David City Elementary School

I’m not pleased with the American education system to begin with. The more provincial a school is, the more set in their ways the teachers and staff are, and the more concerned they are with social engineering than with teaching basic principles of learning, and basic and advanced knowledge in science, history, geography, political science, sports, and the rest. It was very disappointing to see some of the simplistic procedures used in, for example, spelling. Imagine spending thousands of dollars on a program to improve «spelling education» and then be told that one of the «new» steps in teaching spelling is, quoting, «tell the student when they make a mistake.» Oh My Goodness. It takes very little training to be able to teach children how to spell and read. I know because I’ve done it. but academic gaps can be filled in. Long range bioengineering cannot easily be undone. I was shocked to see that teachers in this school still follow the old disproven belief that all students must write with their right hands in order to be successful. They force left-​handed children to write using only their right hands. The results are sometimes disastrous. I know because i’ve seen the results. It’s past time that Dewey’s concept of schools as places where children are socialized rather than taught academics, be left behind. In the 21^st century, with the revelations available on the world-​wide web, we need our children to be taught facts, not theories, present realities not imagined future utopias, how to study and how to learn, not how to avoid «offending» others (the principle and one teacher refused to allow one student to present his paper on his family because they disagreed with the student’s beliefs regarding his family) or being «insensitive» (ironically, in denying a child his moment of freedom of expression is an act of gross insensitivity on the part of principal and teachers). A lot of good being inoffensive and sensitive is going to do when they apply for a job as a barrister, surgeon, sheriff, ranch-​hand, oceanographer, astronaut, chemist, astronomer, geometrician, weather analyst, tax accountant, military logistics officer, or nuclear physicist, David City Elementary needs to shed the web of fear, dry off the rancid «Dew», and face the future boldly, with genuinely new methodologies and a commitment to real learning.