Traditions, Ceremony, Symbols, yadda yadda yadda

There's a good post on the Edspresso Blog about how it seems that we simply don't pay attention to propriety and decorum anymore, and the sacredness of some of our principles are paying the price. The implication is one that I agree with. It's not that people just don't care, period. They don't care because they don't know. Our educational system is partly to blame for this. We've done a lousy job of educating our students in the facts because we fail to give them something to care about.

I love this quote by Charlotte Mason.

"The question is not—how much does the youth know when he has finished his education—but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?" (School Education, pp. 170-171)

Meanwhile, the Tulsa World is slapping TPS on the back for a rather hollow victory: their schools have had a dramatic upturn in their test scores. It's disheartening, but not surprising. We all too often confuse process with product. We think that, simply because a student is able to jump through the hoops set before them by the educational system, that they must be educated. Unfortunately, we don't have the tools to be able to give us a much more accurate picture of where we stand with regard to educational success. Until we have standardized tests that can measure general student apathy on the one hand or, on the other, enthusiasm for truly understanding content, we will continue to graduate students who have no need for knowledge save what it adds to their paycheck.