Why Our Children Are Not Learning By: Anthony Pellegrino Part One

For the last two years I have been researching the field of education in the hope of learning why children are having a difficult time achieving satisfactory abilities to read, write, speak, and compute numbers well. In my research I have read widely from the history of education and many books and articles concerning the present day dilemma. I wanted to know what we are doing wrong and how it can be corrected.

I discovered that despite extensive research in learning abilities, brain function research, and huge increased expenditure of funds to education, most of the population thinks that the schools have failed students. Presidents, federal legislatures, local governors, state legislatures, private industry, parents, and anybody else who can speak, all think that they have a way that the school system can be improved.

The solutions fill volumes of books, and the research papers are well documented. At first I tended to agree with all these educated people. But as I began to prod deeper into the matter, my thoughts changed. I began to place schools in the society in which they operate. I started to research the forces that play on them.

All of us are influenced in our daily lives by our environment, our families, our neighbors, and all types of other forces–economic and social-some of which we can control, but most of which we cannot. We are also influenced by the media such as television, and print. We now can know what everybody is doing or thinking within minutes. The world is at our fingertips. So I asked to what extent then are our children influenced by the same forces. The following are my findings to date.

It is my belief that although families and communities are much more powerful influences upon children than are their schools, it is the schools that remain the institutions that the public attempts to manipulate to form the children. Consider that schools have children only 9% of their time from birth to 18 years of age. Thus 91% of their education-for whatever it is-is by the family and the community.

It is also my belief that society and children would be better served if public policy directed to the young would focus more on family and community support, television restriction, and health and child care provisions. Instead the focus has remained on the schools. Such an emphasis on the schools is understandable because defining the problem in that way makes it containable and assignable to a certain segment of society, the educators. Notice the low position in society that educators are placed today. From a high revered status years ago to a notch above a high paid baby sitter.

On the other hand, a broader focus on society and community support would necessitate changes from all of us and would not be school reforms but social reforms, which is even more difficult. So the attacks continue on the schools who cannot fight back because they have been emasculated by more powerful forces than they are.

As a result public schools are regularly called upon to be what no other institution in society even aspires to becoming-. non racist, nonsexists nonclassist, open places, palaces of learning, enclaves of joy which respond equally well to a range of children’s talents and desires which would fill a modern-day Noah’s Ark.

How could expectations be otherwise? Society constantly pulls and tugs with each changing day and changing whim. Instead of looking at the true reflection in the mirrorourselves- and correcting the blemishes, it is so much easier to have schools and educators as whipping boys. How could any school not fail at this mission?