PIML 96061401 / Forwarded to Patriot Information Mailing List: [After the heavy dose of PIML yesterday, today we will serve lighter fare. A number of replies from subscribers which are worth reading have come in. This first one refers to the 1895 8th grade final exam.] PIML ================================================================== Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 10:43:06 -0700 To: Bill Utterback From: jon.roland@the-spa.com (Jon Roland) Subject: Re: PIML 96061204 - 1895 8th grade final exam At 04:49 96/06/12 -0500, Bill Utterback wrote: >[Folks, I'm afraid I just failed eighth grade. This test speaks >volumes about the decline of our educational system.] PIML This test resembles one my grandfather, a schoolteacher who made the transition from one-room private schooling to cohort-segregated public schooling, gave his students in the 1920's, and it is at a similar level to tests given my classmates in 1958 in Seguin, Texas, although ours were different in form and style. Since then I have visited various schools and observed their study materials and exams. Most of the decline has occurred during the past 30 years, and began in urban schools. At the time I went to school, most of the kids were solidly middle-class, with a high proportion of parents having some college. More than 80% of my graduating class went on to college. Since then there has been a decided shift toward lower-class, less well-behaved kids with less-educated parents, and the quality and educational level of the teachers has declined, even in my home town. People who used to teach are now going into well-paying professions, leaving the field to persons who would never have qualified in the 1950's. I remember a talk I had with my grandfather, who worried about the cohort-segregated system which public education had adopted, based on the production-efficiency teachings of Frederick Taylor, who did the theoretical work for the modern assembly line. In the old one-room schoolhouse days, the older students helped teach the younger ones, and the adult, at the top, was the principal role model for them all. My grandfather said that although the cohort-segregated system allowed more students to be taught by fewer teachers, he feared that students would increasingly come under the influence of their age-peers, and that the result would be generations of people raised more by other children than by adults, taking on child-like values that would persist into adulthood and be passed on to their children in turn, with the resulting loss of adult values from the society. I'm casting what he said in modern language, of course. He didn't express these ideas in such terms. But this is the gist of it. He may have been on to something. If he was right, and I think he was, the cohort-segregated system of public education may have gone a long way to destroying this counrty, and only abandoning that system can save it. It is often the seemingly innocent changes that have the greatest long-term consequences. By the way, I can pass that 1895 text, although some items, like the "epochs of U.S. history", are textbook- or lecture-dependent, and therefore I might give different answers than the original teacher was expecting. --Jon ======================================================================= Visit our Web site under its new domain name - http://constitution.org/ If you need help setting up your own Web site, call us at 916/927-4935. ======================================================================= * Patriot Information Mailing List * http://constitution.org/piml/piml.htm * A service to help inform those who have an active interest in * returning our federal and state governments to limited, * constitutional government * Send messages for consideration and possible posting to * butterb@sagenet.net (Bill Utterback). * To subscribe or unsubscribe, send message with subject line * "subscribe patriot" or "unsubscribe patriot" * Forwarded messages sent on this mailing list are NOT verified. * See World's Smallest Political Quiz: www.self-gov.org/quiz.html * Libertarian is to LIBERTY as librarian is to library (DePena) * PIML grants permission to copy and repost this message * in its entirety with headers and trailers left intact.