Public education has come a long way from the dusty chalk boards and cement-anchored jungle gyms of my youth.
Today I’m going to point out some differences — some good, some bad — concerning how children are taught today, versus the education students received 50 years ago in the age of penny loafers and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
I have some experience in this regard. I attended public schools from the late ’50s through the early ’70s. My wife and I raised 11 children, and during the ’80s and ’90s we watched their education at very close range. Today, I am a semi-frequent substitute teacher, observing the education process for children who are the same age as many of my grandchildren.
Today’s teachers and students have access to unparalleled technology and instant access to information, which, for both good and bad, has changed everything in our schools. Giant touchscreens are replacing blackboards, and Chromebooks are replacing notebooks. Put it all together and you have an online infrastructure capable of producing the best educated and most technologically proficient students in human history.
But, strangely, I don’t see it happening.
For all our connectivity, I see a significant majority of today’s public school students largely disconnected from the importance of learning, disconnected from the rapidly approaching demands of adulthood, and disconnected from anyone outside their own tribal circles.
I’m not naïve. Young people have always looked for the easy way around hard jobs, educational or otherwise. What’s different today is how technology has made their natural avoidance of difficulties so easily accomplished, and how the electronic walls our teenage children live within have become so impervious to adult entry.
It seems to me that all this technology, capable of opening the world’s knowledge to young inquisitive minds, is instead being shaped and crafted by our youth to function largely as a shield, an impenetrable wall, between themselves and the adult world relentlessly closing in on them; behind which they can hide, comfortable in their own flashy but fake alternative universe of bloody video games and TikTok dance clips.
None of us should be surprised by this. The world is a scary place, and the modern teenager’s insulated online quasi-reality provides the adolescent electronic equivalency of a toddler’s comfort blanket. Meanwhile, we, the adults, are allowing it to happen mainly because we can’t figure out how to stop it. Many of you won’t believe that last statement but your kids know it’s true. High-minded family and school rules on tech usage are too easily worked around, and the world’s online enticements are too easily obtained.
But enough about the problems of runaway technology, as worrying as they may be. I’m convinced that there is a second problem facing today’s students, one we have created in our own local neighborhoods, and for which we, my friends, are solely to blame.
In decades past, teachers were largely revered for their work in the classroom, and if Junior came home with a demerit there was no discussion about whether the teacher or the student was at fault. Teachers and parents were a team. Crazy, I know.
Now, far too many parents regard teachers with suspicion — and are quick to assume that Johnny’s low test scores or frequent classroom disruptions are the fault of the school, or the teacher, but certainly not the student, nor the parent. This attitude easily feeds and reinforces the frenzy over whether local schools are functioning as a sort of hiding-in-plain-sight mind-control cult determined to train students to be morally warped and irresponsible.
And so it’s no surprise that today’s students, caught as they are between the crashing waves of our current culture wars, are happy to check out, keep their heads down, hide behind their earbuds and just play Grand Theft Auto while their parents and school boards tear each other apart.
And in the end, what does the student learn in all this? They learn that their fears of growing up are well-founded, their parents are far too easily conned, that studying is for losers, Shakespeare is dumb, and that if push comes to shove A.I. is going to bail them out anyway, so who cares?
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