FOREVER CHANGING THE WAY AMERICA EDUCATES

FOREVER CHANGING THE WAY AMERICA EDUCATES

Education has long been inadequate, particularly in the earlier
years.

There isn't a bright child who does not come home complaining of
boredom.
There isn't a slower child who does not come home in pained
frustration.
Often they do not really get to voice their thoughts about their own
suffering.
The bored suffer at least as much as the otherwise challenged.

Children want to learn.

We see that in how many those who have access to complex video games
master
them, very often readily exceeding their elders in a fraction of the
time it takes them
to learn the game.

There are several things wrong with education.

1). It fails to provide a common standard, across the country, for
quality in terms of results.

What is quality in education ?  It is more than learning facts and
basic skills.

Ultimately results are the effects on society. Does education foster
true achievement, decrease
the crime rate, create better lives and improve society, by the
values, discipline, ability to think
clearly, and act progressively and effectively. Does it serve social
functionality rather than add
to the dysfunction and failure that plagues society as its statistics.
Where that measure indicates a failing grade, it is the fault of
senior educators, and they should be replaced with competence. When
schools cannot teach citizenship, discipline, good conduct, ethical
action, progress,  the quest for scientific and social truth, cannot
better human lives adequately, educators need to be fired out and
replaced. These are measurable standards and can be upheld.

They are as measurable as actual testing for acquisition of cognitive
skills and fact based knowledge.

We can measure results in terms of how society is faring. Whether it
is improving or in decline.
Where crime rates are rising educators need to be replaced with
competency. They are incompetent. We must begin to rethink how we look
at the role of education and its purpose in society.

2). Modern technology provides the means for giving each child a
device for programmed learning. An electronic tutor with a
standardized program of study that provides consistent, thorough,
learning of the fundamentals of the major subjects while making them
enjoyable and teaching basic motor skills. Such devices were a dream
twenty years ago when I first discussed it, on the net, with a black
educator in America, who thought the idea was a perfect solution to
individualized education, but worried about the costs. The costs are
no longer the problem. We can do it. Great strides have been made as
to interactive software, for learning, that reinforces concepts,
according to the best psychologies of learning, in a more scientific
way than any individual educator can hope to do for a whole classroom
of students. Children each learn in different ways at different paces,
but the program rectifies the short comings of each, helping them
across their individual hurdles, and aiding memory of key information
and concepts.

It is time to bring technology to each child to supplement what
teachers can do, and to create a
common, nationwide, program of learning where every child is equally
advantaged. Where there is truly some educational justice being
implemented. Where every child has personal tutoring and
where every child can accelerate or catch up according to their
individual natures, but no child
needs to be left to fall behind and perish. The brightest could
accelerate far beyond their pained
frustrated boredom serving genius as well as the average. We need not
hold back the brightest.
All we need is the new technology and it is available at a very
affordable cost.

3). Education must teach a non sectarian ethics and morality. It must
inculcate discipline.

To do this educators must be able to discipline. This has become a
problem with insufficient and
ineffective penalties for the persistent and sometimes dangerous
violators. Teachers often feel
helpless as to what to do, and the problems of classroom discipline
have failed to adequately come to government's attention. Where
teachers cannot use corporal punishment in today's education system as
they could in the past, their only choice is to remove students who
are unruly and disruptive. This solves nothing for education or
society. It is a failure of the purpose of education. Ultimately that
education fails in its responsibility to society.

What then can be done ?

Where behavior problems exceed the ability of educators to cope, the
legal system must be given a method for dealing with the problems
before they become uncorrectable problems for society. Removal of the
offender from the classroom, appearance in court, and sentencing to a
reform school type correctional facility, where expert help and
special discipline can be provided to correct the problem when it is
discovered in early life. Such expertise and taking away of privileges
as punishment can only be accorded by legal means, by legal process,
not by a disempowered educator hard pressed to keep order in an urban
classroom. It also requires the application of medical, psychological,
diagnosis and treatment resources, as well as special methods not
applicable to other children, in order to properly rectify the root
cause of the problem. Without that type of empowerment, and without
special facilities capable of providing the necessary care for
offenders, education cannot cope. We need to realize that there is an
ever growing problem in our schools, which requires immediate
legislative change to provide for adequate recourse, to correct the
problem and restore educational effectiveness.

Education cannot be held responsible to society if it is not suitably
empowered.
Only a rethink of the relevant legislation will adequately empower it

Robert Morpheal


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