Job 1 Is Three R’S Plus A Little Respect
Investor’s Business Daily ran a scary story the other day - scary for the economy, scary for the country.
The story, “When Firms Are Schoolhouses,” reported that business and industry are having to do the job that should be done by public schools. Not for any volunteer doing-good that is so big in the news, mind you, but just to get enough employable workers to run the shop. No wonder bosses are grumbling. One Illinois bank turns away eight out of 10 job seekers because they can’t read job applications.
The story is much more than one isolated horror statistic. A survey of the American Management Association found that more than a third of 1993 job applicants had trouble reading or doing simple math. And the literacy scene is getting worse. The number of companies reporting that they have to teach employees basic reading doubled from 1991 to 1994.
In a global economy that runs on knowledge and technological skills, that dumbing-down trend in the work force will lead us into catastrophe in the next century. The number of jobs that can be performed by illiterates shrinks with every passing month.
Note that this breakdown isn’t at the top of the education tree, in colleges and graduate schools. The trouble is with the growing number of people who never learned how to tell a “B” from a “6” and who can’t read a bus sign.
Despite President Clinton’s second-term campaign to claim the title of “the education president,” the answer to this big, growing problem isn’t more federal programs and more billions of tax dollars being spent on schools and standard liberal hooha. What we are talking about here is that old-hat sort of thing that has been a cliche for decades now - “back to basics.”
Nobody is going to win any big awards for calling for that. But if we don’t get a system that teaches basics, we aren’t going to improve the lot of millions of American illiterates. And the damage will show up in everything from welfare to crime to politics to taxes.
We are talking about schools that demand regular attendance and order in the classrooms, grade school teachers who can and do teach the old three Rs, standards of achievement that aren’t twisted and distorted by political correctness, fear or other factors having nothing to do with learning. And above all - as any real educator will tell you - we are talking about complete support for good basic education from parents and other adults in the community.
Nineteenth-century stuff, that is. We Americans led the world then in bringing education to the common man. Now, more than a third of us can’t really read and write our own language or do basic arithmetic. Before we get too carried away with weeping over the socioeconomic divide between haves and have-nots, we would do well to examine one reason for that divide: the fact that economic security is dependent most often on whether a citizen has or has not that most vital tool for coping: basic literacy.
Again, the problem has been around for a while, steadily growing worse. And it’s not as though no one knew what to do. Thirty years ago, The Dallas Morning News editorially commented on a mass resignations at a Bronx junior high school. Two-thirds of the faculty resigned at midterm because they declared they no longer could teach in what had become “a blackboard jungle.” They had quit not just jobs but careers.
The editorial noted that as situations in urban schools grew more dangerous - 11 teachers had been assaulted that year in that school - good teachers leave and the situation only can get worse. A reporter visiting one such urban school found it took 10 minutes to get the class to sit down and another 10 minutes to get the students to begin listening to the teacher. At which point a drunken student entered and broke up the class, and no further teaching was done.
The principal explained to the reporter that students who address their teacher with obscenities and insults weren’t even reprimanded, for that “closes off further communication.”
In such chaos, even the most dedicated student will have an almost impossible task trying to learn. If you wonder where those unemployable products of the urban school come from now, that principal’s 1967 philosophy is a good place to look. It is the too-prevalent notion that the schools’ chief mission is to “foster self-esteem,” rather than teach the kids the academic and self-discipline necessities they will need to function as self-supporting citizens.
Outgoing school board president Bill Keever recently urged Dallas not to turn its schools over to the thugs. That is good advice now, as it was 30 years ago.
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