EDUCATION AS AN UNWANTED BURDEN

There is a great challenge in an article written Amanda Ripley and published in TPM, Book Club: Poverty Doesn’t Explain Poor American School Performance. I belong to a Google Circle, +Education Revolution. This is a circle populated by people, mostly teachers and retired teacher, who are interested in education as more than just a job. A member of that a group called attention to this article. I expect to see a bunch of comments but there were only four, of which three were mainly focused on the parents attitudes/involvement and one blaming our antiquated teaching methods.  I certainly don’t know the answer but would like to add something from my own experience in life. For 19 years in lived as an adult in what some would call a poverty-stricken third world tropical culture. The schools were poorly constructed, without air conditioning, with outside toilets, and no locker for the children, which meant they had to carry everything all day. If a child could not afford a book, paper, or pencil, he or she had to do without. During the first years I live there, the teachers were essentially untrained. The government subsidized teachers’ salaries but church donations paid some as well. To indicate the level of education the children were dealing with I would explain that the one course that most children had the greatest difficulty with was religions; if a child had to repeat a grade, it was usually because they had failed “religion”. In my village, there we two schools, the Catholic school and the Christian School. In the Christian school, they taught children that Catholics were not Christians. In one case, the head master stood in front of the class and told the girls in his 6^th grade class, that is 12-year-old students, “Si quiere un hombre, soy un hombre.” He was not even reprimanded. But, things changed.

For some unknown reason, things changed and changed rapidly. The Prime Minster called for closing the digital gap. The village built a library with foreign aid, and installed computers. The alcalde and town council charged students to use the computer so the use was limited but still the computers were there. What seemed to be changing most was the general attitude. More and more parents would go out of their way in conversation to mention that their schools were not as good as in the U.S. but they were working to make them better. Some students would tell me that they were studying hard because someday they hoped to go to college. Both the parents and the children had aspirations. It may sound like a “put down”, but some of the gringos would tell them that they would home school so they didn’t have to send their children to the local schools. The local people, when they heard this, would say nothing but you could tell that this attitude had an effect.

In other words, there was a community effort to make the education of their children better. Contrast that with what we see and hear in America; taxes are too high, educations costs too much money, privatize schools so we don’t have to pay for other peoples children to go to school, raise tuition so student have to pay their own way, fight teacher’s unions, etc: everything is money,  money, money. I believe American students, hear these things and even the youngest ones sense this attitude from their parents, and develop the attitude that education is not a privilege deserving their up most effort but that their schooling is a heavy burden their parents would rather not have.

 

 

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