Education on Oprah

I caught a bit of Oprah yesterday. MDB records it and I happened to be in the room when it started playing.

I'm sure she was glad to change it after a very short time; I'd asked her to pause it so I could explain the REAL problem in education to her so many times.....

The show featured Bill Gates and his wife, both of whom have taken on the education system and are determined to bring it up to world-class standards.

I hope they're not too late!

You see, the problem is NOT the education system. It would work just fine if the politicians would let it. The problem is society and the general attitude toward education, the attitude of entitlement that pervades every arena today, and the idea that we should leave no one behind.

Sorry, but that's not real.

The Oprah show framed the problem by doing a little C and C on two Chicago area high schools; one an inner-city school, the other a suburban school.

You guessed it; the inner city school was almost entirely black and the suburban school was lilly white.

Naturally, the white school was REALLY nice; the nicest school I've seen anywhere (it was suggested, of course, that such environs are typical in white suburban America) and the black school was a pit. It was horrible! They took students from both schools and transplanted them into each other's schools to see how they'd feel about it. Of course, the white students were appalled and the black students felt cheated and snubbed.

Imagine that.

The black students reported their utter disappointment, stating that they WANT to succeed and they WANT an educational opportunity like their white counterparts.

In short, it was framed as a racial issue.

Now look who's disappointed! Shame on you, Oprah!

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT, a racial issue! It's a behavioral issue, and the behaviors that have destroyed that inner-city school are the same ones that will never allow a nice one to replace it!

Here's what needs to be done to fix education:

1. Stop putting square pegs in round holes. The days of mandatory education are past! If a child does not wish to be educated, don't make them go! LET them explore the inner workings of the criminal justice system if that's where they think their future lies! Students who insist on going but clearly have no desire to do anything but disrupt the educational environment by starting fights, selling drugs, gang-banging, or otherwise pursuing almost every non-academic avenue they can find, should be escorted out of the building and not allowed back in; period!

If those elements of society were removed, the inner-city school COULD be as nice as the suburban school and no one would have to worry about a bunch of thugs tearing it down as fast as it's built!

2. Let high achievers do their thing and stop dragging them down! I'm sorry if some one's going to get their feelings hurt, but we need to stop mainstreaming special education and learning disabled kids in with the general education population so that THEY can go at a pace that's more comfortable to them and the general ed kids can do the same! Look, I KNOW that learning disabled kids are NOT retarded; many of them are very bright. However, they ARE re-evaluated every year and CAN be re-assigned based on the progress they make, so spending some much-needed catch-up time isn't a bad thing, is it?

Let's face it; not everybody is college material. We've come up with this mindset that you can't be successful and NOT go to college, but that's not true and it never was. Some of the most successful people in America are bootstrap people who simply worked their way past whatever shortcomings they had and found success because this IS the land of opportunity. They found theirs by EARNING it!

Oh, and they didn't spend a lot of time whining about what they DIDN'T have and about how unfair everything is!

Does that mean that education is not valuable? Of course not! I work in education and I genuinely believe that a good education is the key to your future so long as that education is crafted to fit what your future holds! If a guy wants to become a mechanic, why does he need trigonometry? If he wants to be a welder, why should he be forced to take keyboarding? People who intend to go into vocational fields should pursue vocational education! People who intend to go on to college should be educated in those other fields of higher learning! Let's quit stuffing square pegs into round holes, people!

I guess the whole "entitlement" thing bothers me as much as anything. To hear those black students complain that they don't have the same opportunity as their white counterparts..... Uhh.....that school didn't fall down all by itself! It had a lot of help! It's like graffiti; you see it, you paint over it, tomorrow it's back. So you paint over it again and it returns overnight. You paint over it again and it comes right back. So, you give up and just let it remain because you don't have the time or the resources to fight it! That's what's happened to these inner city schools. They TRIED to keep them up, but the destructive elements that they allowed to attend, uhhh.....INSISTED that they attend......, tore them apart. Districts ran out of time and money to fix it back up again, so it stayed broken.

Remove the element that does not want to be there and insist that it NOT be allowed back in, and then the school will be nice! I'd bet Oprah and Bill and a lot of others would even cough up the coin to make it happen, but I'd be just as willing to bet that they'd NEVER throw good money after bad and put a new school into the current situation when they KNOW it will just be torn up as badly as the old one in no time flat!

Sorry.....but that's REAL!