Care to Connect the Dots?

These days there is a lot of talking about our security services failing to connect the dots with a supposed plane terrorist who allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas day. And there were many dots to connect, as it turns out.

This situation, though, illustrates very well what is wrong with other sides of the American civilization: we fail to connect the dots.

Take education, for example. We spend more than any other country on educating the nation's children, but the results are dismal at best. We pump in more money into doing some sham research to find out even better and more expensive ways to teach our kids, we spend a lot of time debating about what needs to be done, but we fail to see that one of the biggest problems in our education is its discrete character. There is no continuity of care, so to speak.

Our children have a new teacher every year. Moreover, once they start Middle School, they have a new teacher in EVERY SUBJECT EVERY YEAR. I read obituaries fairly regularly in our small town, and it is not uncommon to read absurd statements like "Mrs. So-and-So retired in 1998 after having taught 5th grade math for 40 years." WOW!!! How would you like to read that Dr. So-and-So retired from treating the left kidney for 40 years?

If you are only charged with teaching Math in 5th grade, your main concern is to get through the year and to have the kids pass a standardized test at the end of it. You basically don't care if they do not get some particular concept for life. They may need to have a full grasp of that concept in Algebra I in 8th grade, but that is not going to be your personal problem.

This is how they taught us in Russia which was a much poorer country than the US, but beat it in academic achievements of its school children in every subject hands down. We went to school for 10 years - 6 days a week. Grades 1-3 were the elementary school, 4-7 - the middle school, and 8-10 - the high school. All the grades were housed under one roof, and the schools were not as huge as the American ones - 900-1000 students max total in all grades combined.

In the elementary school we would have 1 teacher for all 3 years. So she knew that if she did not teach us to read well in the 1st grade, she personally would have to struggle with us for a couple more years. Starting with the Middle School, we would have the SAME math, geography, history, etc teachers who would teach us THROUGH THE HIGH SCHOOL. So our math teacher knew very well that if she did not drill multiplication of fractions into our heads in the 4th grade, she personally would have to reap the consequences of this later on. There was continuity of education.

Just imagine for a minute that there were no internal medicine doctors, and that the medicine were even more fractured and specialized than it is today: that some "specialists" treat only the right ankle, and some treat only the upper lobes of the lungs. How would you ever know what is wrong with you if there is NOBODY to see the whole picture and to know how treating one local problem is affecting the rest of the body?

I am not at all convinced in the reality of terrorism threat to the US, but I know for a fact that even the worst enemy would not be able to hurt the education of this country worse than we deliberately are doing it ourselves. Connect the dots, America!