See The Instruction

With the spider’s nest secured in the large glass jar and put into my school satchel. One of those classic-style, side satchels, with the buckles. The style that was suitable for the lower aged schools where all you had to worry about carrying was your lunch and a few exercise books. Such a bag would be totally unsuitable for the intermediate aged school. The amount of books that we were required to carry to and from school would never begin to fit into a satchel. The work books, the text books, the sports gear (because everyone did sports then. Everyone. Regardless of how you felt about it).

One of the problems with young school students today, (as I see it) is we give them too many choices, before they have even the basics settled in their minds. Their focus is distracted with multiple choices and they do not possess the necessary skills to make informed decisions. There are three basic lesson areas that every child should be able to cope with. Simple maths. The ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide ….. correctly. Not guess it. Not roughly. When was the last time a clerk in a store counted back the change they gave you, to equal the amount you provided. They don’t seem to be able to do that anymore. The hand you the change, based entirely on what the machine says. Every now and then, depending on attitude of the person serving, I have asked them to count it back. To actually add the change to the price and give the total (yes, I can be a pain sometimes). The recent case was when the girl tried to count it back she started with the total I had given her ($50) and started adding the change to that ($14.20) so when she was nearly completed at $64.00 she stood looking at the twenty cents and said…. (wait for it), “You gave me too much” (I kid you not) Tell me there is nothing wrong with our education system. So let’s get back to teaching those basics and get the children being able to count.

Then there is the need to read and write. It cannot really be that hard. We learnt before we went to school. We were reading at five years of age. After that we just learnt to read harder words. But, I still can and do read all the time. I have met children as old as 16 who cannot read, adults who are totally unsure of many words and yet all, have at some stage, passed through ten to twelve years of schooling. Nowadays, the schools will not keep them back if they fail. ‘It puts a stigma on them” is the government bodies response. What sort of a stigma will they have if they have to live their life incapable of reading the simplest of things.  I can ignore the need to read a daily newspaper (and generally do because I hate reading all the spelling and grammatical errors that now appear in them as national standards slip), but how about warning notices and legal notifications. How can they prepare for an emergency, if they can’t read “Open other end”?

(Continued tomorrow)