I currently teach art at a private Christian School.
The school works hard at educating the children with the basic skills needed to function in our world today.
It is difficult.
The American educational system has long been in failure mode. Catering to the lowest demoninator public schools do not teach or educate. Politics has for many years been a deciding factor and all school districts have become addicted to state and federal funds.
I know children that by the 6th to 7th grade to not know basic math skils, cursive is a foreign language, to cite just two examples.
Diviant sexual preferences and idealogy is attempting to influence children into life changing decisions.
Virtue, empathy and altruism are often replaced by arrogance and self-obsession.
What happens to a society when we stop teaching classics of literature that show what came before us, what people did, how they sacrificed?
Look at America today, this is what happens!
A Glimpse at what we lost when we abandoned classical education
Video from Roman Roads Media
What We Lost When We Abandoned Classical Education
"Mark Twain is attributed with the saying "Those who don't read have no advantage over those who can't." We are now a couple generations away from our forefathers who abandoned classical education. We are now the generation that does not even know what it has lost. Wes Callihan gives a glimpse at the kind of richness we have lost in this excerpt from the Old Western Culture curriculum on the great books of Western civilization. If you don't study the classics, you have no advantage over those who can't. Roman Roads Media provides tools to help you accomplish this task! Get started today!" from video introduction
The Dumbing Down Of America: Our Kids Are Not Learning
WASHINGTON, DC, Feb 8 – America’s schools are failing to teach young learners the basics. Tweens and teens are failing to learn, it’s as simple and as worrisome as that. The proof is in assessments that show too many of our youngsters can’t read, do math and write. The pandemic has a lot to do with it, for sure; COVID restrictions have disrupted the education process.
But could it be that there is more to today’s education crisis than debilitating lockdowns and remote teaching? About 30 years ago, the Foundation for Economic Education published a paper with the harsh conclusion that: “By any reasonable measure, America’s monopolistic, bureaucratic, over-regulated system of public schools is woefully unprepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Political, business, and education leaders continue to talk about “reforming” the current public education system. They should, instead, be discussing how to replace it.”
That may sound like a drastic measure were it not for the fact that our kids are not learning. Take Patterson High School in Baltimore, MD. A recent assessment of the teens in that school shows that a staggering 77% of them had the reading skills of elementary schoolers. According to Fox News, 204 of the 480 students who were evaluated using i-Ready Diagnostic testing were reading at kindergarten, and elementary school levels—71 of them read at kindergarten school levels, 88 at first-grade levels, and 45 at second-grade levels.
The unidentified teacher who leaked the test results to Fox said: “It’s heartbreaking to see a child that, when you talk to them outside of the classroom setting, of what are your dreams? And they have these amazing dreams and hopes for the future. But then you realize that with the skills that they have, with the level that they’re at, they’re going to have to work a thousand times harder to achieve. Our children need a future.”
The situation in our nation’s public schools has triggered a backlash among parents who have taken matters into their own hands. Many of them have taken their kids out of school and have begun to home-school them. Others are opting to take their children out of public schools and placing them in charter schools and private schools.
A U.S. Census Bureau survey shows that toward the end of the 2019-2020 school year 5.8% of households were homeschooling their youngsters and that in the 2020-2019 school year 11.1% of households opted to home school their kids.." from the article: The Dumbing Down Of America: Our Kids Are Not Learning