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From: dm@bbn.com (Dave Mankins)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: blaming teachers
Message-ID: <11380@quartz.BBN.COM>
Date: 2 Aug 88 23:03:17 GMT
References: <12230@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <12260@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <24171@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <2967@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: dm@bbn.com (Dave Mankins)
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 41

I believe that we err in blaming teachers for the poor performance of
our children.  Even the most enthusiastic, motivated teachers have an
uphill battle to interest our children in things that we parents are
not interested in.

Children go home to houses where there are no books, and parents
wonder why our children can't read (I read once that the average
American buys TWO books a year).  Children go home to houses where
watching television news makes you ``informed'' and parents wonder why
our children can't locate Central America on a map.

Teachers try to teach science, or try to teach the principles of
intellectual analysis, and parents burn them at the stake for teaching
heresies like ``evolution'', ``secular humanism'', or ``cultural
relativism'' --- As though teaching ethics is the role of schools and
not parents, as though the parents' ethical choices cannot withstand
exposure to the outside world.

	[The preceding paragraph is a little unfair.  MOST parents are
	 perfectly reasonable.  Unfortunately, there's a vocal
	 minority who ruin schools for the rest.  Also, I'm being a
	 bit unfair to those parents who do protest the teaching of
	 cultural relativism --- they have a valid concern that,
	 without an ethical framework, their children will be adrift
	 in an ethical sea.  Unfortunately, it remains the parents'
	 duty to give their children that framework.  If the framework
	 they give their children cannot withstand exposure to other
	 cultures and other ways of thinking, then it is the parents
	 who have failed, and not the schools who fail by exposing
	 their children to those other ways of thinking.]

The answer?  We all know what it is, I hope you'll forgive my
belaboring the obvious.  Teach your children to respect learning.
When they come home from school, have them read to you for 15 minutes
as you do the dishes, prepare dinner, or set the table.  It doesn't
matter what they read --- have them choose something and read to you.
Talk about ideas over dinner.  Give them a taste of intellectual life,
and they won't need teachers to drag them to it.
-- 
David Mankins		|``Surrender your heart's conceit that it is you 
BBN something or other	|  alone who knows the truth, and no one else.''
dm@bbn.com		|				-- Sophocles