Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
I very much appreciated Nancy Mercante’s Opinion piece, “Saving Delaware’s kids is our responsibility.” The key complaint in her letter was low test scores among Delaware kids compared to the rest of the country. The key goal, in her letter, to correct this is to hold “superintendents accountable for delivering improved academic outcomes.” And the key action she is pushing is for people to run for election to school board slots and make a lot of noise and pound on the table at board meetings.
I would also like to acknowledge Paul Herdman’s letter, “Now, there’s a plan for literacy emergency.” He wrote, “Gov. Matt Meyer’s first major education decision was to appoint Cindy Marten as Delaware’s secretary of education in 2025.” The rest of his letter was mostly about the “action plan” in the Delaware school system to make things better. In particular, his letter contained internet links to Delaware government websites that explained new plans to improve education in this state.
I will applaud almost anything and everything that will likely improve everyone’s level of education. However, my point is still that using complaints about test scores to focus blame only on how the educational system is organized, and how it functions, is missing the forest for the trees. There are plenty of other factors that play significant roles in education, and some are more amenable to influence than others are. Poverty, unengaged parents, dysfunctional households and the presence of fairly large anti-education, anti-expert and anti-science sentiments in today’s society certainly work against education. There is even hostility toward certain fact-checking in parts of our society, and this is also a problem. Articles have been coming out for years about the distracting presence of cellphones and smartphones in schools. Psychologists have been writing that teen brains are really not fully ready for certain kinds of media content, hormone-amplifying outrage messages, sexting, images of naked or artificially manipulated images of schoolmates and misinformation that pass over social networks. These things lead to higher rates of anxiety, absenteeism, depression, higher senses of entitlement, defiant and disruptive behavior, bad attitudes, reduced attention span and mental illnesses among students. Internet searches on drug use and alcohol use among students — even during class time — show that up to 10%-20% of the students are “not all there.” Levels of violence, cranked-up hate and racism, threats, bullying and some students bringing weapons — including loaded firearms — to school are all things happening today. In the last year, I read at least two articles about parents buying their kids guns. Then, later, the kid takes the gun to school to shoot other kids and at least one teacher. Guns don’t kill people, right? But, if the gun were not there, then how many innocent people would be alive today and how many fewer traumatized people would there be?
I was a primary school kid in the late 1940s and a secondary school student in a half-White, half-Black school in the 1950s, and I never saw any of this stuff. How is the educational system responsible for this new stuff I just listed? And how, may I ask, is putting all the responsibility on the backs of the schools, teachers and administrators going to fix the problems that come from outside the school system?
Off and on, in recent years, I have read Opinions about the so-called “total failure” of our educational system. I spent many hours on the internet and used several artificial intelligences to educate myself on why as many as three dozen other countries in the world do a lot better than we do here in the U.S., in terms of primary and secondary school literacy and education. I think it is a bigger problem than most people realize. I remember first reading newspaper and magazine articles about “Why Johnny can’t read” back in 1955 (an internet fact-checked date), while I was in late primary school! It is not a new problem! But it is worse than that. This title started appearing in articles and book titles about four decades ago: “Why Johnny can’t think.” Here is an internet essay anybody with web access can get: “The State of Critical Thinking Today.” It is on one of The Foundation for Critical Thinking websites. Equally good, if not better, is the Wikipedia article, “Critical thinking.” My favorite tag, or label, is “dishonest debate.” You should do an internet search on just that two-word phrase and discover that a lot of people cannot even detect fallacies or realize they are in ideological “silos” or political “foxholes” and disconnected from reality.
Finally, may I ask why parent-teacher meetings are not being mentioned or encouraged? The internet has many reports from many other countries. The reports say the PTAs always help. By the way, there is a PTA in Delaware. It has a website at delawarepta.org, and the website says the mailing address is Delaware PTA, 3434 Old Capitol Trail, PO Box 5144, Wilmington DE 19808.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
