Two summers ago, I lived on the cheap in a tiny Donegal village. It was an immensely clarifying experience, in ways too personal and numerous to enumerate on this blog. One thing I did when I wasn't walking endlessly through bogs and around farms and across moors was to sit by the turf fire in our little living room, drinking cup after cup of milky tea, and ruminating about this strange thing--or cluster of things--we glibly call "education". I blogged a lot that summer, despite a slow dial-up connection that had a bad habit of cutting out in mid-post, and I also read a lot. One book I started, but did not finish, and which I find myself returning to now as I reflect on what this experimental boarding school year has been, is Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America, a tart, witty, and wise reflection on the American education establishment that is often as fresh today as it must certainly have been when it was published in 1944.

Barzun begins with two counterintuitive caveats: "Education is indeed the dullest of subjects" and "I am convinced that at any time brooding and wrangling about education is bad." He then proceeds to disregard the latter and to disprove the former. A classic early series of paragraphs:

At best the title of teacher is suspect. I notice that on their passports and elsewhere, many of my academic colleagues put down their occupation as Professor. Anything to raise the tone: a professor is to a teacher what a cesspool technician is to a plumber. Anything to enlarge the scope: not long ago I joined a club which described its membership as made up of Authors, Artists, and Amateurs--an excellent reason for joining. Conceive my disappointment when I found that the classifications had broken down and I was now entered as an Educator. Doubtless we shall have to keep the old pugilistic title of Professor, though I cannot think of Dante in Hell coming upon Brunetto Latini and exclaiming "Why, Professor!" But we can and must get rid of "Educator." Imagine the daily predicament: someone asks, "What do you do?" -- "I profess and I educate." It is unspeakable and absurd.

Don't think this is frivolous, but regard it as a symbol. Consider the American state of mind about Education at the present time. An unknown correspondent writes to me: "Everybody seems to be dissatisfied with education except those in charge of it." This is a little less than fair, for a great deal of criticism has come from within the profession. But let it stand. Dissatisfaction is the keynote. Why dissatisfaction? Because Americans believe in Education, because they pay large sums for Education, and because Education does not seem to yield results. At this point one is bound to ask: "What results do you expect?"

The replies are staggering. Apparently Education is to do everything that the rest of the world leaves undone. Recall the furore over American History. Under new and better management that subject was to produce patriots--nothing less. An influential critic, head of a large university, wants education to generate a classless society; another asks that education root out racial intolerance (in the third or ninth grade I wonder?); still another requires that college courses be designed to improve labor relations. One man, otherwise sane, thinks the solution of the housing problem has bogged down--in the schools; and another proposes to make the future householders happy married couples--through the schools. Off to one side, a well-known company of scholars have got hold of the method of truth and wish to dispense it as a crisis reducer. "Adopt our nationally advertised brand and avert chaos."

Then there are the hundreds of specialists in endless "vocations" who want Education to turn out practised engineers, affable hotelkeepers, and finished literary artists. There are educational shops for repairing every deficiency in man or nature: battalions of instructors are impressed to teach Civilian Defense; the FBI holds public ceremonies for its graduates; dogs receive short courses in good manners, and are emulated at once by girls from the age of seven who learn Poise and Personality. Above and beyond all these stand the unabashed peacemakers who want Kitty Smith from Indiana to be sent to Germany, armed with Muzzey's American History, to undo Hitler's work.

These are not nightmarish caricatures I have dreamed but things I have recently seen done or heard proposed by representative and even distinguished minds: they are so many acts of faith in the prevailing dogma that Education is the hope of the world.

When my child was in elementary school I read some articles about different theories of education, and Summerhill and so forth, and I asked myself what my goals were for her K-12 education. I decided that what I wanted for her was a multitude of options. That would mean enough breadth and depth that (1) she would know enough to decide what she would want to focus on later, and (2) when ready to make that choice, she wouldn't have to take a step backward and take, for example, remedial math courses, or in some other way make up for unnecessarily lost ground. I think it's worked out OK. Whether my goals for her matched her teachers' goals (if any) is a good question.

I've never understood parents who turn their children's education over to the schools. My kid has loved school, she's learned a lot and had some great teachers, but I've always believed that ultimately her education was her dad's and my responsibility. Up to now. When she goes off to college in the fall, our part is done (except to send money).

I just want my child to be able to read and write. If i have to help with one more graphics arts project which pretends to be a book report or a history report I am going to scream. What ever happened to one page essays? To book reports? to vocabulary excerises? Everything is bells and whistles with no substance. I live in a community that spends $13500 per child to educate its high school students. The lack of basic skills and the amount of remedial work that is required at the high school level is appalling. I have two children in college and i have been very happy with what they are being taught and exposed to. One is at a Jesuit college the other at a big ten university. It is the secondary education at our public high school where my third child is a freshman that is drving me crazy. If you are a top student its great. But if you are average or below you need to get tutors because the fundamentals just are not being taught.The role of teacher at least at the secondary level in my mind is to teach how to read how to write coherently and grammatically corect and how to add and subtact

"If I have to help with one more graphics arts project which pretends to be a book report or a history report I am going to scream"...it does seem as if many educators have a strong desire to turn everything into an arts & crafts project. I saw one lesson plan which was about Hans and Sophie Scholl, the heroic German kids who resisted Hitler--but it also had to be about "watercolor transparency painting," whatever that is.

Even the Holocaust has been turned into a "project." One school told kids to pretend that they were Jews hiding from the SS, and to pack the things they would need to take with them....made it all sound like an exciting game.