(11,062 words completed yesterday. Oh, and one correction: yesterday I said that ScriptFrenzy is in June, and though it was a June event its first year, it is now an April event.)
In today’s Corpus Christi
Caller-Times,
this letter to the editor:
***
[snip]
Prayer, paddles
…I do know the cause of the decay in quality of education. It is not the three Rs that are missing. It is the three Ps that are absent from the education system (prayer, pledge, and paddle). Those were the things made each generation a little smarter and a little wiser than the ones before. When the three Ps left the school system, the three Rs followed them out the door.
[snip]
Larry Reid, Rockport
***
I’m not sure why this letter to the editor irritated me so much. Usually I can pass up the really annoying ones with an eyeroll or a sigh. And there’s usually at least one of those every day.
The inaccuracies are a bit grating.
I’m not sure when Mr. Reid was last in a classroom, but my kids recite the U.S., Texas, AND School pledges every day during the morning announcements, and the U.S. pledge is recited at the beginning of all parent meetings. Sporting events always include a performance of the national anthem. So I would politely suggest that “pledge,” or other manifestations of American pride and patriotism are far from missing in American education.
Prayer is also far from absent in public education, at least in some local institutions. As recently as last year, all meetings, concerts and sporting events in our school district were opened with a prayer, in spite of the clearly established unconstitutionality of official-led prayer in public educational settings. As defenders and teachers of the U.S. Constitution, public schools must observe the separation of church and state that ensures our religious freedoms. This year such invocations are practiced in a more clearly constitutional way. “Spontaneous,” student led prayer is a-ok according to the Supreme Court, and it happens all the time. Every school in our district practices a minute of silence each morning, in which students can choose to pray or reflect or doodle simply sit quietly. Every Friday night at the football game the athletes convene at center field after the national anthem to recite the Lord’s Prayer. The difference this year is that school representatives do not invoke the prayer over the loudspeaker, or actively call for prayer in other meetings.
The one point Mr. Reid is sort of right about is the paddle. Corporal punishment is rare in American education today, though if you check the books, it is still within the power of teachers and administrators in Texas to administer bodily punishment. As someone with intimate knowledge of a school administrator, I can vouch that parents sometimes ASK administrators to paddle their children, though no school official, to my knowledge, uses corporal punishment in this district. Part of the reason such punishment is thankfully almost unheard of today, even here in Texas, is that educational philosophies today advocate positive discipline to help students choose to learn rather than learning out of fear. There is also the obvious litigiousness of our society. Consider the liability a school faces if a corporal punishment is deemed abusive, or if injury or other extreme harm comes to a student as a result of that corporal punishment.
I wonder if Mr. Reid could pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (the infamous TAKS, a standardized test, administered beginning in third grade, and ultimately necessary for graduation in Texas)? Did his praying, pledging, and paddling experiences help him to remember and understand essential information or ultimately make him a better citizen?
What, I wonder, is Mr. Reid’s evidence of the “decay” of the educational system? Perhaps it is the broken buildings, the high teacher turnover, or maybe he relies on test score data? I think this decay argument is often trotted out as a precursor to some sense of insecurity about the U.S.’s place competitively in the world. But the mandate of public education has grown so far beyond the three Rs that simplistic proclamations about how praying and beating will make our schools better are really rather ignorant.
I understand that his implicit argument is about the balance between local educational control and federal educational control. The Constitution leaves education to the states. Changes in policy under the second Bush administration (No Child Left Behind and its offspring) enacted sweeping accountability measures which grabbed some control of education from the individual states (though often without funding for its proclamations). I don’t necessarily agree with Mr. Bush’s educational policies, but I do think that in today’s global culture and economy, that we need to think as a nation, and not as a collection of loosely confederated states, about what our educational standards are and how we will train our young people to be citizens of the world. And I hope those standards include respect for each student’s bodily integrity, cultural integrity and desire to learn and succeed.
;)
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 9:07PM 
