School is for fools

I didn’t have to think very long about this week’s column title. It had been written on the board by someone when I walked into my classroom earlier this week. Unfortunately, it is an attitude that is becoming more and more pervasive in our younger generation. And it’s a shame.

 

I tell all of my classes that knowledge is pow-er.

Knowledge gives us more control over our lives, a stronger hold on our future, and the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Knowledge provides us with the ability to make sound decisions based on critical and analytical thought rather than just going with the flow or believing everything people tell us. It gives us insight into our lives and the lives of others and it allows us to analyze rather than just absorb.

 

So, how did we reach the point where so many of our young people not only think that school is for fools, they also believe that school isn’t cool? I was lamenting this fact the other day when an onlooker observed that not everyone needs knowledge, education, either or both because the world is going to always need ditch diggers. Based on what I see in the classroom and hear in the halls, I don’t think we’re in any imminent danger of running out of ditch diggers.

 

The odd thing is that when we start looking for the culprit that fosters this anti-intellectual perspective, we don’t have to look any further than the mirror. Somehow, our educational institutions have lost their way. Our priorities are misplaced. Because of  “no child left behind” too many schools are “teaching to the test” instead of fostering intellectual cur-iosity. Too many schools embrace athletics as their god instead of the learning process.

 

If this happens at the U in Lincoln, it’s no surprise it happens throughout the state. The big news all week long coming out of Lincoln is the deconstruction of a once proud football dynasty, the firing of the athletic director and the return of the prodigal son, Tom Osborne. Chancellor Perlman, in his press conference announcing the firing of Steve Pederson, lamely attempted to convince people that our priorities were out of place and that there were so many good things going on at the university. This plea essentially fell on deaf ears.

We don’t seem to care how many doctors, lawyers, businessmen, social workers, nurses, architects, engineers, biologists, chemists and teachers our colleges and universities produce every year. Instead, we’re much more interested in who the new football recruits are going to be and whether or not we’ll ever make it back into the top 25 ratings.

 

In McCook, we have a high school band that hasn’t had new uniforms since I was a kid but we make sure the athletic programs are first rate in everything they do and everything they wear.

 

At community colleges across the state and nation, including our own, we have become so wrapped up in the new technology of distance learning and online courses that we fail to even suppose or imagine that either or both might have a significant downside.

We all seem to be in the hunt for numbers and when we do that, we too often forsake quality for quantity.

I understand we have to have numbers to survive but to take on an enterprise of this magnitude just because everyone else is doing it is doing exactly what we tell our children NOT to do.

I went through an educational system where you didn’t get promoted simply because you were there.

You had to earn your way and no one gave you anything. I think we need to reassess our entire educational philosophy because somewhere we got off track and went down the wrong road and now we’re paying for it. I used to always announce in class who made the high score on exams but I’m more hesitant to do that now because I don’t want to subject them to ridicule and scorn.

This is a tragedy and the precursor of our society becoming mired in mediocrity.

 

I remember the day I realized I had fallen in love with knowledge. I try to spread that enthusiasm for learning to my students but it seems to be getting more difficult every year.

I even ask them in class if they don’t think it’s a pretty cool thing to go to bed knowing more than they knew when they got up that morning.

 

From the looks on their faces and the general lack of positive responses, it’s pretty apparent that many of them don’t.

 

And it’s our fault that they don’t.