The public schools of the U.S. are under fire! But, why?

Do you recognize the apathy and disorder of this classroom in your school? I hope not.

“Morning at a West Coast high schooL The first-period bell rings, barely audible above the classroom din. ‘O.K., everybody settle down,’ says the soft-spoken teacher of the course called Modern Problems. Her two dozen students, grouped around seven tables, pay scant attention. She switches on a video machine by her desk; a neatly categorized outline flashes on the board. ‘Have you already copied this down?’ she asks, pointing to the topic headings. A few heads bob yes, several more shake no; the rest of students merely carry on with their private conversations. The subject of the day is not terrorism, energy, or Watergate. Aptly enough, the topic is ‘The Probblem of American Education.’”

It appears that the chief problem in American Education is apathy and mediocrity. Neither the teacher nor the student comes to school to do that which the school is intended to do. The teacher does not come to teach and to discipline or disciple the student, and the student does not come to be discipled—i.e., to be taught. We live in a day of anarchy when everyone does that which is right in his own eyes.

American democracy and its exaltation and glorification of the twin doctrines of man‘s inherent goodness and individual freedom has defied the more excellent way.

However we must not point the finger and then be complacently swept along with this seemingly irresistable undertow of mediocrity.

The paragraph describing the West Coast high school is, I fear, a “normal classroom” in many a high school in the U.S. This paragraph begins a major feature article which every reader of Beacon Lights ought to read. Time magazine, November 14, 1977, contains a documented description of the educational scene in the U.S. today. This frightening scene found in the high school portrays a severe indictment of education in the U.S. This is particularly true when one contrasts education in the U.S. high school with that given in similar instiutions in European countries.

The conclusion one must inevitably reach after reading the Tale of Three Cities –Medford, Mass.; Coos Bay, Ore.; Iowa City, Iowa, in Time, November 14, 1977, and the article “Why American Education is Failing,” Reader‘s Digest, January, 1978, is that schools, and not just the big city-schools, are not doing the job they should. American education in the ‘70′s according to these writers is in deep trouble. n ere are 25,300 high schools in the U.s., which enroll 19 million students and carry a million teachers on their payrolls. Public education will cost $144 billion in 1977. This 152% increase over the 1960‘s is more than the country spends on national defense. The higher teacher‘s pay and the soaring costs per pupil coupled with tumbling test scores have caused Americans to become justifiably concerned about the decline and what seems to be the eventual fall of American education to complete mediocrity. Time writes, “. . . never have more Americans worried about whether they are getting their money’s worth from the institutions that were once the symbol of the nation‘s dedication to democracy.”

But what are American analysts and leaders going to do about this educational malaise? Can a system that is fathered by the American way of life really be corrected? Can the society which spawns the system and the failings of that society which cause the failures in the system correct the system?

Former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz has headed a panel of experts that has spent two years studying the problem and has “concluded this fall that U.S. education bas been ‘off stride for ten years.’” President Carter in his campaign for the presidency called for a creation of a separate Cabinet–level Department of Education to help remedy the situation.

What, however, will a proliferation of federal departments do to correct the problem which exists at the grass–roots of American society and causes failures in our public systems of education?

What according to Time and other analysts are the most serious problems today?

The most serious problem is declining performance! Declining performance is at least the most noticeable symptom of the real problem. Inspite of the advances made in textual teaching materials and audio-visual materials, today’s students are more poorly equipped in basic skills than were their predecessors. Simply stated, this means that students who graduate from today‘s high schools cannot read, write, and cipher as they could have, if they had graduated from the high schools of the past. In addition, they lack the other basic study skills such as map reading and graph reading which they need in order to gather information. They depend almost entirely upon electronic gadgets and calculators and lack the ability to compute accurately the smallest column of figures in arithmetic classes. The average scores on the College Entrance Examination Board‘s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) have been falling slowly but steadily since 1962. Verbal ability (ability to read, write, and speak correctly) has fallen by 10% while average math skills have declined by 6%. Despite the infusion of vast sums of money and technological skills into education, the number of high achievers on SAT tests (those scoring over 600 on a 200-800 scale) has been dropping. Graduates, who claim they are illiterate after thirteen years of schooling, have taken school boards to court. This has been emphatically dramatized in the last year in the State of Florida where graduates claim they are functionally illiterate. Colleges complain of entering freshmen who read at the sixth grade level.

Other indictments, which indicate the deviant preoccupations of the American student, are rising violence and mounting absenteeism. The problems caused by the student are compounded by the teachers who band into unions and through strikes, cause school shut-downs.

James Fenimore Cooper writing “On the Disadvantages of a Democracy” pessimistically, but correctly, said a century ago at the outset of the American experiment, “The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.”

Although optimistic educational reformers want to think Cooper was wrong and believe that the U.S. Commissioner of Education, Ernest Boyer, is correct when he sees and applauds “a new commitment to excellence in education.” I personally have no such faith in the American educational enterprise at the public school level.

Reformed Christians in America have for the past century realized the need in America for excellent schools where the demands of the covenant may be realized in aU areas of instruction. Such excellence places great responsibility upon the Christian school teacher and upon the parents. This may mean that our teachers will have to work extra hard so that they will not be swept along with the proneness which is in their own nature and in the nature of their students to mediocrity. We are in a certain sense products of our age.

In a day when the schools of America are hearing a call from the conservatives to “return to the basics” and progressive forces refuse to “mandate students to march through an educational maze,” Reformed Christians, who maintain distinctively Christian schools, must resist the inevitable tide of mediocrity.

The vigilance we need as Christians in being perfect is epitomized for us in the Word of God. Jehovah God calls His believing children to perfection so that they will be thoroughly Stted unto every good work. There is a sense in which each of us must go “on unto perfection or completeness” in our day to day tasks as well as in our spiritual life of sanctification. In this way, we can be thoroughly perfect in every good work.

God does not call us to mediocrity! (cf. Matt. 5:48)

God calls us to resist the inroads of mediocrity!

There is an ultimate standard that urges us to excellency!

Reprinted by permission from Beacon Lights for Protestant Reformed Youth, Feb. 1978.