Public School Education
In “Look Who’s Telling Us Our Schools Stink,” Molly Ivins (Column Left, July 5) contends that special interests, like the supporters of a voucher system, distort the failings of public education. That’s absurd. Business and industry know that public education is failing because high school graduates cannot meet minimum standards in English and math. The real education special interests, the teachers unions and the massive federal, state and local education bureaucracies, are telling us our schools are OK.
SHELDON WELLES
Pacific Palisades
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In praise of Ivins’ column, I would like to add a few thoughts--as a product of private schools and colleges and one who has spent close to 25 years in public education.
What advantage do private schools have? The classes are smaller and the parents are more committed because they are taking the time, effort and money to ensure that their children will be forced to produce at the highest level they are able to. Their teachers are not better. Their facilities may even be inferior. But they have the pressure of having to produce so that their students will be sent back for another year and will go to good colleges, so that their future as an institution will exist for future generations, and so on and on.
Why can’t the parents of public school students have the same commitment? Why can’t they let the schools do their job and not interfere? Why don’t public schools make students memorize poems, read “A Tale of Two Cities,” learn Latin declensions, listen to a symphony? These examples may not be pleasing, but what they do is exercise and stress “the little gray cells” and that is what education should be about. Train the brain and then in adult life the brain can be used productively.
How many parents exchange an hour of the Discovery or History channels for an hour of MTV? How many insist their children read a book a week? Young minds have so much ability to learn and you must let their teachers challenge them, even if it isn’t fun.
JOAN BEDDOE
Palm Springs
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