My dad went to grade school in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Minnesota. He had to walk a mile to school, even when it was freezing. One February, so we heard all our lives, it was so cold that it never got above 20 below. As my little brother quipped, "It was so bad he had to walk uphill---both ways!" But I would put dad’s seven years education (seven because he managed to skip the second grade) in that one-room schoolhouse up against anybody’s grade school education at the most sophisticated, plugged-in, computer-rich, media-savvy environment. He learned well.
         This little one room school house had one teacher for all those children. It was cold in the winter and hot in the late Spring and early Fall. There were no fancy visual aids per se. No computers, no videos, no recordings. Just books, a dedicated teacher, and a trusty paddle---if needed. The school day began with prayer and with the pledge of allegiance. The focus of the education was on the basics.
         The building dad and his classmates learned in was torn down long ago. But at a family reunion recently, we were able to see a facsimile of such a school. The one room schoolhouse from a different township had been saved and refurbished, serving as a type of museum, providing a glimpse into the past.
        Go back the two previous centuries and we also see a well-educated populace. When I see documentaries with quotes from ordinary 19th century Americans, I am struck at the level of education. Someone noted that the reason the essays in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were so sophisticated was because they were written primarily to reach 18th century American farmers.
         Is it just me---or are we going backwards in this country when it comes to education? The phrase "the dumbing down of America" comes to mind.
         Just this week a new study confirmed our suspicions. Bloomberg News reports,  "Fifteen-year-old students in the U.S. ranked 25th of 34 countries on an international math test and scored in the middle of the pack in science and reading, raising concerns the U.S. isn’t prepared to succeed in the global economy."
         There are obviously many factors contributing to this regress in our national educational achievements. These would include:
        ·the kicking God out of the schools (as the Bible says, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom"),
        ·the breakdown of the family,
        ·the teachers’ union, which won’t allow seemingly any discipline over mediocre teachers or worse,
        ·efforts by groups like the ACLU that prevent trouble-making students from being kicked out of schools.
But there’s one huge problem I fault that many might not have considered (and this gets back to the teachers’ union as well): education today has largely become affective (focusing on psychology) at the expense of being effective. There is an over-emphasis on self-esteem and under-emphasis on core instruction. It doesn’t matter whether little Johnny can read or write well. All that matters is how little Johnny feels. If you make him feel bad for not reading or writing well, then shame on you.
        We have put so much stress on the importance of self-esteem that the result is a false and over-inflated picture of the self. This leads to arrogance and puffed up fluff, without any real substance to support it. A friend of mine describes a person with such an attitude as "a prima donna without portfolio."
        About ten years ago, columnist Thomas Sowell reported on another study on the education level of Americans versus children of other countries. The study found that American students have higher self-esteem but lower academic achievements simultaneously. For example, in one international test of 13-year olds, Korean children ranked first in math and Americans ranked last. Yet 68 percent of the Americans felt they were "good at mathematics" compared to only 23 percent of the Korean students Thus, the American youngsters ranked first in self-esteem and last in actual skills. This is a result of misguided emphasis on boosting self-esteem without any base in reality.
         I have no idea of the level of the self-esteem of the students in my dad’s one-room school house. Chances are, it was not too high. But for the most part, when they graduated, they could read, write, perform basic math functions, and they had a working knowledge of history, geography, and science.
        Why, educational achievements like that are enough to boost one’s self-esteem.