- Stop the Madness, Please - No More Inventiveness in Our Schools
As a business owner you may have noticed some of the talent spewing forth from our public school systems is sometimes somewhat less than you find desirable. In fact time and again, business owners, when rattling off a litany of problems they face in the course of operating their businesses, place finding high quality employees near the top of the list. Many place the blame squarely on the shoulders of our public school systems, and point to the quality of education received in other parts of the world as an example of how we need to prepare future employees in this country. Witness the explosion of H1B visas to supply American tech industries with the staff they need to be successful (getting high quality employees on the cheap notwithstanding).
Well, if the some of the concepts being promoted in some of the schools in our country are an example of what educators deem necessary to properly prepare our students for the rigors of life in the workplace, things may well get worse before they get better. I speak specifically of a concept embraced at one of my children’s schools in Washington State.
This one is known as “inventive spelling”. Just what is inventive spelling, you may well ask? I’m glad you did. Inventive spelling is sadly all to close to exactly what it sound like; letting our children, in the very beginning of their educational careers, spell words in inventive, new ways. Why might our schools, who are supposed to be instructing our kids in the finer points of the English language, allow such a practice?
Because, and Rush Limbaugh will absolutely love this one, being told they are spelling some of their words incorrectly is bad for their self esteem. No, you really heard me correctly. From the same people that brought you noncompetitive sports, we now have noncompetitive academics.
For example, although Webster’s lists the proper spelling of the word that means delighted, pleased or glad as “happy”, the kids in Washington schools may actually prefer to spell it “hape”, because well, it looks like you could maybe spell it that way. After all, it kind of sounds that way, if you use a long e. We learned phonetic spelling in kindergarten and 1st grade, now they get to take it one step further with inventive spelling. The feeling of those in the halls of knowledge is that, and you’ll just love this, kid’s will all have access to spell check at some point anyway. I am not making this up, really.
American inventiveness, when used to develop interchangeable parts, the light bulb, the assembly line or transistor is exactly what we need more of. However, when it is applied to the fresh, young minds in such a fashion as to allow them to actually learn things incorrectly, because we don’t want their self esteem to suffer, that’s just plain wrong. I’m sure this is all supported by reams of study data from the finest minds in academia, but is it any wonder that business owners feel that they’d rather hire their computer engineering staff from India than Indiana? What’s next? 2+2= oh, whatever you’d like, as long as you feel good about it. I think it’s finally time to stop the madness.
