Our fellow blogtress, Chicagoan Backyard Conservative, has kudos for our post on the head-in-the-sand feminist academics who insist that the fact that boys are cropping out of school at high rates and now form a minority of college students doesn’t mean anything–‘cuz the boys at the upscale schools where their kids go are doing fine! (See: “The Feminist Response to the the Boy Crisis: What Boy Crisis?,” April 10.) The feministas are scared that any effort to create a more boy-friendly educational environment for kids not so lucky to attend school in Greenwich, Conn., might involve that bugaboo of the education establishment, “rote learning,” aka actually learning something.
“On what bias against boys,it always amazes me when supposedly well-educated people refer to learning facts as ‘rote learning.’ Learning math facts is pretty important, and math facts continue to build up all the way to the university level and beyond. And suburban boys are doing OK, yes. It’s called private schools.They have a choice because their parents can afford it.”
Backyard Conservative also points us to her own blog post on the subject, dealing with the National Education Association’s adamant opposition to merit pay and other incentives for good math teachers, a proposition bipartisanly endorsed by such figures as Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney:
‘Any parent, urban or suburban, who has been told by ‘educational professionals’ that they know best and want to mold our children, like little widgets, has on occasion felt the urge to walk out of a school and never come back again. Some can afford it, some can’t. But if we care about the future of our country, we need to care about the education of our children. We can still enforce standards, but reward merit and achievement. We need to let children go to a school where they feel safe. We need to respect parents and view them and their child as clients of a school, and give them the purchasing power, let the education dollars go with the child. And our children need to have more of a stake and choice in what they are actually learning, and the speed at which they learn it. We want to raise enthusiastic seekers of knowledge.
‘Children are now held hostage to the teacher’s union agenda—let our children go!”
So true.