American Thinker

by Micheal S. Parkhurst

    Every few weeks, a reporter takes a microphone onto the street and asks ordinary people simple questions. Name the three branches of government. Who is your senator  What was the Civil War about  The answers are alarming, and the surveys back them up. This year, 35 percent of Americans could not name all three branches of government. In 2018, a majority could not name a single Supreme Court justice. Then a legislator or a pundit delivers the familiar verdict: The schools have failed us, and reform is needed.

    I am always struck by the hidden assumption: that the people saying it know what the schools are supposed to do.

    I have seen American education from a few angles. I started in parochial school, switched to public school around fifth grade, and stayed in California’s public system through my bachelor’s degree. My Master’s came from Biola and my doctorate from Pepperdine, both private. Then, not by choice, I became a different kind of teacher: My wife and I homeschooled all three of our children.

    They have led me to an unpopular conclusion. The schools have not failed us. American families have failed their children.

    For most of history, education happened at home. Children learned to read at the kitchen table, learned a trade in their father’s workshop, and learned right from wrong in Sunday school. America began the same way. Massachusetts’s first education law, in 1642, made parents responsible for teaching their children to read. Towns were ordered to provide schools only later.

    The public school system as we know it took shape in the 19th century, as immigration swelled, and its goal was clear and worthy: to make citizens. In the great wave of 1880 to 1920, millions of newcomers could not read or write English and knew little of American customs. The Americanization movement leaned on the schools to teach them the language, American history, and how our government works. It did a real public service, raising the general level of knowledge of nearly everyone who passed through it.

    The schools did teach morals, in a sense. Horace Mann’s common schools taught a generic, nondenominational Christian morality, the lowest common denominator. But they were never built to pass on a family’s own faith, values, or history. A classroom of thirty children from thirty families cannot carry thirty family traditions. And after the Supreme Court ended official school prayer in 1962 and devotional Bible reading in 1963, even that thin common layer was stripped out.

    The first five years of parochial school gave me a foundation that let me coast from sixth grade well into my freshman year of high school. In all my public schooling after that, I cannot recall a single conversation about right and wrong. Nearly all of it was memorization and regurgitation. Knowing the capital of Turkey has not come up much in my adult life.

    Real critical thinking, being asked why something is true rather than what was said, did not come until my Master’s program. That is a long time to wait to be asked “why.”

    Our homeschooling began with our son. Real doctors and learning psychologists diagnosed him with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, back before those labels were handed out so freely. He could not be taught in a group. He would not sit still, and a class moving at the pace of thirty children was far too slow for his mind. So we taught him at home, and when our two daughters came along, they joined in.

    At the time, many people considered homeschooling a form of child abuse, and parents feared that California would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fear was not imaginary. As late as 2008, a California appeals court ruled that parents without teaching credentials could not homeschool, before reversing itself months later. For legal cover and support, we enrolled through a private school that mainly kept records, while each family ran its own instruction.

    The objection we heard most was that homeschooled children would be isolated. We knew that it was false within our first few years, and the research has since agreed. Our homeschool group made time for the children to socialize. Because instruction was one on one, the school day was far shorter than mine had ever been. On field trips, docents loved the homeschooled kids, because they wanted to be there, asked intelligent questions, and behaved. I taught my son from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and he went on to earn a college degree.

    Having taken all three through high school, I can say this: Almost any parent who graduated from a university is perfectly capable of tutoring a child through the eighth grade.

    Some things a public institution simply cannot do, no matter how earnest its teachers are.

    It cannot teach your family’s history. There is a reason oral histories are so much richer than the anthology textbooks of history class. Families keep diaries. Grandparents tell their grandchildren what they saw firsthand. My grandfather was a Navy Seabee in World War II, and the stories he told me taught me more about that war than any textbook did. My wife’s grandmother served in the French Resistance and was beaten more than once by the Gestapo, leaving her with a damaged eye. What she told my wife, no curriculum could reproduce. That is how a child learns why there are medals in a frame on Grandpa’s wall and a statue in the town square.

    And no teacher can make a student learn. A teacher with thirty students can assign the homework. A parent standing over the kitchen table is the one who sees that it gets done.

    The moral drift shows up even in our language. We have become so afraid of offending anyone that we no longer say a person lied. We say he spread “disinformation.” Look the word up, and the dictionary will tell you it means false information spread deliberately. In plain English, a lie. We have softened truths into ambiguities so nobody has to feel uncomfortable. Children do not learn that lying and stealing are wrong from a state curriculum. They learn it from the people who raise them.

    So when the man on the street cannot name his congressman, cannot say where his electricity or his food comes from, and has no idea why World War II was fought, the honest question is not what the schools failed to do. It is who was supposed to be teaching him all along.

    Somewhere along the way, Americans decided it was easier to send the children off to school so both parents could work and afford the house, the neighborhood, the television, and the vacations. None of those things is bad in itself. But we have decided that pursuing them matters more than making sure our children are ready to face the world after we are gone.

    The schools did the job they were built for. The job we handed them on top of it was never theirs. It was ours, and it still is.

    Image via PickPik.