Despite the billions of dollars being spent our students are arriving at college totally unprepared. Why?
A few reasons
1) Parents do not take ownership of raising their children. They expect the school system to impart a sense of achievement and discipline that should be already in place when the youngster enters the school.
2) Children are not allowed to fail. It might hurt their self esteem. A few years back my neighbor a teacher told me how they were instructed to no longer use red pens to grade lessons. It seemed that red can cause stress and results in an adverse effect on a child's self esteem. I remember it well as that same day I made a hell of an error at work and got hauled into the Associate CIO's office. A half hour later I was certain of two things. First, I had screwed up, and second - he did not give a damn about my self esteem.
3) Children are not allowed to be children and mature normally. Today's youngsters have every moment programmed and planned for them. They do not know how to make use of what is offered in school. I actually had a young man say to me "I knew there was a problem, and I would have taken the initiative to solve it - if only someone asked me to." This mindset inevitably leads to teachers becoming frustrated and when buried in a morass of well meaning but useless regulations, they often just do enough to make do.
Today's parents have created a generation of coddled, self indulgent, brittle primadonnas that compensate by competing in everything and not having the opportunity to fail at anything.
Like anything in government there is waste, always will be. However, until we as a society step up and see to the development of our young people they will continue to perform at the level that allows them to get by.
Yes,there are exceptions. I simply believe we are letting our young folks down by not teaching them to excel while exposing them to the consequences of not doing your best.
I also believe we put way too much emphasis on a college education. We place too much merit to getting a degree and finding some office job. We should return to a time when we also developed a well-paid skilled blue collar workforce.
