Education, part 1.

Education is one of the most talked-about aspects of life in this country, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Frequently the media discusses how much better education is in other countries, particularly Asian countries and the latest”superstar” of education, Finland. They wonder why our educational system is not as good, and they point fingers at supposed causes. But rarely do people not intimately involved with education truly understand why our country’s education system fails at what it is supposed to do.

I was a teacher for nearly 40 years, and I have had a first-hand view of why education fails, when does it succeed, and why it is likely never to be any better than it is currently is, no matter how many crude attempts are made by various levels of government to improve it.

Since I am now retired, and have no masters to please anymore, I feel as qualified as anybody to write a no-holds barred series of essays on the state of education in America, its failures, its successes, where it is headed, and why some attempts to improve it are actually destroying it. I will freely point fingers at the hypocrites who are pretending to improve education but are actually its worst enemies.

I do not plan to devote this blog exclusively to education. I hope to devote one entry per week to my essays about education. A second entry will be subtitled My Life and Times and will reminiscence on the past six decades as I have experienced them. Part of it will be autobiographical, part of it will be devoted to popular culture and history.

If I have anything else to say besides those two topics, I will write a third entry each week. After all, it’s not as if I do not have the time to do it. ☺