But the fact is that no matter what the ideology of the parents may be, the success of a child's education will mostly come down to things that have nothing to do with the alleged ideology of teachers one way or another. Is the child curious? Is the child supported? Does the child have learning resources at their disposal? Does the child have a cohort that expects them to learn, or a cohort that expects them to fail?
Kids are incredible learning machines, but they have to get plugged into the right ecosystem to activate that urge to learn.
TLDR: I'm an old guy, was serendipitously lucky that I had good teachers, and benefitted from a simpler curriculum focused more on "thinking" as opposed to "what to think".
I put these two Hank quotes together because I believe it get's to the heart of the matter. Politics, bias, in vogue social theories, common core, etc. all have done one thing to public education....it has made it more complex, not in the way that the world keeps getting more complex (I remain amazed at how complex the curriculum for my kids was). I'm not advocating for getting back to the basics of 'readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmatic' only. But my sense is that what Hank pointed to is that support for curiosity, development of critical thinking skills, inculcating problem solving into the curriculum, etc. is something that has been at best minimized and at worst lost. Our society has added so much around the edges of each subject, that the necessary kernels of those subjects can become obfuscated.
I'm not talking about including the true history of race in the teaching of history; that should be a given and be part of the general understanding of the American experiment. Context is extremely important to understanding how we got from where we were to where we are today.
I'm one of the older guys here on HF26 and when I went to elementary school in Virginia, I believe the schools had only been desegregated a couple of years before I got there. In my first Virginia history course that I can remember (in VA you took VA history something like 4 or 5 times over your 12 years of school because, Virginia), one of the earliest lessons was about 1619 and it was called "The Red Letter Year" because that's when tobacco was exported back to Europe, women came to Jamestown, and the first slaves arrived. Our teacher (and subsequent teachers of VA history that I had) took the time to discuss slavery's impact going forward (heinous practice, but one that drove significant segments of the agricultural economy), tobacco's impact on the economy yet with serious negative consequences, and how women, well they were the one really good thing that happened that year. It wasn't until I was in high school that we learned about the Tulsa massacre and such things. But it wasn't whitewashed. The plight of black folks wasn't minimized and was pretty unvarnished. And while we likely didn't learn as much about African American heroes as we could or should have, during our junior year visit to Washington DC, we learned that the enslaved built a great deal of our nation's capital, for example. Yet they didn't have the same freedoms and benefits that America provided others.
Throughout all of that we learned the other basics of history. We had civics and American government classes. We had the usual science triumvirate of biology, chemistry, and physics. We had English literature sprinkled with a good bit of world literature. Now I'm not pining for the good old days and I know that I was very fortunate in that I had teachers who cared and who were open minded for the most part. Throughout all of that we were guided to think critically about all things, what was right and what was wrong, what was accepted at a point in time that is no longer acceptable, and how to construct and deconstruct logical arguments.
And yes, I now see the value to the much maligned and hated "word problems" in my various math classes as they were pure, simple applications of the principles we were attempting to learn. We had mechanical drawing courses (something like basic drafting) which was one of the simplest applications of geometry that I had experienced as a youth. When my kids were at Broughton in Raleigh, they were one of the last cohorts to have the option of taking shop classes. That money was ear-marked for the newer technology curriculum (perhaps rightly so).
I apologize for the long diatribe, but my point is, the curriculum was simpler and we were fortunate to be well guided, but the emphasis provided the basis of "learning how to learn", not learning what to think. That appears to be the main complaint of some of the parents that I know. They just want their kids to be given the tools to discern right from wrong, true from false. They fear that has been replaced by more of the "what" and less to none of the "how and why".
The argument that "if public schools don't teach my children the way I want them to be taught, I should be able to put them in a school of my choice, with the funding that goes with it" is a reasonable argument, and it becomes more compelling as the learning environment becomes more politicized. In 2022-2023, 7.5% of public school students in the US are attending charter schools, and that number is going to keep going up.
Florida just passed one of the most comprehensive "the funding goes with the child" laws in the country. When people have argued against vouchers and charter schools they often bring up the stats about how the test scores aren't always significantly better at those alternatives. Yet, they never complete the research enough to find out that the schools that now compete against those others have improved test scores as well. Competition in essence drove improvements across the entire system.
