APBP Article Oasis

What’s Wrong With Today’s Teachers?

What’s wrong with today’s teachers? It’s a well known fact that academic performance is suffering in American society. National standardized testing reveals increasingly poor performance in reading comprehension, mathematics, science and every other area of academics for grades K through 12. So what exactly is it about teachers today that has resulted in the dumbing down of American children?

How could these collective individuals allow the educational system to get so far out of hand? After all, teachers have a union. Surely that means they must wield substantial power over the local, state and federal bureaucratic management of our children’s education, right? All we ever hear about is how teachers are paid less and less every year and forced to do more with a dwindling budget. What about poor parents who are expected to show an active interest in their children’s future? Isn’t it enough that they sired the children and drop them off at the mall or provide a television set for entertainment? I mean, really…given the choice between expecting and demanding more of our kids academically and encouraging them to participate in athletics, who wouldn’t choose football and cheerleading?

Thankfully, not everyone is complacent with the current state of affairs. A quick look at educationally related news from around the country shows several stories featuring parents suing schools because their children misbehave, are reprimanded for wearing inappropriate clothing that goes against school policy or refuse to follow rules designed to keep kids collectively focused on the task at hand. It sure is comforting to know that parents like these are teaching their kids what’s really important in life. After all, wouldn’t it go against the “rugged individualism” this country strives toward if kids were told they don’t always need to be the center of attention? Besides, if it weren’t for managing the increasingly combative, disruptive and apathetic behavior we’ve worked so hard to teach our children by example, what we be paying teachers for in the first place?

And just because budget cutbacks decried by the same taxpayers who refuse to pay more for their own children’s education result in overwhelming class sizes, that’s still no excuse for our education system’s poor performance. If anything, learning environments where kids get less individual attention serve to prepare them for the modern state of parenthood, right?

Yes, it’s obvious…the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of teachers. Why blame our society’s overwhelming attitude of pride toward being uninterested in math and science? Why blame unruly children who aren’t getting any attention, guidance or discipline at home? Why blame salaries that are barely enough to live on and education budgets that pale in comparison to the amount of money spent on waging pointless, fruitless wars that devastate the lives of countless innocent civilians abroad? Everyone knows that people living outside of American shores don’t matter anyway, right?

Yes, we could examine the aforementioned, but that might force us to examine ourselves, how we live, how we vote and why we’ve lost all sense of personal accountability and responsibility. Why do that when we can do things the American way…let’s just continue to blame teachers.

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