FOREVER CHANGING THE WAY AMERICA EDUCATES

[Morpheal]

Education has long been inadequate, particularly in the earlier years.

There isn't a bright child who does not come home complaining of boredom.
There isn't a slower child who does not come home in pained frustration.
Often they do not really get to voice their thoughts about their own suffering.
The bored suffer at least as much as the otherwise challenged.

Children want to learn.

We see that in how many those who have access to complex video games master
them, very often readily exceeding their elders in a fraction of the time it takes them
to learn the game.

There are several things wrong with education.

1). It fails to provide a common standard, across the country, for quality in terms of results.

What is quality in education ? It is more than learning facts and basic skills.

Ultimately results are the effects on society. Does education foster true achievement, decrease
the crime rate, create better lives and improve society, by the values, discipline, ability to think
clearly, and act progressively and effectively. Does it serve social functionality rather than add
to the dysfunction and failure that plagues society as its statistics. Where that measure indicates
a failing grade, it is the fault of senior educators, and they should be replaced with competence.
When schools cannot teach citizenship, discipline, good conduct, ethical action, progress,
the quest for scientific and social truth, cannot better human lives adequately, educators need to
be fired out and replaced. These are measurable standards and can be upheld.

They are as measurable as actual testing for acquisition of cognitive skills and fact based knowledge.

We can measure results in terms of how society is faring. Whether it is improving or in decline.
Where crime rates are rising educators need to be replaced with competency. They are incompetent.
We must begin to rethink how we look at the role of education and its purpose in society.

2). Modern technology provides the means for giving each child a device for programmed learning.
An electronic tutor with a standardized program of study that provides consistent, thorough,
learning of the fundamentals of the major subjects while making them enjoyable and teaching basic
motor skills. Such devices were a dream twenty years ago when I first discussed it, on the net, with
a black educator in America, who thought the idea was a perfect solution to individualized education,
but worried about the costs. The costs are no longer the problem. We can do it. Great strides have
been made as to interactive software, for learning, that reinforces concepts, according to the best
psychologies of learning, in a more scientific way than any individual educator can hope to do for
a whole classroom of students. Children each learn in different ways at different paces, but the
program rectifies the short comings of each, helping them across their individual hurdles, and aiding
memory of key information and concepts.

It is time to bring technology to each child to supplement what teachers can do, and to create a
common, nationwide, program of learning where every child is equally advantaged. Where there is
truly some educational justice being implemented. Where every child has personal tutoring and
where every child can accelerate or catch up according to their individual natures, but no child
needs to be left to fall behind and perish. The brightest could accelerate far beyond their pained
frustrated boredom serving genius as well as the average. We need not hold back the brightest.
All we need is the new technology and it is available at a very affordable cost.

3). Education must teach a non sectarian ethics and morality. It must inculcate discipline.

To do this educators must be able to discipline. This has become a problem with insufficient and
ineffective penalties for the persistent and sometimes dangerous violators. Teachers often feel
helpless as to what to do, and the problems of classroom discipline have failed to adequately come to
government's attention. Where teachers cannot use corporal punishment in today's education
system as they could in the past, their only choice is to remove students who are unruly and
disruptive. This solves nothing for education or society. It is a failure of the purpose of education.
Ultimately that education fails in its responsibility to society.

What then can be done ?

Where behavior problems exceed the ability of educators to cope, the legal system must be given
a method for dealing with the problems before they become uncorrectable problems for society.
Removal of the offender from the classroom, appearance in court, and sentencing to a reform
school type correctional facility, where expert help and special discipline can be provided to correct
the problem when it is discovered in early life. Such expertise and taking away of privileges as
punishment can only be accorded by legal means, by legal process, not by a disempowered
educator hard pressed to keep order in an urban classroom. It also requires the application of
medical, psychological, diagnosis and treatment resources, as well as special methods not
applicable to other children, in order to properly rectify the root cause of the problem. Without
that type of empowerment, and without special facilities capable of providing the necessary
care for offenders, education cannot cope. We need to realize that there is an ever growing
problem in our schools, which requires immediate legislative change to provide for adequate
recourse, to correct the problem and restore educational effectiveness.

Education cannot be held responsible to society if it is not suitably empowered.
Only a rethink of the relevant legislation will adequately empower it

Robert Morpheal