What did you do? Those millions of poorly educated Americans who, as tweens and later as teenagers over the last forty years, took the twelve years of free public education provided to them from the ages of six to eighteen, far less than seriously, who eventually nonchalantly walked through the graduation ceremony. stages of receiving diplomas without having obtained the fundamental academic skills that adequately accompany bona fide high school graduation? And what are they still doing now, as it inexorably continues, when countless unprepared young men and women receive those diplomas only to sadly discover, a few years later, that the lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic that befell their unruly minds and deaf ears as they languished inattentively in classrooms where teachers worked to present their prepared lesson plans, could it have allowed them to move on to higher education for rewarding, higher-paying jobs? I see them all the time, almost always in the cities of the United States, the abject unemployed and unemployable, those wandering people who mill the streets with desperate and desolate looks, who cannot get work because they do not have the proper education, because they cannot compete in the job markets against those men and women who took public education seriously and learned those fundamental academic skills well enough to access post-secondary education and training. However, it goes far beyond the formal classroom, the secluded carol at the public library, and the book-filled study at home, where an individual can use those essential basic academic skills to burn off the midnight oil while researching and delving. selectively across topics and disciplines. of personal interest for the sake of intellectual improvement.
The age group of the above individuals, to which I refer, includes those adult men and women between the ages of 19 and 35, who did not achieve, in 12 years, the ability to read, write and do mathematics at, at least, level 9th grade year. These countless men and women throughout all fifty states go from one dead end job to another dead end job earning barely minimum wages, never able to perform a successful continuum of gainful employment. Perhaps these former teens did not have parents who would regularly encourage and help them diligently acquire the rudiments of learning in elementary, middle, and high school. Currently, between 75 and 80 percent of all children in American public schools do not have these types of parents, who regularly take an active part in their children’s elementary and secondary education, who regularly help and encourage them at home. understand and complete homework assignments and assimilate subject concepts to help make learning fun. And I think the reason for this is the perpetuation of a vicious cycle of learning dysfunction that has a viciously generational effect. For most of the ignorant mothers and fathers, who had parents who were uninterested in their education, they usually have trouble being caring and caring parents.
However, there is another relevant reason for the staggering recession in American learning over the past 40 years, and it is systemic in nature. It used to be that a complete basic education, which included learning to read comprehensively, write with grammatical skill and clarity, and solve basic mathematical problems, was the substratum for an advanced education, and was basically good as an end in itself. That is, when a person learned to read, then he read voraciously to learn. A person, from 1900 to 1970, did not go to school to get a job, but to get a complete basic education; and with a well-rounded education he later got a good job. Back then, most committed students seriously studied Latin, world history, Western civilization, English literature, basic and advanced mathematics, physical and biological sciences, and geography in public school so that advanced studies in foreign languages, political history, and philosophy, world politics. development, creative writing, advanced theoretical mathematics, physics and microbiology, and advanced mapping could later be pursued at the college/university level. If it is rather the other way around, and students who have done poorly in public high school seek post-secondary education to get specific jobs, say as computer programming specialists, students who are not academically prepared to acquire well- Comprehensive liberal university education will be channeled only in courses and subjects, in colleges or universities, that will prepare them only to perform specific jobs, not to continue learning throughout life through reading and various conceptual thoughts.
Thank God for private and parochial elementary and secondary schools and, perhaps, public magnet and charter high schools across the country, which serve the small minority of tween and adolescent children who are molded by their parents to enjoy learning. But thank God more for those parents who take seriously their essential jobs as nurturers of their children’s development, who regularly dedicate priority time to their children, helping them to become wise and intuitive, while sacrificing their own personal time for the greater good. of learning. These are the parents of the children who will become the Leonardo De Vinci, the Thomas Edison, the Jonas Salks, the Louis Pasteur, the Mark Twain and the Michel de Montaign of the future. These children will become the adults who will continually rely on that basically complete knowledge substrate they acquired from their parents, and in the classroom before the age of 10, to pursue eclectic personal reading to continually learn and internalize increasingly convoluted topics. material.
I fondly remember a profound statement made by an eminent scholar, Dr. Stephen R. Lefevre, my mentor while I was studying political science for my graduate degree at the University of Texas at Tyler. Recalling a day in the early 1990s about his graduate experiences at the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his Ph.D., he said, “I was so honored when I walked across the stage to be cloaked as a Ph.D. and suddenly that there was so much more to learn, in so many related disciplines that I realized, that I didn’t know.” Stephen Lefevre remains a living tribute to continuing personal education and the advancement of knowledge, having used his acquired intuition and basic academic skills, gained early in life, to go far beyond the college classroom to the permanent academy of the deadly learning. to enrich the lives of others, like me. But what do “they” do? Those countless young people who suddenly become adults and discover that they have wasted the most important years of their lives, when they could have been acquiring, without any cost to them, the essential rudiments of learning, the 3Rs (“L”read, w” R”iting ya”R”ithmetic), the basic academic skills that would have prepared them to study a rewarding and, in most cases, lucrative profession. Well, they either realize the need to remedy and make up for what they failed to achieve during their early years, and do so at their own expense, or they sadly remain ignorant, socially and financially, for the remainder of their lives. life. their lives, unwilling to step up and take responsibility for their actions, and perhaps those of their parents. As I learned from my dear mother, achievement, in any particular area of life, involves accepting the premise that it is “mind over matter.” That is, you can’t afford to “import” what it takes to do it, and it doesn’t “matter” how long or how difficult it is to get there. Ultimately, getting there is what really matters.