Mister Rogers reminds us of the importance of communication, gratitude, kindness, and more kindness.

Fred Rogers, known as Mr. Rogers, was the creator and host of the beloved children’s television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” MovieStillsDB

From 1968 to 2001, tens of millions of Americans, most of them children, watched “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on television. He enthralled the preschool set, puzzled many adults – was this guy for real? – and was so one-of-kind that comedians such as Eddie Murphy parodied him.

Behind his famous pair of sneakers and cardigan sweater, Fred Rogers (1928–2003) was a man of many talents and gifts. He was a musician and songwriter, composing most of the songs used on his show. Although he never headed up a church, he was an ordained Presbyterian minister and a lifelong reader of the Bible. He studied child psychology and was a pioneer in children’s television. Continue reading →

For our Founding Fathers, education was about so much more than reading and writing.

The Founding Fathers stressed the importance of an educated citizenry, based on knowledge and virtue. ~ Biba Kayewich

During the Colonial era, education, especially literacy, was a near-obsession among the European newcomers to America.

There was no government supervision of schools – indeed, there were no official government schools at all. While the well-to-do might hire tutors for their children or enroll them in the few colleges and academies then available, most children acquired the basics of reading, writing, and ciphering at home. Continue reading →

Do these things with love, and the torch of American liberty will never be extinguished.

In 2007, President George W. Bush dedicated a memorial in Washington DC to the 100 million people murdered by communism over the past century. Here is a portion of what he offered in remembrance of those victims:

“They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest and Ethiopians slaughtered in the ‘Red Terror’; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.”
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Yes, yes, and YES!

That was what I shouted, in the silence of my heart, when I finished Louis Markos’ online review “How Classical Education Can Liberate Black America.”

Earlier that same week, I’d read yet another account of an attack on the classics of Western civilization, the Great Books as they were once called, as racist and misogynistic. Though I can’t recollect where I saw this piece, I was once again knocked for a loop, wondering if those who were panning Aristotle and Pascal had ever read any of the writers in this canon… Continue reading →

Are America’s public schools falling apart?

The evidence certainly points in that direction…

In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” found historic declines in reading and math scores among American students. Scores by grade level and subject fell dramatically in all categories. Continue reading →

Thirty-odd years ago, I taught adult basic education two nights a week in a minimum-security prison in Hazelwood, North Carolina.

The men in my classes had committed a variety of crimes. The majority were incarcerated for drug-related felonies, mostly possession and dealing. One major dealer from Charlotte was rumored to have killed a rival, while another inmate had murdered his wife in a lover’s quarrel. Still another had once lived across the street from me and burglarized various houses in the neighborhood, though as he told me, “I never hit your place, you know.” One young man was behind bars for child molestation but, given his limited intelligence, would probably have fared better in a psychiatric unit.

The great majority of these prisoners were white, reflecting the demographics of Western North Carolina. Some were in their late teens, a few in their 60s. Some had grown up on farms, some in cities. Some were serious about learning, while others were clearly in the classroom to escape the dormitory for two hours. Some spoke lovingly of their parents, spouses, children, or girlfriends. Others were bitter, including one old man who swore to several people in class that he was going home to kill his wife when he was released. The police shot him dead in a chicken coop on his property when he tried to do that very thing. Continue reading →

… is for failure.

Last week, I happened upon an article reporting over 40 percent of Baltimore’s high school students had a 1.0 grade point average or less. In other words, 40 percent of these students were practically flunking their course load.

That shocking figure led me to look at statistics from U.S. News and World Report, compiled before COVID-19 closed down the schools. Baltimore has 166 public schools and over 77,000 students. Private schools in the city teach another 17,000 students. In the public schools, over 90 percent of the students are minorities, and 58 percent of all students are deemed low income. Only 15 percent of high school students tested as proficient in reading, only 8 percent in math.
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In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Professor Mark Brennan declares, “My students look at me in amazement when I tell them I read 8 to 10 hours per day. I look at them in amazement when they tell me they play video games 16 hours straight.” Brennan then went on to wonder if his book reading habits qualify him for “endangered species” status. Continue reading →

This week an older reader, Ed, sent me an email lamenting the current state of education in our country. He gave several examples, including “I remember when I was about nine years old, my dad who didn’t finish the Sixth Grade had to help my brother with Eighth Grade spelling.”

Ed’s email took me back six decades to the elementary school in Boonville, North Carolina, which I attended in grades 1-6. Continue reading →

Maybe part of the “New Normal” should be the “Old Normal” – ’cause it sure beats Abby Normal!

In the last two weeks, lost among the coronavirus ruckus, some organizations have issued reports revealing the poor scores of our elementary and middle school students on standardized tests. From the Pioneer Institute comes a study showing the failures of Common Core in basic subjects like reading and math.

“Nearly a decade after states adopted Common Core,” said the Pioneer Institute’s Executive Director Jim Stergios, “the empirical evidence makes it clear that these national standards have yielded underwhelming results for students. The proponents of this expensive, legally questionable policy initiative have much to answer for.” Continue reading →

Last week brought two special delights…

Though I had read and even taught Francis Gray Patton’s novel Good Morning, Miss Dove, I had never seen the movie. With forlorn hope, I went to YouTube, punched in the title, and there it was, a wonderful film released in 1955 starring Jennifer Jones as “The Terrible Miss Dove,” an elementary school teacher whose principles, stern classroom discipline, and general demeanor terrify her students but make her a beloved figure in the town of Liberty Hill. Continue reading →

Room 241, a blog maintained by Portland’s Concordia University, reports these dismaying statistics regarding the current state of the Three Rs – reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic – in America.

* More than 30 million American adults cannot read, write, or do math above a third-grade level.

* Seventy-five percent of American prison inmates either never graduated from high school or are “low literate.” 85 percent of offenders who appear in juvenile courts are functionally illiterate.

* “The American Journal of Public Health” reports that low literacy contributes to $230 billion in annual health care costs because patients cannot read well enough to understand the information given to them. Continue reading →

In the last fifty years, homeschooling in the United States has grown from a tiny movement composed primarily of conservative Christians and John Holt “unschoolers” to its present size of around 1.69 million students. Despite these numbers, and despite the fact that most Americans are familiar with the concept of homeschooling, some misconceptions continue to make the rounds. Continue reading →

In the mid-1990s, Mrs. Irene Harrison (1890-1999) from Akron, Ohio stayed in my bed-and-breakfast in Western North Carolina. On her last visit, Mrs. Harrison, daughter of famed tire entrepreneur Frank Seiberling, was 105 years old. She was a petite, gracious lady of the old school who proved highly entertaining on some occasions. Once when I was passing through the living room, she was discussing politics with her son. I paused to ask her to name her favorite president… Continue reading →

A few years ago, I thought it was time to retire George Orwell’s 1984 to the attic. My years of teaching literature convinced me that Huxley’s Brave New World was more likely to unfold: a world in which an elite might control the rest of us through the erasure of history and literature, but who might also pacify common citizens through the diversions of sex, drugs, and electronic entertainment.

I was dead wrong. Continue reading →