I feel like I have been drinking out of a firehouse lately. So much knowledge coming at me and I can’t quite reap the full benefits of savoring every drop because it’s just coming too fast. I have thought of a spill-way filling a reservoir. Water coming fast and furious, it would bowl you over and drown you if you stood under it, yet eventually it does settle into a still, quiet, beautiful lake that can then be let into irrigation ditches to water crops and provide growth. Hoping this fire hose I am feeling is more like a spillway to a reservoir. Being face-to-face with great knowledge is never bad, even if I am not gleaning the depth I hope to attain someday. I'm writing here again to hopefully better internalize some of this knowledge. No guarantees for regularness though. Life is too great to spend in front of a computer.
Onto the current topic. RCA
Not sure how common the acronym is, but it’s a throwback from my Cargill days. Anytime there was a problem or situation that happened repeatedly or cost a significant chunk of change, we did a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), an exhaustive process trying to drill down to the details of where the issue really was, hopefully ensuring that our solution and processes weren’t just Band-Aids covering a wound that would just reopen with perhaps slightly different details. Just my first thought as I wrote this…
Applying this fire hose of knowledge: I have heard lots of discussion about Common Core lately (who hasn’t?). I am not a fan. (see tangent 1) That said, I think criticizing Common Core is like hacking at leaves, generously a branch, leaving the root issue totally untouched. What is the real issue? The real issue is, we as citizens have at first willingly, then happily, passed off what should be our own personal responsibility to others. Bear with me….
Education is a big one here. No one can educate another, we can inspire, coerce, bribe and/or punish people into complying and regurgitating facts, but we can’t force another’s education. Teachers with great intentions are left with their hands tied (CC or not) when parents, and by extension students, feel that teachers or anyone, besides the kid himself, can and must ‘educate’ children. We've got to inspire our kids to love learning through our own example, then give them the freedom and tools necessary to learn anything and everything (educate) themselves (with guidance and help of course.)
Until we as a society can once again appreciate and love education enough to pursue it ourselves, in concert with and in addition to ‘ formal schooling’ using whatever resources we’ve got (books, classes, mentors, nature, anything) to help us achieve OUR OWN lifelong educational goals, we’re sunk. Any other approach will end up ‘meeting standard’, aka bare minimum requirements to get a job, and most likely not even that, as regurgitating facts is somewhat useless in today’s economy of constant flux and at-our-fingertips info. We need to show the children in our nation that a real education (in addition to, and not soley academic schooling) is the only way to be happy, live a fulfilled life, achieve our goals and better our world. Plus it’s a whole lot of fun!
We’ve done very poorly at this. 33 % of US high school gaduates will never read a book again after high school. 42% of college grads will never again read a book and 80% of US families did not buy a book this year. (Turn the Page, 9) If no one reads, besides textbooks, what are we doing to educate ourselves? Besides that, does anyone out of school remember what was in those textbooks? Can we really class that as education?
So what does abdicating personal responsibility have to do with this? Obviously we have abdicated our responsibility for our own education and along with that we have passed along other responsibilities that should and would be much better handled by ourselves in our own homes and in our own communities, or at least at a lower level than the Federal Government. The founding fathers studied and built our government on natural laws, that is: all laws that are above mankind, including scientific and revealed law. One of these laws I think is very applicable here is the Law of Economy. Issues, agendas, ‘things’ should be addressed at the lowest level possible to still be effective. Absolutely there are things that need to be centralized and handled in Washington, like national defense and things pertaining to it, but education, at least how we do it currently, is not one of those things. (See Tangent 2)
Ideally, education should be taken care of at a community level with tons of involvement from parents. (Radical as I may sound, even state level is above ideal for me.) Sure, sure Common Core is optional for states, but not really if you consider the manipulation of federal funding. And yet, again Common Core is not the issue here. The real issue is handing off responsibility for what we can and should be handling at lower levels. The 'lowest level' where we've handed off accountability where we shouldn't have is in our own lives and homes, when we expect others to take responsibility for what really should be individual's or children's parents responsibility (whether it be in education, teaching morals, accepting consequences, learning basic life skills, taking care of our health, whatever) we set the precedent for big and growing bigger government. Someone's gotta make the decisions and make things happen and if we're not doing it, someone else will. Yep, big intrusive government is simply a symptom of individuals and families handing off responsibility and accountability that is rightfully theirs. Granted it has been festering for many years, decades. Weird I know, but as citizens, the natural laws we keep or break are the same laws the government makes or breaks, and we reap the same consequences. We, the people, really do still have the power if we'll just own it. Anyway...
Centralizing stuff to Washington that should be taken care of at a lower level has been going on at a high rate for 70+ years.Common Core is nothing new, it’s just the current expression of the precedent set. Before it we had the Republican ‘No Child Left Behind’ and tons of other centralization type policies that have set the stage allowing Common Core to happen.
This is why Common Core is not the issue, take away Common Core and the problem will still not be solved, the vacuum will just be opened again for more policy of the same nature. Until we as a citizenry take responsibility for our own education and future opportunities (going way above and beyond formal schooling) and inspire our children to do the same, rather than leave those decisions up to experts in Washington or elsewhere, we’re in for a rough downhill slide. . so go read a book, a good one, a classic that generations have learned from and loved!
**And if we do that for our own education, I have a pretty good bet we’ll step up to the plate and take back our personal responsibility and accountability for a whole slew of stuff that we’ve coaxed ourselves into thinking should be Washington’s OR someone else’s issue to fix.
(back to the Law of Economy, if IT, whatever ‘it’ is, is taken care of at the lowest level possible it’s a whole lot more effective and efficient.)
Tangent 1: Several reasons I don’t like Common Core itself.
1. It moves the focus even further away from true education to standardized test passing and regurgitating knowledge in a specific, defined way. We are already pretty far down this rabbit hole, but CC definitely magnifies it.
2. Teachers who wish to inspire and individualize education to their classrooms are even more limited in how they can do this because they must teach certain things on a certain schedule and have kids pass those tests.
3. Concepts are introduced before most young learners have the maturity to really understand them (especially in math and to some extent in the reading curriculum I’ve seen) Yes, we can force feed these concepts to the point kids can regurgitate at test time, but they don’t have the understanding to really apply or build on these concepts. All of this is driven by ‘meeting average standard’ and comparing and competing our students as a whole body with other nations. (No one is an individual with gifts to give the world, we are a body in job training for a world job market and we must be competitive. . . .)
Tangent in a Tangent: At first, I was OK with having a ‘national standard’ for what requirements should be attained at certain grade levels. I have since changed my perspective on that.
(tangent within tangent within a tangent…hehehe) I used to be opposed to idealistic theories, but now I have decided unless we have idealistic goals we are forever stuck in the realism of mediocrity.
That said, I know this is idealistic, but there really should be no set standard applicable to everyone. It should all be individual standards for education based on students’ aptitudes, weaknesses, personal experiences, opportunities and personal goals and gifts. I believe God will judge and evaluate whether we ‘meet standards’ on a very individual basis taking so many things into account and I believe God has put us here on earth, to learn and grow, to ‘get an education’. I choose to shoot for formulating my child’s education in the type and patterns I believe God operates ( individualized and inspired and inspiring). Granted we are not God, but fallible human beings, and in our current system where one teacher is responsible for 25+ little yahoos (with little outside support from parents) this sounds like an impossibility, but once again if we don’t have an ideal theory to work towards, we are stuck in current realism of mediocrity.
Tangent 2: There were founding fathers who argued that education was critical to national security and should be handled at the Federal level. I totally see their point. Yes, an uneducated populace is at huge risk for foreign invasion, and at an even huger risk for control, manipulation and subjection from a few elites in their own midst, plus stagnating in their economy, but how we are approaching public education now really has nothing to do with helping our kids prevent this type of stuff in the future. It’s all about spewing back facts and figures in accordance with how the teacher wants, essentially job training for employees and mid-level management (we tell you what and how to do it and what knowledge to use, and then you do it- in a new phrase I really like, high-class drone work.) It’s all about preparing assets for the job market, which is a good and necessary thing, but when that is the sole end goal we end up with a serious lack of thinkers, leaders and statesmen and thus it is a national security risk, but a security risk that cannot be addressed by an entity that buys into and promotes this sentiment. (Common Core is an excellent example of this sentiment, but this way of thinking was status quo WAY before CC and Pres. Obama, like back to FDR times.)
So there you have it, my musings on natural law, Comomon Core and RCAs
P.S. There's lots of other natural laws that could better be applied to fix the education culture, and societal problems in general, this is just the first one that came to my mind and was easiest for me to relate to right now. A GREAT easy book on Natural Law, how we are breaking them, the repercussions of breakage and *choir of angels* solutions! (Yes, something in the law/government/(semi)political realm that is not just a diatribe on what the other side is doing wrong, but has solutions available to us regular Joes) is: 'We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident' by Oliver DeMille. Ever wondered what that phrase you memorized really meant? Honestly I never did, until now. . . Ahhh yes, that is one of the problems of today's education culture. I digress... Great book though that really can help us.
P.P.S. Update since looking at my last post, like 2 years ago. So I ended up LOVE, LOVE, LOVING hillbilly hell. It took me awhile and I am so sad I wasted precious months there struggling and hating it. Alas, once I decided to love it, we moved back to my pretty house. My new ideal: my pretty house in the mountains of hillbilly hell or what I now more kindly refer to as Podunkville.
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