EDUCATION
by John Q. Pridger

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." (Thomas Jefferson, 1816)

Unfortunately, educational standards, as well as the state of civilization in the United States, have been on a path of steep decline for well over half a century. There is no educational excellence in our public school system.

Of course, there would be many who would claim Pridger lacks the qualifications to pass such a sweeping judgment. "Do not judge, lest you be judged," they might rightly say. After all, Pridger is not an educated man, and is very aware of his academic limitations. He's neither scholar nor prophet, nor particularly well read. Yet he does claim the a modest store of experience in his passage through life, and a modest facility for observation.

"Experience keeps a dear school," Ben Franklin once said, "but a fool will learn through no other." Pridger is modest enough to admit he is a towering fool, but conceited enough to imagine that he has managed to accumulate at least a modicum of learning in his three score years of experience. Perhaps enough to make some valid and useful observations. Pridger's life has spanned the age of educational decline in America, and while Pridger himself has only been able to accumulate the merest "outline" of a classic liberal education, he has watched with fascinated dismay the folly of a supposedly much more highly educated national leadership and academia literally ruining a great nation.

The first thing Pridger personally noticed with regard to education was that he and his contemporaries in the public school system of the fifties, never seemed to approach the state of knowledge of history, geography, and literature that our parents had gained from the educational system of a generation earlier. Of course, it must be observed that Pridger's parents were of the laboring middle class. His parents were a mother and a step-father, and a father who reentered his life when Pridger was about ten years old.

Neither Pridger's mother nor step-father had attended a college or university, but they both had exceedingly well-rounded educations by any standard. His mother was a dedicated homemaker, and his step-father was a General Motors electrician who wired buses in the big General Motors plant near Pontiac, Michigan. Pridger was always as proud as he was amazed that in general knowledge both his mother and step-father always surpassed what was being taught at any given time in the schools Pridger attended. And high school never appreciably closed the gap. Though Pridger did not realize it at the time, the reason for this was that the techniques used to educate the youth had undergone considerable change in the intervening generation. The quality of public school education had already been in decline for a matter of decades.

Public school education was still pretty good during the fifties when Pridger came up through the system, with one glaring exception, and this was in how literature, history, and geography were being taught. Previous generations had been required to do a lot of memorization – such things as names and dates, national and state capitals, etc., and lengthy passages of the classics, certain poems, and famous speeches such as the Gettysburg Address. These things had to be recited before the class, so there was no such thing as being able to avoid learning and still pass the grade. These memorization requirements had already been largely abandoned by the time Pridger was getting his primary education. We were taught a little about quite a lot, but never had to memorize the material as had been required of the older generation of students.

There was still a lot "traditional materials" being taught in public schools, but the repetition and memorization requirements that insured that a considerable amount of what was being taught would also be absorbed and retained had passed into history. Pridger was required to memorize little more than the multiplication table. Of course, Pridger wasn't all that great a student. Like many other students, he was mentally lazy (if not actually retarded), so he very easily passed up most of what was being taught. The new methods of teaching made a serious educational deficit exceedingly easy to attain.

Because students were not required to memorize great passages of classic literature text, and at least a few short poems (which actually required them to read and reread the material until they actually "knew" it), it became possible for clever students to merely scan through literary assignments or practically avoid reading completely. Pridger knows, because he was always able to pass without actually reading or learning much of anything.

Another phenomenon was coming on-line in the fifties. Television competed all too successfully with the activity of reading, and the process of learning through reading (which is the greatest educational tool of all), went into precipitous decline. Why read for entertainment or education when you could just sit and watch TV programs that were both entertaining and often educational?

It was in the late fifties when some educators began realizing the results of both the new educational methods and the influence of television, and started asking a few salient questions – such as, "Why can't Johnny read?"

John Q. Pridger