I write as an educator, pastor, father, and grandfather. I love children. I have worked with them all my life. While I applaud our president’s efforts to improve our educational system, I find some of his proposals very disturbing and frightening.

I am not surprised that the ideas our president embraces are provoking hostility from members of the teacher's union. To have longer school days and years to help our children compete in the world, is very short sighted and will end up in disaster. Our children do not need longer school days or school years. They need teachers who love and respect them. They need teachers who aim to educate the whole child, not just their brains.

The aim of a good educational system is to tell all children that they are very special and unique and that no one else is like them. No one in the world has their particular set of abilities. God gives every child a task, a purpose that nobody else can fulfill as well as they can.

The “No child left behind” law enacted by President Bush was a disaster. I am frightened if our new President wants to make this law even stronger. The results will be devastating for decades to come.

Failure in our schools needs to be addressed. This can only be changed if we return to the three R's: Reading, writing, and arithmetic, and adding the fourth "R" and that is recess! All this is best expressed in the courageous dissent of Justice Louis Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States in 1928:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

The time has come to stop attacking falling grades and disciplinary problems. Instead of focusing on the classroom we need to focus on the living room, which as Friedrich Foerster said, “is the locus of education.” Every child longs for family. If parents stay together, if they play with their children, if they mow the lawn together, and clean out the garage, or read stories at bedtime, American classroom standards would jump above Japan and Europe without our government spending another dime. Getting rid of computers and standardized tests and bringing back recess would be the icing on the cake.

Our children need white space, they need to play, in order to become thorough and constructive citizens. Student academic achievement should not be the only aim of our schools. They need to be taught the basic principles on which our nation was founded: freedom, democracy, and spiritual values. Children need to be taught about God. Any education devoid of God is not an education.

Johann Christoph Arnold

 

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You wrote "Our children do not need longer school days or school years. They need teachers who love and respect them." are you suggesting that our President doesn't want teachers who love and respect the children? This is a weird contrast. Do you think the longer school days will make the teachers love the kids less? I don't understand how your thoughts go together...

Thanks