Schools have to endure criticism from all walks of life, so much so that “public school” seems synonymous with failure. We need to stop holding schools responsible for problems caused by the greater society and our focus must turn to positive solutions to problems which plague our entire community. Only then will students cease to fail.

1845:
Massachusetts secretary of public instruction, Horace Mann, said Boston schools are ignoring higher-order thinking skills.

1902:
New York Sun editors said school is a “vaudeville show.”

1909:
Atlantic Monthly said, basic skills have been replaced by fads and fancy.

1927:
National Association of Manufactures said that 40% of high school graduates cannot perform simple arithmetic operations, nor express themselves accurately in English (please note that only about 20% of Americans graduated from high school at that time).

1947:
Benjamin Fine, in Our Children Are Cheated, said, “Education faces a serious crisis…We will suffer the consequences of our present neglect of education a generation hence.”

1958 March 28:
Life, in “Crisis in Education,” said that the “high school diploma has been devalued to the point of meaningless.”

1984:
Nation at Risk said, “the average graduate of today is not as well-educated as the average graduate of 25 to 35 years ago.”

2005:
National Governor’s Association says we must “restore the value of the high school diploma,” and “push students harder.”

Are you noticing a pattern? The above sampling of public school criticism [1] is the tip of the proverbial ice burg of school bashing that has become a tradition of politicians, business organizations, media editors, and educators. At no time in our history has there been a golden age of education, where everyone agreed that the school system was fulfilling its obligations well. Name a decade and you can find oppositional forces at work exposing a school crisis and warning of the doom that will soon follow if something isn’t done to save the sorry state of education. continue reading…