Schools Can't Fix Society

By Jennifer Hill

Everyone loves a good Facebook meme, and conservatives especially seem to love ones that take shots at the younger generations and public schooling. It’s nothing new, Republicans have complained about the generation that will replace them since the dawn of time, now they just use social media to gripe. They criticize how today’s youth are being raised and love to point out all of the ways the public education system is screwing up. I see daily posts from Libertarians and Republican alike complaining that kids aren’t being taught the important stuff in schools. Skills like balancing a checkbook (is that even a real thing anymore?), home economics, engine repair and social emotional skills like kindness and responsibility are all proclaimed to be erringly missing from the public education system. But what they fail to see is that the very attitude of expecting government schools to instill these things is exactly what led our society to the cliff we now hang on.

Governor Desantis of Florida once again made headlines and earned the mass applause of Republicans everywhere by signing into law a bill that will require high school students to complete a personal finance class prior to graduation. I don’t deny the merit and importance of financial literacy, but in the last 70 years we have added massively to what our schools are responsible for teaching. What was once only core academics, now is all sorts of health and well-being standards, extracurriculars like art, music and PE, social-emotional learning, technology and stem, test prep, the list goes on and on. All of these things have merit, but classroom time is a finite resource. At what point do we wonder if one of the problems in our educational system, one of the reasons many of our kids struggle so much with basics, is because we have added so much of the responsibility that was traditionally a parental role onto the teachers? Life skills are important and nobody is attempting to argue otherwise. Of course, it’s vital that people understand how to manage personal finances, cook a meal and complete basic home repairs, but just because something is important doesn’t mean it has to be taught in a school, nor does it mean that school is the best setting to learn it. In fact, life skills and lessons are best taught through living them. Want your kid to know how to change a tire? Then teach it to them. Want them to treat others respectfully? Model it.

The reality is our schools are broken because our homes are broken. I was an elementary school teacher off and on over the last 15 years. Frankly I after a few years I’d have to walk away in disgust, come back and repeat the cycle. This hot and cold relationship with teaching gave me a unique view of education, kids and families. When you are in the deep for long periods of time you don’t notice changes as starkly, but stepping out and then back in several times left me with the ability to see how drastically things had changed each time. In the same community I noticed increasing numbers of students from broken homes. The number of active and involved parents dropped as did the academic performance of students. As a teacher I watched parents make more and more excuses for poor behavior, turning their kids into entitled, low performing problems. The entire standard paradigm of my classroom flipped. When I first started kids who needed reading and behavior interventions were a small portion of my class, but by the time I left the number of students NOT receiving formal interventions was less than one third. Neither my teaching nor the curriculum had changed much, but the stability of the homes the students came from certainly had. According to the US Department of Education reading scores of graduating seniors peaked in the early 1990’s. The most discouraging aspect is that neither side of the political isle wants to address this in a meaningful way. Democrats want to throw more money at it, despite the fact that budgets are constantly growing with no change in performance, and Republicans want to blame the liberal system. Nobody is acknowledging that the schools are simply a microcosm of our society and as long as our society is struggling, so will our schools.

Before we can begin to fix our education system we must take a good long look at our society. Why do we have so many kids born to single parents and from broken homes? Why are so many parents tuned out on their children’s education and why won’t we quit abdicating our parental roles and responsibilities to the government and then wondering why you don’t like what is being taught to our kids?