Schools in need of discipline

After reading your editorial and other items in today’s paper about the never-ending debate in regard to Common Core, I’m reminded of the old saying, “It’s hard to remember the original goal was to clean up the swamp when you’re knee deep in alligators.”

With all the bleeding heart good intentions in the world (Your editorial column headlined: “Think about the children”), all the changes in testing are a waste of time, if the real problem is that the testing is just telling us that the “teaching methods and disciplines imposed simply aren’t getting the job done!”

My housekeeper and I were talking about the situation this morning, and came to an agreement on one simple truth: I attended Davidson High School in the 1940s and ’50’s, and she attended Rosenwald High School in the 1960s, and we both think we got a reasonably solid education from teachers earning considerably less than they do today. Why do students seem to have a fair amount of difficulty in public schools today? What is different about the current system, compared to that in place during our schooling?

Discipline! Strong and heavy-handed approaches were taken to class-disrupting misbehavior in the classroom then, compared to the namby pamby “we can’t hurt their self-esteem” attitudes of the modern educational system. Today I wonder if many young children act up to receive a “badge of honor,” a trip to the detention center, only to be returned to the classroom to continue their disruption of daily attempts to educate their peers.

While I supported President Bush in many of his policies, I have never fallen for his “feel good, care about the children program called, “No child left behind.” My position, better attuned to educational expectations, would have been, “We can have the bus ready for you, but if you don’t get on, you’re going to be left behind.

Lord knows how many well-behaved and worthy students have struggled to overcome the problems in their paths by disruptive, socially retarded students who seem to be in charge of the asylum.

Why not take a survey of the young people to see where the problem really lies. Or would knowing the truth be hard to swallow?

William W. Watson

St. Joseph