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

Sensible educators recognize that profound changes must occur in our society if our children are to grow up educated. Society must stop attacking the schools and begin to examine itself and its visions. We must come together and decide in a unified voice what we want our children to become.

When so many children do not enjoy nutritious and sufficient food, proper health care, or adequate housing, then meeting academic goals is inevitably secondary. When so many children in families and communities where learning has never been taken seriously, where books are never read, where television is watched extensively on a daily basis, where immediate consumption is accepted and deferred gratification unknown, and where the sports page of the newspaper is the only section regularly studied, then such learning goals are remote from the experience, expectations, and imagination of many of us.

My research points to more disturbing conclusions. There has emerged the conviction that children have had to bear the costs of unprecedented levels of adult selfindulgence, thoughtlessness, incompetence, and perhaps most importantly, misfortune.

A vast array of physical, emotional, and social problems that are battering the lives of schoolchildren seem to be caused by the inability of adults to live productive, healthy lives, to build and maintain families able to comfort and nurture children, or to organize communities that protect the young from emotional stress and physical harm. It appears that today’s children really do face a harder, more dangerous lives than in the past. And all of this in an age of the highest affluence ever achieved and in an age of the most advanced technical and medical knowledge ever known to man. What an irony!

To be very frank with you, two years ago I was singing in unison the same chorus that most of you are about the deplorable state of the schools. But after delving deeper into the matter, I have changed my tune.

Desperate for a solution, we experiment with all types of new school systems such as magnet schools, voucher systems, computer technology, etc. We pump more funds into the system hoping that money will wash away the evils that the schools are creating in our children. We scream that more accountability is needed. Higher standards must be expected. Teachers are lazy. Educators are incapable of improving the system. Get rid of them. But the system is not improving despite the concerted efforts of all the above. So what is left.

Until society comes to realize that the reflection in the mirror is itself and begins to take responsibility for its malaise, it will continue attacking the only institution that can help to build a better society. Schools cannot hope to do in only 9% of the time a child is with it compared to the 91 % of the time it spends with the family and the community.

My conclusion is that until the rest of the educational influences–family, community, government, higher education, and the business community–become as one in the education of our youth, only then will all of our children be able to achieve that which by birthright should be theirs: enthusiasm for and accomplishment in learning.

Let’s stop throwing bricks at and demanding the impossible from schools that we have emasculated and made the whipping boy for our own short comings. How do we explain the plethora of youth violence? How we do explain the breakdown of social mores? How do we explain all the violence and abnormal behavior in our society today?

Schools do not set standards for a society. Schools only reflect society’s activities and visions. Let us understand the reality of the situation and correct it accordingly. Than schools can do their job properly.