phrase “outcome based education.” It was such an anathema after a year or two, that the use of the phrase was deliberately outlawed by the education establishment. It’s been called by other names, but a rose by any other name smells the same, and in this case it’s a stinky rose. Outcome Based Education was the precursor to many of the educational paths we now see in our schools. Its purpose was primarily to change cognitive learning to affective learning. Or translating, we moved from a knowledge based curriculum to a “process” based curriculum. And translating again, we stopped learning facts and instead students just learn “how to learn.” Learning “how to learn” is pure baloney, but educators can drone on for hours explaining how that works. It’s always good for a laugh, unless of course one cares about the true academic education of children. The word devious is the one that comes to mind with regard to what has been done deliberately in our schools. There was never any serious public discussion about whether to change our schools. Most local school board members were kept in the dark for years after the decisions to change were made at the national and state levels. We have school board members in Katy ISD who still don’t know that anything changed. I realize that such an event seems preposterous, but I can assure you that it happened. There are many aspects of this change which I will discuss another day, but the primary one is the removal of competition. The Katy ISD has managed to remove all vestiges of competition. We have done away with real Science Fairs on all our elementary campuses. Kids get a ribbon for participating; they don’t get one for winning for being the best. We have eliminated the History Fair. Can’t have someone being the best in such a contest, so they just ended it completely. We give “citizenship awards” instead of academic excellence awards. We wouldn’t want any child to think someone could do math problems better and faster than he can. Watch for the Spelling Bee to disappear soon if it hasn’t already. The fact that home schooled students usually win the Spelling Bee at the national level, means that public school students will just stop competing rather than lose to those students. We honor the top ten in each high school class instead of the valedictorian and the salutatorian. In some schools, the valedictorian has not even been allowed to give the valedictory address at graduation. We honor those who have performed “community service” with the same level of appreciation as the valedictorian. We tell thousands of kids that they are graduating “with honors” and they’ve only made a 4. grade point average, AND their grades are based on inflated grades. Students cannot even get in to our state’s finest universities with such an average. We give a multiplicity of scholarships to students who “deserve” them instead of giving them to students who have “earned” them by virtue of excellent grades (the word is “SCHOLARSHIP!”) We name ten kids “captain” of the football team so no one gets his feelings hurt. We give out “participation” ribbons on Field Day so everyone is happy. The list of such changes is endless, but the results are critical. We either believe in excellence and competition or we do not. We either see the long term value for students in preparing them for what they will find in an actual job or we do not. The current stance of our public schools, in my opinion, harms our students, especially the ones who are academic achievers. Public school is supposed to be about acquiring an academic education, nothing else. Along the way of such an endeavor, children will learn to get along, respect authority and each other, and appreciate their cultural heritage. Those secondary lessons should not have become primary. Someone needs to shake parents and remind them that when we reward every child regardless of his academic success, we are espousing communism. There’s no other way to describe what is being done. EVERY CHILD IS NOT THE SAME. Every child CANNOT learn the same as every other child, and it is morally wrong to imply that they can. My concern with this sea change is that it was underhanded and hidden, and it goes against what most thinking Americans want for their children. It will take a major effort to fix what “they” have done.
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Mary McGarr, Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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Date: 01/31/2006 |
