How many millions of kids returned to school this week in the U.S. alone?
More than 55,000,000 from what I’ve read.
Is school fulfilling its purpose for them?
I well remember the late 1950s when the big issue was—are Soviet kids getting a better science and math education that Americans? This was a big problem. After all, they beat us into space.
The curricula changes resulting did nothing to improve literacy, not to mention productivity, citizenship and character. Yet what is education for? To set a child up with a way to succeed in life, right?
After a lot of speculative programs and “modern” techniques, we are still way behind, ranking (internationally) 14 in reading, 25 in math and 17 in science, behind such countries as South Korea, Finland, Canada, and Japan, which are in the top five in all three.
Yet our future as a culture depends upon our ability to learn.
Education, unfortunately, is very “exam” oriented. In an article called “Education,” L. Ron Hubbard discusses what such an orientation does to our children’s future, and offers a paradigm that would give us kids who can not only “get good grades,” but who can also think and do enough with their education to dig us out of the situations we have created (or at least failed to solve) as a nation, both internally and as part of the world community.
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