School Administrators Are at Fault

Cindy Suman’s letter, “Education Depends on Parents’ Support” (April 16), is a typical example of shifting the blame. Parents being interested in their children’s education is one of these mother-and-apple-pie platitudes that certainly sound good but have no basis in reality.

The average parent is busy trying to make a living, plus a lot of other things like keeping the car or the house operating. If we wanted to educate our children at home we would do so. We send them to school to get that job done.

I went to a country school. The teacher not only had 40-plus students, but they consisted of four grades. We were, at best, lower middle class and most of our parents were foreign-born. They could not have helped with our schoolwork if they had wanted to. My mother probably met my teacher when I enrolled in the fifth grade, but I suspect that was the last time unless they met again when I graduated from the eighth grade. My father never met her and I am sure never knew her name. Most of us went on to acquire college degrees and we did not require remedial work to be able to do so.

I do not blame the teachers. They are as interested as anyone else, in any other profession, in doing a good job. I do blame the administrators for mismanaging the whole school system and I blame the liberals for their insistence that we are all equal.

You cannot bring the stupid up to the level of the intelligent, but you can force the intelligent to operate at the level of the stupid. That is what we have done with our school system.

JOHN WAUGEN

Anaheim