{"id":1476,"date":"2011-10-13T16:46:17","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T23:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2011-10-13T16:50:52","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T23:50:52","slug":"education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2011\/10\/13\/education\/","title":{"rendered":"Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

I ran across this cartoon<\/a>–or one similar to it–on Facebook and it got me to thinking.<\/p>\n

It used to be that when children received poor grades in school, or didn\u2019t do well on tests, it was the children who got in trouble. Now, according to the politicians and pundits on television and in newspapers, it is the schools that \u201care failing\u201d and it\u2019s all the fault of \u201cbad teachers.\u201d And it is the teacher\u2019s unions who are at fault for protecting all the incompetent teachers that infest all the failing schools and who resist the reforms that would lead us to the promised land of educational perfection.<\/p>\n

\tHuh?<\/p>\n

\tIt must be nice to live in a world where it is always someone else\u2019s fault other than the person who does a bad job. The child is the one who takes the tests, not the teachers. The child is the one who does his or her homework\u2014or fails to do his or her homework\u2014not the teachers.<\/p>\n

\tThis all seems so obvious I\u2019m puzzled why no one has said a word or noticed the peculiar shift in blame. It is said that \u201cschools are failing\u201d because the students are not learning, as demonstrated by their failure to pass standardized tests\u2014for which the students suffer no consequences for failing, and no bonus for doing well. The standardized tests by which the pundits and politicians measure school success have no effect on the students at all, and the students know it.<\/p>\n

\tSo tell me again. Whose fault is it that students aren\u2019t learning? The teachers, or the students who don\u2019t bother doing their homework, fail their tests, and intermittently come to class?<\/p>\n

\tAs I recall, if I got a bad grade in a class, my parents always blamed me. That seems obviously right, since I was the one who earned the grade, whatever it was. If I\u2019m writing a book and I make mistakes, I really can\u2019t blame my editor. If a worker on the assembly line is drunk and fails to properly tighten all the bolts, it will usually be that worker who gets fired, not the president of the company.<\/p>\n

\tBut if a student fails a test, why, of course it\u2019s not the student\u2019s fault for not studying: it\u2019s that stupid teacher and her stupid union.<\/p>\n

\tMakes perfect sense. If you\u2019re the sort of person who doesn\u2019t believe in taking responsibility for your own actions.<\/p>\n

Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran across this cartoon–or one similar to it–on Facebook and it got me to thinking. It used to be that when children received poor grades in school, or didn\u2019t do well on tests, it was the children who got … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1479,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions\/1479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}