by Christian Heisler

Created on: August 03, 2010

Our schools aren’t failing our students. 

And that’s the problem.

I’ve spent the last ten years working in education, at both the high school and college level.  I’ve worked in excellent schools and schools that were so inept and so focused on the wrong things that it’s remarkable anyone ever graduated.  The one commonality?

There was never any chance that a student, no matter how uneducated, would not actually graduate.  There was never any chance that a student, no matter how little work he or she did, would not pass. 

A passing grade was, essentially, guaranteed just by showing up.

And for virtually every student, a passing grade was all that mattered.

In her exceptional article In Praise of the F-Word, Mary Sherry posits that what our school systems need is to return to the days when students actually feared they would fail.  She couldn’t be more right.

The failings of our school system started long before No Child Left Behind, but that program – perhaps in title alone – stands best as the example of the way our current education system has taken to mollycoddling students and dived headlong into social passing.  The idea behind NCLB was good, I’ve no doubt of that.  But what it, and all the other programs focused only on preserving a child’s self esteem and moving them through the assembly line that is modern American education lack, is a fundamental understanding of the basis of education. 

That is, that students are not there to learn 2+2=4.  They aren’t there to learn that George Washington was the first President of the United States, or that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. 

Students are there to learn to think.  To be able to take the factual knowledge that they’ve memorized so they can spit it back out on the test, and use it. 

If they can’t manage that, if they can do little more than recite facts and figures, they haven’t learned.  And if they haven’t learned?

They can’t move on.

Students today never sense that this is an actual risk.  In fact, they see no risk in education at all.  They firmly believe that it, along with everything else, will be handed to them.  Why? 

Because that’s what we teach them. 

A case in point: a young woman in my high school English class.  A sweet young girl on her own, she became the stereotypical ditzy blonde whenever

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