Big Government, Schools, and Wood Burning Stoves

THE OLDER THE UNITED STATES becomes, the bigger its federal government becomes. More bureaucrats, laws, programs, agencies, departments. The United States Constitution lists three federal crimes; counterfitting, treason, and piracy. Now there are, what, forty or fifty thousand? There was a time when a cabinet level department called "Health, Education, and Welfare" presided over the well being of each and every citizen, relatively unobtrusively. Those times are long gone. When Obama calls a cabinet meeting, the government rents the stadium where the Washington Native Americans play football. Focusing on only one aspect of American well being, education, the Secretary of Education, sitting in the second deck, near an isle on the fifty yard line, can listen to the President calling roll, and conjure up ways and means for ever more federal intrusion into America's schoolrooms. And make no mistake, this is what he/she does. Conjures up schemes for fed. gov. and edu...A long time high school teacher, requesting anonymity, recently opined: "we teachers are really being micromanaged these days, by people who know far less about the daily realities of teaching than the teachers know". Interesting thought. Makes sense. Let's see now. A quick review: Bush gave us "No Child Left Behind", and Obama has given us "Common Core", and he still has plenty of time left to pile on more, higher and deeper, so, beware. Sometimes you wonder where they come up with all these clever names. Let's see now. "No Child Left.." emphasized testing, and testing. Standardized meassurement of the academic progress of millions of American students. Just what we needed, I guess. Obamacare...ooops, Commom Core focuses on reading. Content, and logical thoughtful analysis of content is the central theme. A steering away from emphisis on personal relevance of reading material, and more emphasis on developing the thinking skills required to analyze reading material content, by engaging in the actual analysis. Also, no more of this business of assigning reading according to the reading level of the individual reader. All students will henceforth be assigned reading material at grade level, come hell or high water, so decrees the great all helpful leader. The problem with Common Core is that not very many teachers around the country seem to understand it, agree with it, or are in the process of implementing it, studies indicate. Therefore, what good does it do? What good would it do if it were being implemented? We'll have to wait and see, studies indicate. There hasn't been much improvement in the reading skills of American children since 1971, ever present studies indicate. That's fine with me, it takes me off the hook. Why should there be any improvement? Why should today's kids be any faster or better than we were? If you didn't know better, you'd almost believe that in fact today's students not only read less, but absorb less, even if reading faster, ever faster. Ah, there was a time, say fifty or a hundred or a couple hundred years ago, when the teacher simply walked into the room, got the books out, and started in, without any studies, analysises, government programs from the swamp on the Patomic, or standardized testing. And you should see those eigth grade and high school tests from those little one room wood burning stove schools from 1913. Very few of us alive today could pass an eigth grade general exam or high school general exam from 1913. The wood burning stoves are gone forever. Sometimes its tempting to pretend that the Department of Education were safely ensconced inside one of them.