Back when there really was no crisis in public education, just the potential of becoming a political non- issue, the GOP began using that non-issue because who wouldn’t support the politicians who had discovered a problem and were the only ones to have the solutions to solve them, doing so for the children.

Children are those creatures that make up the renewable population stock the GOP recently decided they were and  who get no attention until they can be brought out in front of the cameras for the sympathy affect.

As the Republican party and conservatives in general dismantled the public education system, some because of not knowing what they were doing, others who claimed “good intentions” were misguided and detrimental, some because they want money to go to private, for-profit schools, and too many ensuring that we always have a number of unthinking people who, being easily led, will do the works no one else will do and for little pay having been told it was a lot.

I was born in 1950. 

My education went from the post war era to prepare us for the new world, through the atomic and space age education where math became important and in the eighth-grade we changed from the traditional arithmetic to “New Math”, Algebra in disguise.

Educational opportunities became more available to more people, and college curricula moved away from the Medieval Oxford model to add subjects more relevant to a changing world.

And as public schools and the teachers who taught in them were continually ignored by politicians when they practically begged for funds to keep updating programs, like ignoring the small price of minor repairs only to have to pay more for a greater one, they were ignored until the politicians saw what they had wrought and blamed it on the very people they had been ignoring.

One of the biggest laments was that American Students were behind the rest of the world in math and science. Of course, that was the fault of the science teachers who could not do experiments in chemistry, biology, and physics labs because there were no funds for supplies. 

The only solution was found not to be allotting the funds to buy those supplies but spending that money on the whole testing complex from creation to printing, from delivering and retrieval, from correcting and correlating results, from compiling reports and delivering them, a system that cost money in salaries and all other related cost, with a reduction in instruction.

I taught science to my middle school Special and Regular Ed kids. We were out in the bungalos, those little milary looking classrooms they move onto a campus like mobile homes when the school becomes temporarily too small. We used reflective telescopes and a few with built in lights to look at samples of pond water collected in different parts of town. Each kid made their own discoveries, asked questions, and freaked out at what swims with them in the swimmin’ hole. These I took from a supply closet where they sat unused because there were not enough for all students to have one, or even enough for a pair of kids to share, and no funds to buy more.

The same grade level as my students whose classroom was inside, had to watch the relatively large screen tv by the standards of the day, as the teacher moved the microscope camera over the slide, explaining things while every students saw the saw things at the same time and made no discoveries.

As a kid I had Mr. Wizard and any number of local shows for kids that showed us science things. This was the post WWII space age, and the war showed the importance of science. 

A-Bomb.

Some of these science guys were serious like Mr. Wizard, but along the way you had Beakman and later Bill Nye, but in those early years, science was something every kid grew up with, doing all the science experiments at home and then doing them again at school either as part of a lesson or just an opportunity to show off.

When I entered teaching, science class was some degree of Mr. Wizard with the perpetual possibility of something going wrong which meant fireworks could ensue.

In the frenzy to solve the created problem in public education, science class became watching the teacher perform an experiment like you watch the cooking demonstration in the culinary pavilion at the county fair, either in real time, or perhaps a video, but certainly not in a form that takes away from test preparation practice. You can know what is inside a frog without ever actually seeing the inside of a real one. 

And while the rest of the world is learning science, our kids are learning how to successfully take the various tests they will spend their educational careers taking.

We need to go back to teaching science and getting kids interested in it as soon as they start getting interested in other things.

Imagine a law that says that while you can let a kid get into baseball, you cannot let a child below a certain age git into science.

I was chasing butterflies from the moment I moved to the ‘burbs at age three and turning over rocks finding the creatures underneath. I had question and my parents, as best they could, answered them. I was never told I was too young to be spending my time exploring and needed to go play baseball.

North Carolina’s highest-ranking Republican, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, advocates for eliminating science and history classes from elementary schools. There is a strong possibility he will run for governor in 2024 with part of his platform being to keep science and history out of grades one through five in elementary school classrooms and eliminating the State Board of Education. 

He wants to eliminate history and science and prioritize reading, writing and math.

Yep, pre-World War II Readin’, Ritin’, and ‘Rithmatic, 

“In those grades, we don’t need to be teaching social studies. We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.” 

What will the kids be using for their Readin’ material?
Science is misleading.

 He knows his science and can back up theories and beliefs with evidence as he so clearly showed when dismissing Climate Change.

“Guess what? Most of the people of North Carolina know global warming is junk science.”

I would propose that bringing his state’s education system back to the 1940s will not bring us closer to closing the science gap between the United States and the rest of the world.

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