Identifying the Problem

I’d like to call your attention to an article by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative on the topic of the bad situation in public schools. He reacts to a letter a middle schoolgirl wrote to the New York Times about how superior her online schooling is to the chaotic public school she attended before the CoV lockdown. Some key Dreher quotes:

What if the problem is not the system, but the kids, and the families that send them to school without the character qualities necessary for their success?

Education is not a mechanical process (inputs + process = outputs), but an organic one. It requires students, teachers, and parents working together, in harmony. The role parents play is to create a habitus in which the student is prepared to learn, and to acquire the self-discipline to participate in the process. If parents do not or cannot do that, the system breaks down.

A friend who teaches at a very poor rural school here in Louisiana told me at length that the biggest obstacle to his students learning is the culture they bring with them into the classroom. It is a culture of natural hatred of authority, of chaos, and in the worst cases, contempt for schooling. He said that when you meet the parents of these kids, you know exactly where it comes from.

Amen, brother. Much of what is wrong with the schools, as opposed to with the students, is the result of well-meaning but ineffectual attempts to counteract the lack of parental support and structure, to have the schools somehow try to do what the parents can’t or won’t do, which task the schools are unable to accomplish.