Going Old School in Education

Often when the topic of improving education arises increased funding is claimed to be critically necessary, but having taught at the high school level for 35 years I never thought that the lack of money was really a primary requisite for fixing education.

I may have been mistaken, but in my opinion the three indispensible necessities for building a quality education were teachers who loved their students and their subject matter, administrators whose top priority was educational excellence, and high building-wide discipline standards. Any school that has these will perform well and none of those need place an intolerable burden on taxpayers.

Jeremy S. Adams is a man after my own heart. He's a high school and university teacher who has written a column for The Federalist in which he declares that it's "time to go old school in education."

Here's his lede:

Enough with the endless torrents of education reform and the modern obsession with infusing technology into every facet of the learning experience. Enough dumbing down of the curriculum, tolerating egregious student behavior, and politicizing the curriculum of the classroom. Enough self-censorship of America’s teachers and administrators who know deep down (but are often afraid to say out loud) their students are graduating with a depleted battery of skills and knowledge that would have been unrecognizable and unacceptable a generation ago.

Going “old school” is much more than a cranky trope or cantankerous canard extolling the “good old days” when kids worked hard and had respect for their elders. Going old school means recognizing that the solution to many of our problems does not require more money, more innovation, or elite schools of education promoting vogue (and usually leftist) notions of instruction and curriculum.

It’s time to bring back pencils and paper, teachers who lecture rather than largely facilitate class projects and online activities, discipline policies that actually discipline, and, most of all, adults who are ready to be in charge of the children they are educating.

While the headlines about education these days are often centered around the razzmatazz of critical race theory and the 1619 Project, the controversies of transgender bathrooms and sports, and the conferences of Moms for Liberty, they pale in comparison to the real crises in American education.

These topics certainly make for flashy television spots and viral op-eds, but the hardship for most teachers is rooted in a more banal reality: We ask little of our students and in return get even less from them. Many are borderline illiterate, can’t pull themselves away from their devices, and their attendance is spotty at best.

Here's one more excerpt:

While schools should certainly offer “wrap-around” services to support our most disadvantaged students, the solution to almost all of these problems is to look backward, to go old school. Schools should remember a time when they were more than counseling centers and places where breakfast and lunch are provided, a time when teaching was more academic than therapeutic, a time when highly objectionable student behavior (like cursing at a teacher) had serious consequences for student and parent alike, and a time when high expectations were considered a blessing, not a clandestine form of bourgeoise oppression.

In what areas of modern education would an old-school approach be preferable? A few.

Adams goes on to discuss those areas of education that would benefit from a return to the values and pedagogical methods commonly employed by schools two generations ago. If you're a teacher, an aspiring teacher or a citizen concerned with the quality of education your local school is delivering you should read the rest of Adams' column.