Team USA

The Most Important Race—We’re Losing

Imagine that many of the world’s developed and emerging nations agreed to compete in a yearlong auto race. The race will cover all sorts of terrain and climates in widely separated global venues. Our team would be selected by political leaders in the nation’s capital from people nominated by every state. Imagine that Team USA would be the first team to settle on an all purpose vehicle for the race.

All of the competitors but Team USA chose all purpose and reliable late-model SUVs for their vehicle based on the varying course conditions where normal over-the-road cars could not be as successful. Team USA chose a modified version of the Ford Model T. While their choice was scorned by their competition, Team USA said that they were the real experts and they would win the race easily.

They decided on the Model T based on its reputation for being easy to work on and repair. They added a bunch of features which they deemed necessary for the race. These included an air-conditioned cockpit, a complete set of the latest instruments to measure every aspect of vehicle performance, a state of the art GPS system plus additional crew members to monitor the gauges and computer readouts. Team USA was very positive about having the best vehicle in the race and couldn’t wait for the competition to begin.

The race is to cover 25,000 miles over one year. Only the first 5 teams would be awarded prizes. At the end of the first week the leading teams were Finland, Singapore, China, India and Russia. Team USA was far back because their 50,000 pound modified Model T experienced 100 tire blowouts and the top speed on level ground was 10 miles an hour due to the immense weight dragging on the relatively tiny Ford engine.

Day after day Team USA fell further and further behind. They took to announcing progress against lower and lower targets to make their failing performance look better than it was. This was successful in fooling most of the people. The race ended when the first five teams had finished. Team USA was about 200 days behind the leaders based on their average speed to date.

The Point

The race story is an analog to the performance of American K-12 education versus our global competition. The modified Model T was chosen because it is a hundred year old design just as the progressive philosophy of our education system is a century old. While there have been lots of added changes in curricula; program names, advanced education degrees, best practices, response to intervention, etc. they all are consistent with the constructivist, discovery beliefs of the progressive ideology. As in the race story, the performance of the constructivist/discovery methods is such that the education of students is much slower and never reaches the robust levels of the competition that are using higher performance methods and curricula (faster, better performing cars).
Also, as in the race story, educators set lower and lower standards to make their performance look much better than it really is (short yardstick). Our schools are simply not close to being competitive with those of our most capable competitors. Their children, not ours, are being prepared to seize the best job opportunities of the future. This has massive import to our future standard of living and our very survival as a nation.

How long will we grant huge amounts of money to the failed education process? The waste in the current system is akin to the thousands of pounds of modifications the race team made to the basic model. Attaching fancy gadgets to a failed underlying “vehicle” or education philosophy is a fool's approach. Yet it is we who are fools to allow it to continue when it is wasting huge amounts of money AND harming our kids. It shouldn’t be hard to demand changes once we face reality. That is difficult because we feel foolish for not realizing the truth sooner. But the truth must be faced if our kids are to be saved from hobbled futures. Results don’t lie. The educators have proven they can’t improve no matter how much money we give them. They can’t be trusted with something so important as the futures of our kids. Clemenceau famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” Similarly, “Education is too important to be left to politicians and professional educators.”

Sirens' Song; There be danger here Will Robinson

You probably remember the Sirens of Greek mythology. Homer’s Odyssey is one of the more famous versions of the tale, but there were many others. The basic kernel of the story was that the creatures (Homer said 2, but other sources vary from 2 to 5) would sing their song to lure mariners to shipwreck on the rocky shore of their island. Odysseus in Homer’s version knows the legend and has himself lashed to the mast tightly and tells his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and not to free his bonds no matter how much he demands or pleads for them to do so. As they travel within range of the songs Odysseus demands and pleads for them to release him from his bonds and is not at peace until they pass far enough away to be out of earshot of the Sirens’ songs. Because the myths said that the Sirens would die if anyone escaped their trap, the Sirens were no more.

In education the Sirens’ part is played by the schools of education. There are a very few exceptions but their graduates do not make a dent in the message carried in the Sirens’ songs of “process is all that matters, learning is natural it doesn’t need to be taught, just make the kids feel good about themselves and that is enough.” This romantic view of learning is de rigueur in our society because the vast majority of educators have been trained in education schools which were designed in the 1930s to teach the Progressive principles of education. This anti-content approach results in teachers (especially elementary level) who don’t understand the subject matter well at all. This is in direct contrast to the philosophy of nations where their children are getting a much better education than ours as their achievement results prove year after year and decade after decade.

So let’s consider a couple of examples:

• Music education—this field has escaped the “they will learn it on their own naturally” approach. Why? Because you can’t teach students to play a school band concert in front of the parents each year without them understanding the notes, how to play them and so forth. And the teachers have to know music reasonably well or their students would give an embarrassing performance that would surely leave the school and its music program subject to severe criticism. The romantic approach is akin to that of Professor Hill in The Music Man. Oh, it worked for him because it made a nice story but his “think” system doesn’t work in the real world no matter how strong the wishes that it would or should.

• Sports—this is another area where physical education teachers and coaches know the skills required in the sports and how to teach them to the kids. That dreaded “drill and kill” so criticized in “normal, mainstream” subjects, you know the most important stuff, works and is used widely by sports coaches. Why are they granted a “waiver” from the Progressive party line? Dewey likened the education system that really works as fascist because it was structured to really teach subject knowledge. You could ask yourself why the Progressives didn’t want kids to learn to their potential. Perhaps because if they were well educated they would see through the Progressives’ desire to have government experts make the important decisions for us.

In sports as in music the obvious proof of whether the students learned the skills and knowledge required to really perform is in the games with their competitors and the public music performances. The question for us then is how much longer will we see our students shipwrecked on the future-reducing rocks because their educators couldn’t resist the Siren Song of the technically wrong and “abysmal failure to work” education school training.