CONTINUOUS SCHOOL?

Reader,

I chose the adjective in the subject line over "continual" for a purpose, so be certain to distinguish the meanings.

Lately in a newspaper I read that educators - by that was meant administrators in the sphere of education and not that they educated anyone - both in that Republic and the Supreme Soviet in D.C. were ardent about year-round public schooling - no long, summer vacations.

The reason given was not for schools to function as day care centers for the convenience of households where all the parents must work - to provide welfare tax subsidies for all the households where NO ONE works. No, it was that students forget everything, especially mathematics, over a long, summer vacation.

That's a crock! School for me never started prior to Labor Day and was always finished prior to Memorial Day, yet my classmates and I at our little school managed to retain enough technical knowledge from year to year for us to produce two Ph.D.'s in Engineering, a dentist, and the founder of a Civil Engineering firm, to name three examples.

I believe, rather, that the difficulty is that many students pay no attention to what is taught nor to the work they are supposed to do or are simply too stupid to remember anything, but since they have to be passed in order not not to destroy the self-esteem they have never earned, they show up next year with empty heads.

As usual, the response of "education" is to reduce students to the lowest common denominator and penalize everyone for the ineptitude or irresponsibility of some of them. I believe that there are students so incapable that they wouldn't recall anything if they stayed in classrooms day and night and received "education" around the clock, even when asleep, which might be during the day, too. Why penalize good students for the failings of the dregs? Let's go back to culling the duds and putting our resources where they will provide some payoff to the nation; i.e., to children with the intelligence and motivation to work.

My personal view about the singling out of mathematics for this selective forgetfulness owes to two facts: first, that it is a precise discipline, where slop work counts for nothing and wrong answers can't be subjectively credited by "let's feel well" faculty; and, secondly, that too many of the math instructors are duds themselves that graduated with degrees in "education" and know nothing of subject matter. These are the "I forgot everything over the summer" crowd from earlier generations. Let's dump them, too.