While the American public may be stressing a return to basics in public schools, teachers may be taking it overboard.
Educators around the country are adopting a new system of teaching that stresses self-esteem over academic ability. This new curriculum dismisses the traditional methods of learning and replaces them with a new "outcome-based" educational system in which the "learning process" is everything; facts and right answers are secondary.The Instructional Resources Evaluation Panel, the group that decides which textbooks receive government funding, recently noted, "Early memorization of number facts is seen as a hindrance rather than a help in developing mathematical understanding." One textbook that the IREP rated highest (100 percent), suggested "skip counting" in place of multiplication tables.
That is irresponsible.
As this new outcome-based system evolves, textbooks are becoming more politically correct than educational. One new math book intrudes everything from multicultural folk tales to pollution to Maya Angelou's inaugural poem for President Clinton. One seventh-grade textbook problem told students that they must fill a recycling bin with phone books, but the books and container only had two dimensions.
A recent Scott-Foresman text suggested that President Truman settled the Korean Conflict by dropping an atomic bomb. A Macmillan/McGraw-HilI text claimed that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated during the presidency of Richard Nixon. (Both were killed during the Johnson administration.)
As some educators continue in their "dumbing-down" of American students with the philosophy that there "is no right answer," they are doing a great disservice to those same students who won't be able to compete with their national and international peers when they reach college and the workplace.