Categories
education and schooling folly nannyism

Well-​Substantiated Insanity

In what sort of place are children taken from their parents, or parents investigated by the authorities with that in mind, because they allowed their 10- and 6‑year-​olds to walk to a park to play?

Not a forced 20-​mile march across Death Valley, mind you, but a Saturday stroll of less than a mile under normal earth conditions.

What sort of place? These United States Silver Spring, Maryland, to be specific.

Thats where Danielle and Alexander Meitivs two kids, Rafi and Dvora, were picked up by police, on their way home from a neighborhood park.

A two-​month Montgomery County Child Protective Services (MCCPS) investigation followed. Now, theres no law against youngsters walking in public by themselves. Local public schools dont provide bus service for kids within a mile of the school, deeming that close enough to walk. Nevertheless, this week, authorities announced that the Meitivs were found responsiblefor unsubstantiated child neglect.

The good news is that the neglect charge is completely unsubstantiated.The bad news is that official Free State busybodies seem to have not one clue as to what that word means.

MCCPS will keep a file on the suspicious family for five years. We dont know if we will get caught in this Kafkaesque loop again,says Mrs. Meitiv, noting that the agency left unanswered the question of what might happen if they ever again dare allow their kids to walk outside the house without adult supervision.

The family is appealing the nonsensical MCCPS finding.In the meantime, the Meitiv children will continue to walk in public as if its a free country.

This is Common Sense. Im Paul Jacob.


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Categories
education and schooling national politics & policies

The Education Nightmare

Ever have a nightmare … about school?

I can’t remember enduring a “dog ate my homework” or “naked in front of the class” dream recently — it’s been a long time since graduation — but economist Bryan Caplan discusses a different variety on EconLog: those nightmares in which one “realizes” that one lacks a credit to have graduated, and so must go back to college, late in life, etc., etc.

Caplan says many people have such unsettling dreams.

More interestingly, he muses that “I’ve never ever heard of someone dreaming about suddenly forgetting whatever job skills they learned in school.”

That is, people worry about trivial infractions of arcane qualifiers for a credential, but people don’t worry about the alleged purpose for going to school and getting credentials: learning something.

This Kafkaesque comedy rests on our “deeply rooted beliefs” that

crossing educational finish lines has a big effect on employability but little effect on job skills. The nightmare isn’t that you suddenly can’t do your job. The nightmare is that you’re the same person you were yesterday, but society throws you into limbo because your papers aren’t in order.

Caplan is writing a book titled The Case Against Education. He argues that we’ve come to rely too much on credentials, that pushing schooling and accreditation has not produced a net benefit to society.

He, a college professor, happily admits that, for bright people who test well, schooling can provide enormous private benefits. But that’s no ground for public subsidy.

Policy should surely encourage increasing skills, not making it easier for some folks to get jobs regardless of skills.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling

Play Gun Theater

Stop me if I repeat myself … but maybe we don’t need elaborate explanations for poor performance in America’s public schools.

Maybe it comes down to this: they are run by people as unhinged as the administrators of the Stacy Middle School in Middleford, Massachusetts.

Yes, it’s time again for American Play Gun Theater, in which children (usually boys) pretend to have toy guns in their empty hands, emit fake gun sounds from their mouths, and scare the living Horace Mann’s out of government employees.

The current case? That of Master Nickolas Taylor,. He formed his hand to vaguely resemble a revolver (index finger as barrel, thumb as hammer — don’t try this at home, kids!) and mimicked some ray gun sounds towards two girls in lunch line, and then blew his finger tip, as if smoke drifted up from firing.

I am not aware of ray guns needing this, but it does have panache.

His punishment? Suspension. The 10-​year-​old malefactor needed to be taught a lesson, by gum.

Had he done something truly dishonorable, like cut in line, some punishment was probably in order. But if all he did was pretend to have a toy gun (two layers of pretense here at least!), then the worst probably should have been to put him in Pretend Jail, with no bars and no irons and some irony.

The lad’s father and grandmother came to his defense; the local newspaper put him on the front page.

The lesson? For supporters of today’s abysmal public schools: Don’t reload. Rethink.

And if I’ve said this before, point a finger at me and make ray gun noises.

But hey: I may raise my special Deflect-o-shield.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling national politics & policies responsibility

Sack Lunch

On the face of it, the idea that the federal government should be involved in school lunches is … weird.

And yet Congress and a long line of presidents have pushed the notion of federally funded and controlled lunches; recently the First Lady, Michelle Obama, made a big deal about revamping the federal school lunch program. But as Baylen Linnekin explains, “Whatever past successes [the national school lunch] program may point to, by any objective measure, the USDA’s school lunch program has since earned a failing grade.”

Instead of going through another alleged upgrade, maybe the best idea would be to, as Linnekin puts it, “Separate School Lunch and State.”

And this isn’t an oddball, contrarian proposal. As Linnekin relates, “More than 1,400 school districts have opted out of the USDA School Lunch Program since 2010.”

Linnekin tells the tale of Meghan Hellrood, a high school student in Wisconsin who leveraged Facebook to hold a one-​day protest boycott of her school’s lunch. “It’s not actually giving us healthy foods,” she said.

Maybe Hellrood’s protest strategy should become the norm. Brown bag it, America. Declare your independence!

Parents can make a sack lunch. Older kids can pack their own. And as Adam Carolla, king of the podcasters, has so often opined, even the poor can afford to make their kids a bean sandwich. We can do this.

Reform of public schools might best begin with lunchtime. Locally. With parents regaining some control and responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling

Tech/​Knock/​Crazy

When Bill Nye “The Science Guy” spoke out in defense of Common Core, he succumbed to the urge to carry baggage from other disputes. He laid much of the blame for opposition to Common Core on the creation/​evolution debate, basically just blurting out that people who objected were objecting to “science.”

Amusingly for someone with “science” in his moniker, Nye missed the fact that science isn’t part of Common Core. Math and English are. There are many ways to learn and teach both. I see no reason to standardize either. The “science is settled” meme doesn’t translate to English studies — “the English” is definitely not settled.

More recently, Bill Gates trumpeted that the issue seemed to him a “technocratic” one (his words, not mine; thanks, Bill), like which electrical socket standard to choose, or which gage of rails to adopt.

Now, it’s worth noting that American railways standardized the bulk of its gages ages ago, and without government help. So standardization, when it really matters, can happen without appointing a Technocrat in Chief. Or a Department of the Technocracy.

For my part, I’m glad my wife and I homeschooled our daughters. We could avoid the latest trends in the education biz.

It’s harder for schools under the federal thumb.

Common Core’s “mathematics” looks like a slightly renovated “New Math,” a goofy experiment that wreaked havoc on public schooling when I was young. Some teachers might teach such innovative and oddball methods well; some students might learn best with it. Pushing it down all gullets seems not merely bad educational policy, but bad “technocracy.”

And heck, even bad “science.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling folly

Nothing to Sneeze At

I don’t believe everything I read. If I did, I’d believe seven incompatible things before breakfast, and by lunch I’d suffer a nervous breakdown.

From a cognitive dissonance overload.

There’s a story just out: A Tennessee teen was allegedly suspended from school for saying “Bless you.”

Un-sneezin’-believable.

I don’t want it to be the case that even the people whose policies I generally oppose — in this case, public school administrators (I think the government school system needs to be opened up, competitive) — can be this outlandishly foolish.

The story comes out of CBS Charlotte. One Ms. Kendra Turner, a senior at Dyer County High, says that she offered a “Bless you” after a classmate had sneezed. And then her teacher reprimanded her, saying (in Ms. Turner’s story) “we’re not going to have godly speaking” in the classroom, and the student protested that it was her “constitutional right.”

The disagreement went to an administrator, and the young lady was booted out of school. The school claims the girl was “disruptive,” which hopefully means something other than saying “Bless you.” The girl’s pastor is concerned, and suspects a very touchy, irreligious teacher.

The story seems preposterous. And yet similar stories elsewhere have been confirmed, usually about non-​existent, symbolic guns. The degree of intolerance amongst today’s cultural vanguard (which includes teachers) for unapproved practices astounds.

There’s almost nothing more innocuous than a “Bless you,” or even a “God bless you.” It’s so traditional it’s hardly even religious.

But this story does have a ring of plausibility. Why? Because there is no level of absurdity — no breach of common sense — that a zealot won’t contemplate.

Especially a zealot in America’s intellectually bankrupt public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.