Editor,
An illustrative example of the progressive disintegration of our public school system - and therefore our culture - was to be found in last Wednesday's Daily Lobo. In a letter run in that issue, a student - apparently a young want-to-be lawyer - ranted and whined about not being able to use her calculator for the final exam in a math course.
Her letter was, on one hand, quite amusing, with such laughable nonsense as her postulation that a course syllabus constitutes a written contract, her confused overuse of the word "unilateral," and perhaps best of all the absurd notion that focus groups should determine academic policies.
If this young lady knows enough about the course material to tell the Department of Mathematics & Statistics how to teach and grade the course, why is she taking it?
Her objection to what she describes as a mid-semester decision is obviously absurd, given the course policy statement on the math department's Web site - last updated May 18, 2005 - which states, "The graphing calculator will be needed for some homework problems and quizzes. On the exams you will in general not need a calculator and you may not use it to obtain your answers unless instructed otherwise."
From her letter, it is clear that our young author is more interested in obtaining a good grade than obtaining a good understanding of the subject matter.
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While humorous, this student's trivial blather gives rise to the important consideration of trends in our public education system over the past few decades. Social liberalism run amok is destroying public education at all levels.
It can be seen in a welfare state mentality among the parents who refuse to become part of the education process on the theory that it's the government's job and it should take care of it - to the extent that not only do they refuse to attend meetings with their high school student's teachers; in some cases they even send children to kindergarten who have not yet been toilet trained, demanding that the school system handle that inconvenience for them.
It can be seen in colleges of education that busy their graduate students with cutting out construction paper while producing minimally competent administrators and are apparently more interested in promoting and protecting ethically questionable teachers' unions than producing professionally competent teachers.
It is most tragically to be found in the proliferation of the bizarrely mistaken belief that extreme egalitarianism is not only the greatest good, it is the only good in a system of thought that denies even the quest for ultimate truths.
A perverted notion of self-esteem - coupled with the idiotic concept that all opinions and beliefs are of equal value in all instances - has rendered an educational system dedicated more to the promotion of social equality than to the instillation of knowledge and understanding.
Sadly, this attitude persists at the college level in at least some of the social studies, particularly in those subjects that involve themselves in contemporary sociology, where political propaganda flourishes under the guise of scholarship to feed a liberal elite while the average American struggles to read at a sixth-grade level. We have made precious little progress in literacy in the past 100 years.
As Joseph Sobran observed, "In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college."
John Bauer
UNM staff
