ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993                   TAG: 9309100006
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WE NEED TO RETURN TO EDUCATION BASICS

Your paper has carried two items dealing with Outcome-Based or World Class Education, one by John LeDoux and the other by Lew Scheckler. The logic of these two educators is compelling. Many in the education community will tune them out because of the fear of a "Christian" relationship implied.

This nation has primarily two great resources: our limited and dwindling natural resources and an educated, productive population. After World War II, we began to believe that we, as Americans, were superior to other people. We know now we are not superior except as we train and discipline ourselves to have the educational edge.

The basic education blocks, the three R's, are intuitively essential to build an educated society.

Our future as a nation is to stand or fall on our educational level as a people. And I am scared to death! Results of the primary and secondary schools are pitiful and admittedly so by the institution itself. The dearth of American students taking the scientific and technical pressure to pursue engineering or physics is alarming. The preparation of those trying is troubling.

Perhaps if the cost of remedial reading work with students were paid by the teachers' union, the system might improve. Remedial post-secondary courses are paid for directly by the families of the students, and I am surprised that parents aren't suing the school board for failing to prepare students adequately.

World Class Education says implicitly that a student must be able to communicate in language; at a bare minimum, in his own language. Even better, he should be able to communicate in other than his own language.

One teacher told me we should try outcome-based education, and if it didn't work, try something else. What of the generation lost? What of the billions of dollars lost?

We know the basics work, we know the current mess doesn't, so why not return to the known, including re-establishing discipline as a minimum? Outcome-based education is a disaster waiting to happen even as Mr. Spagnolo has been a continuing one.

Education is too important to be left in the hands of the isolated, cloistered educrat, without local public overview. By that, I don't mean as we in Montgomery County do it, with a School Board stuffed by educrats appointed by the National-Education-Association-pressured Board of Supervisors.\ Bob Anderson\ Blacksburg 


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