education

Emily's stories about the accelerated reading program for 3rd graders horrify me. It seems to me that the educators are trying to acheive a two-fold goal and in the process causing only harm.

A good friend of mine is an English teacher in high school (and has been for many years) and she and I discussed the shift in the role that parents play in the education of their children. She complained to me about how if a student has not been doing well in her class or if the child has been disciplined, she gets an irate call from a parent blaming her for their childs faults. "My Johnny isn't doing well in your class. What have you done wrong?" or "Johnny would never act that way!"

It seems as people in the U.S. become busier, less time is spent with their children--working with them and raising them and that more and more families have to rely on schools to both raise and educate their kids. Perhaps this new (and terrible) reading program is an attempt to alleviate this trend by both forcing kids into the higher levels of scholastic aptitude necessary to function in the "modern world" and forcing parents to spend time with their kids. The fact that neither of these is done voluntarily or happily and that that can ruin a child's love of reading seems to have escaped the administrators.