William Marvel [02/09/2004]

By William Marvel

During the course of his State of the Union message, George Bush allegedly congratulated himself because American public education was "thriving." If Mr. Bush dared to show his face in public, I would invite him back to New Hampshire. Up in Conway, at least, public education is hardly thriving, and our schools are not even listed among those showing signs of trouble. Our elementary schools perform reasonably well, with smaller populations and fairly dedicated staffs, but our junior high school wallows hopelessly, and the malaise of that institution has infected the adjoining high school.Last September, exactly 200 students entered the eighth grade at Kennett Junior High; by December, the honor roll there bore the names of 86 of them. That would seem praiseworthy, if grades were based on universal academic standards. Unfortunately, the 43-percent honors achievement merely reflects endemic grade inflation and a conspicuously undemanding curriculum.The best evidence for that is our freshman a boy who is neither a wizard nor especially ambitious. He breezed through Kennetts seventh and eighth grades in one year and remained on the honor roll the entire time, despite his supposedly "accelerated" classes, and he accomplished that feat without doing ten hours of homework all year. It did not affect his grades, either, that he missed about two weeks of school for routine travel, which we considered far more productive than the ice-cream socials, irrelevant movies, and the endless procession of ineffective substitute teachers to which the school subjected him.This year expectations seem to have increased a little for that lad, but only a little. In his science teacher he has at last found someone who will grade him as his work deserves, and the resulting chagrin may actually inspire him to better effort, while his civics teacher seems conscientious and imaginative. Only in the second half of his freshman year has he encountered real algebra, and Spanish also appears to be moving very slowly.English, meanwhile, is a dead loss. That "honors" class consumes four or five weeks plodding through a novella, and requires only one cursory writing sample every month or so. The English teacher has already skipped over more than half his curriculum to catch up, and his own laziness seems to preclude any more homework that would require correction; our personal request for more taxing assignments yielded only an empty promise. The civics teacher spends more time correcting grammar than does the man who is supposed to be teaching it.Last week Kennett held its mid-term exams, which wasted three days of class time. The loss of those three days would not be so lamentable if they served a useful purpose, such as measuring real achievement, but at Kennett High School the tests appear to be geared to the lowest common denominator to the slowest section of each class. The results therefore magnify the performance of the school overall, making the administration look good, but the aforementioned deficiencies slip through undetected.So disappointed are we in the school from which I graduated that we refuse to enroll our more solitary and studious twelve-year-old. We cannot afford private school: together, my wife and I earn about half the average salary of the school administrators who are failing us. At considerable inconvenience, therefore, we are teaching our girl at home. Her mother instructs her in algebra and science, and with me she is taking French, history, geography, and literature. Every day that she is out of the public school seems like a little victory toward her education.In the nineteenth century students frequently graduated from college at eighteen, and they were at least prepared to enter by fifteen or sixteen. There is no practical reason why that should not be the case now, for colleges impart even less of the available store of information today than they did in 1850. The only hindrance is our public school system, which has artificially extended childhood into the late teens by deliberately slowing the pace of preparation, thereby suffocating the curiosity of those who might otherwise excel.Recently I corresponded with a fellow historian whose seventeen-year-old daughter will take a degree from Bryn Mawr this spring. By attending summer programs and challenging schools she was able to skip high school altogether, and her father remarked that she passed by plenty of other students who were just as bright, talented, and motivated as she was. Those other students were simply held back by a burdensome educational bureaucracy that is more concerned with perpetuating its own existence than in accomplishing any mission. William Marvel graduated from Kennet High in 1967.