We cannot reclaim America without first reclaiming our families. And one of the first places we must start the reclamation process is by taking charge of our children’s education. More parents of school-age children will watch the season premiere of “American Idol” than will read a book to or with their children.
It’s time to be brutally honest and face the facts. If a child is failing or underachieving in school, more times than not it’s the parents’ fault. And that in no way suggests I am absolving teachers and schools of blame. Nor do I suggest good grades signal no need for our involvement.
It is our responsibility as parents to make the time to go over lessons, ask what is taking place in the classroom and/or demand same when necessary. It is our responsibility to compile reading lists for our children. It is our responsibility to expect and insist on academic excellence from our children based upon their individual ability to excel.
We must be proactive. We cannot sit idly by, complacent that the teacher and school know what is best for our children, or that they have their best interest in mind.
We must be inflexible in our familial value system by placing education ahead of television, rap music, clothing, iPods and computer games. To my reasoning, there are few things more appallingly tragic than a child who cannot read commensurate with grade level, or who has never read a real book – one who doesn’t know how to take notes, and is unable to write an essay using proper grammar, punctuation and demonstrating reasonable command of vocabulary – but who knows the lyrics of songs on the top music charts verbatim.
It is a harsh reality, but many times parents are lazy and/or indifferent to their child’s education – leaving same to those least qualified to do what we should do. Sadly and “unfortunately, much of what people believe today about [classroom] education is as mythological as anything from Homer or Aesop, even if it isn’t nearly as poetic” (“Education Myths” by Jay P. Greene).
Work is not an excuse for not having children read the literary classics. Parents today spend more time shopping with their children than they do teaching them geography and the proper function of government. We laugh when those approached in “man on the street interviews” claim to be dean’s list or honor-roll students, but cannot answer the most basic questions pursuant to elected positions and government. It is a tragic indictment of not just our schools, but of the parents as well.
It is easy to blame the public school system for the decline of quantifiable academic excellence (and I am in no way suggesting that they do not deserve strong condemnation) – but tangential to that point, we cannot expect the schools to do what we as parents do not demand.
Not every public school is bad, and not every private school is good. I agree that, thanks to Jimmy Carter’s creation of the Department of Education, we now have commissioned centers of agitprop, i.e., government schools that have taught state-sponsored liberalism and misinformation for nearly four decades. I still argue that this only takes place because parents have abdicated their responsibility for the education of their children.
This is not a social-class phenomenon. It is taking place in every income/social strata. Some may argue that it is an orchestrated conspiracy to turn the malleable minds of children and young people toward anarchist anti-American agendas – and I don’t necessarily disagree – but that also doesn’t absolve the parents.
We discuss and advocate what we know. If as parents we have our minds filled with television, the latest music CD or other worthless nonsense, that’s what we will pass on to our children. If the only periodicals we read are Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Soap Opera Digest and Glamour magazine, how can we expect our children to embrace Charles Dickens? We fathers pass on that which is of importance to us – whether it’s cold beer or teaching our sons how to ogle women.
Reclaiming our nation starts at home. My mother had an eighth-grade education, but she spent every evening teaching me arithmetic and reading. She and her family instilled into my cousins and me the mindset that education comes first. And with limited formal education themselves, they tutored us toward academic achievement.
It is true that I/we benefited from rural school teachers who were skilled, knowledgeable and committed to our learning. The color of our skin did not color their approach to teaching us. Today, tragically, we have teachers who, themselves, are the recipients of flawed educational systems and the absence of hands-on parental involvement in children’s education. While it’s absolutely true that schools, teachers, the courts and the government institutions undermine quality educational outcomes – that makes it no less true that this has happened and is happening because we parents have allowed it.
America is under attack from within, and the battle for our future begins within our families. If the family is destroyed, America’s demise will be as easy as one, two, three. And if we continue to invest the time we spend with our children in worthless pursuits of nonsensical television programming and vulgar misogynistic music – to the neglect of Shakespeare, Mozart, math and factual history – we will continue to reap that which has been sown.
