School is Overrated

Listen up! I want to make sure that you understand me correctly because you may have to re-read this next sentence more than once. The grades your children get in school are virtually meaningless. Yup. That's what I said. I don't think the grades your children get in school mount up to a hill of beans. School is way too overrated! I'm sure I'll get letters if anyone from the teacher's union reads this article, but to those of you who are parents and you are sick and tired of staying up all night helping your child do homework so that they can get an A, B, C or even D, forget about it! I am not trying to play a joke on you. I am not playing on words. I really truly believe that school is overrated.

Let me explain. Does your child need to be educated? Yes. Does your child need to learn math, science, history, literature, etc.? Yes. If you don't read any further and pull your children out of school, will they become criminals? Likely. So let me tell you what I am saying. Our schools today (and in particular public schools) are not equipping our children for life. School work today consists of revised history, science projects, art projects, physical education, sex education, study hall, and whatever other waste of time topic our schools can think of doing. In an article written by the President of Bard College for the New York Times (of all places), Leon Botstein states, "In the last four years of American schooling — high school — pupils study the core subjects of mathematics, science, history, the national language and literature for less than half the time French and Japanese students do. Only 41 percent of the American high school day is spent this way." The title of his article is "We Waste Our Children's Time." Of course we do. Other studies show that our children today spend almost 7 hours a day in school - not counting homework. Twenty years ago, children were only spending 5 hours a day in school. In addition, the amount of time American students spend on homework each week is at an all-time high. In 1981, 9-year-olds to 11-year-olds spent an average of 2 hours and 49 minutes on homework each week. By 1997, kids that age were doing more than 3 1⁄2 hours of homework a week. Kids from 6 to 8 years old had an even bigger increase, from 44 minutes a week to more than 2 hours!

Personally, I think those numbers are conservative. How many of you who have children aged 6 to 11 only spend 30 minutes a night on homework? Not many I would suspect. When you add up the daily homework assignments, special projects, and studying for tests, I would imagine most of you are doing at least one hour a day if not closer to 2 hours a day on homework. We live in an education-obsessed society. And these numbers, in my mind, justify that statement. Why should a seven-year-old child spend almost 40 hours a week in school and on homework? Do they not have the right to just be a child anymore? Where's the playtime in all of that? Where is the family time? When you figure in that the average child watches 13 hours of television a week, when do they just go outside and play? When do they get to use their imagination? When do they dream?

But that isn't even my biggest issue with school. I could almost be convinced to let my children spend 40 hours a week on school if they actually learned something. Going back to the study I listed earlier where children only spend 41 percent of their school time on the core subjects, that's where I have my bone to pick. Who gave our schools the right to take our children away from their families for 7 hours a day and waste 4 hours of that time doing nothing? Our children spend at most 3 hours of their school day on math, science, history and literature. And they still don't learn anything! Ask your average college student who Joseph Stalin was? He doesn't know! They are so exhausted from sitting in a classroom for 7 hours a day that even if they did learn about Stalin they wouldn't remember it! In an article published by Walter Williams, he stated the following, "A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25 percent did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500, 42 percent could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century, and 31 percent thought Reconstruction came after World War II.

"In 1993, a Department of Education survey found that, among college graduates, 50 percent of whites and more than 80 percent of blacks couldn't state in writing the argument made in a newspaper column or use a bus schedule to get on the right bus, 56 percent could not calculate the right tip, 57 percent could not figure out how much change they should get back after putting down $3 to pay for a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich, and over 90 percent could not use a calculator to find the cost of carpeting a room. But not to worry. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's 1999 survey of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal arts colleges and universities found that 98 percent could identify rap artist Snoop Doggy Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34 percent knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown."

Do you understand what I am saying? Your children go to school for 7 hours a day, waste 4 hours, study virtually no history (certainly not accurate history), struggle with math, learn a few spelling words that should've been learned two years ago, and then come home and grow a plant outside and one inside, put it on a poster board with construction paper and call it a science project! And then to top it all off, we pay $20,000 a year to send them to a university with 95% liberal professors that are going to tell them that everything they learned up until now was wrong! Why shouldn't they lose their faith and become alcoholics there? They don't know which way is up much less right from wrong. What are we doing! Is this the life we are going to pass down to our children?

What can we do? Get involved! I don't mean asking your kids when they come home how their day was and helping them finish their homework. I mean get in the face of the school administrators. Tell them that you expect better for you children and ask them what they are going to do to help your child learn. Tell them to quit wasting your child's time with meaningless assignments and busywork. And if they don't respond, put your child in a better school or teach them at home.

It's time we set some priorities in our lives. Sit down and make a list of life priorities in your life. What are your priorities? Are your children high on your list? What about them? Do you want them to be influenced by you? Do you want them to grow up with good moral values? Do you want them to know the true history of our country? Do you want them to be at the dinner table with the rest of your family every night? Make a list. Seriously, make a list of the most important things that you want to accomplish in life. Then look at your list. Really look at it. Are you willing to make the sacrifices that come with that list? Are you willing to quit working so much or quit working all together to make sure your children grow up with the knowledge and values you want them to have? You might make less money. You might live in a smaller house. You might not have cable TV or a TV at all. But what is more important? And if you are not willing to make those sacrifices, make a different list because your list is wrong. What you spend your time doing is your true priority. If living in a nice house or driving a nice car are not worth giving up to see that your children grow up the way you want them to grow up, then the house and car should be higher on your list. But just remember, you are the only one responsible for the way your children turn out. No one else.