76-02-A6
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Education(B)[edit]
Transcript[edit]Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about education-just to get something off my chest. I'll be right back. In this political season there's been some talk about the need to increase federal aid to education indeed the National Education Association proclaims a crisis in education which can only be met by massive infusions of billions of federal dollars. Well however you define crisis we can at least agree in the last 20 years the quality of education has declined by anyone's standard scores and college entrance exams have fallen continuously until last year they reached an all-time low. But can this be laid to inflation or reduce spending? In these 20 years inflation has raised the cost of things 57.2%. The average cost of educating a pupil in the public schools has gone up 211%. The total cost in constant dollars has gone up four times as much as enrollment. The number of school employees has increased two and a half times as much as the increase in enrollment but significantly the increase in non-teaching employees administrators etc is up four times as much. There are fewer pupils per teacher and fewer per classroom. In what has been called the most thorough study of the public schools ever made Dr. James Coleman of Johns Hopkins university says there is no relationship or ratio between the quality of education and class size or the number of pupils per teacher or cost of teacher salary. Well if the National Education Association is wrong and a shortage of money isn't to blame how do we explain the drop in quality? May I suggest the possibility that educators tinkering with the system-their eyes on a brave new world which they were going to build right in the classroom just may have tossed out some pretty tried and true fundamentals. We've all been aware of the educationist claims that the old-fashioned "Readin, wRiting and aRithmetic" was no longer relevant. School was going to mold the "now" generation into world citizens free of prejudice, hostility or even a competitive instinct. Why did we let their theories go without argument? Why did none of us point out that mankind has made more advances in virtually every field in the last 25 or 30 years than in all of history up to the present? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the men and women responsible for those advances got their education in the old-fashioned system the educationists are so determined to scrap. Are we to believe those who harness the atom took us to the moon gave us the miracles of computers electronics jet travel and an end to so many crippling and death dealing diseases did all of this in spite of their education someone in those old-fashioned schools that are so despised by today's elitists must have done something right. Let me add a postscript. Yesterday I mentioned the old-fashioned McGuffey's readers that were standard in our schools for more than half a century. Fourth graders read the Sermon on the Mount, King Solomon and the Ants by Whittier, Alfred the Great and The History of the United Netherlands. Little Johnny could read then. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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