Response to "Reflections on Fifty Years at the Chalk Face"

Mr. Polley:

Your intuition regarding the decline of public schooling in the UK is commendable, the failures of which parallel the crisis of education in the United States.

I have served as an educator for the past seven years. I have worked in a number of educational sites, from a university preschool, to comprehensive high schools in the Greater Los Angeles area, to my current employment as a substitute teacher in the South Bay, an expansive urban sprawl of communities along the South Western beachfront of Los Angeles.

I agree that today's youth enjoy far more comfort and entitlement than previous generations, in part because today's authorities have made every effort to meet every need without depriving our youth. Rather than looking to their elders for "guidance," as you attest, they expect handouts, they expect to given what many in previous generations had to work for.

Sadly, I can also attest to the cult of self-esteem, mixed with multicultural ethnocentrism, that has so inoculated the minds of young people from receiving criticism and taking direction. Many teachers are now called to suffer the rude pretensions of parents and the cowardice of administrators who refusing to follow through on necessary consequence. Many principals at the high school level pressure the teacher to pass the students, instead of the pressuring the student to strive for excellence.

Indeed, expectations are key to the success of a student's education. Nowadays, school districts are obsessed with their own merits, achieving high test scores to justify the outrageous subsidies from the state. These monies, unfortunately, are poured into a broadening wasteland of bureaucracy, one which compromises the necessary skillset that every student must possess up graduating.

Mr. Polley, I could not agree more that today's youth are quite world-wise, though their street-smarts do little more than enhance their dysfunctional existence for getting by in street gangs and criminal behavior

I believe that when youth are expected not just to achieve, but to achieve meaningful goals attached to a career, they can succeed. Let us hope that future reform in education on both sides of the Atlantic will promote school choice for parents and accountability from, not just for, students.