To what do you owe your success? Undoubtedly, your achievement is due to everything from genetics to your upbringing, hard work, mentors, and opportunities.
But no one can succeed as a healthcare practitioner without a good education. That's why it's time healthcare providers take on education as an issue, evaluating the curricula, the approaches, and the standards—or lack of them—that pervade public education.
The problems in our educational system hit me when our son started kindergarten nine years ago in the same neighborhood school that I had attended. I found a bureaucratic system that failed to keep the bathrooms decently maintained or ensure that the lunch lines were short enough to give every child even 10 minutes to eat.
After we moved to the suburbs, our children were immersed in the state's newest “educational framework,” teaching methods and a curriculum that were never tested by solid research. Our then third-grade son brought home papers full of uncorrected spelling errors. His teacher told me that noting mistakes would lower his self-esteem. And memorizing multiplication tables was considered old-fashioned; such rote work would limit his ability to truly understand math, I was told. The kids went on field trips to Universal Studios—really—instead of the missions and museums I assumed they would visit.
I fought to bring back more time-tested and research-driven methods to our public schools, started a parent organization, wrote letters to the local papers, spoke at community groups, even ran for school board at the last minute. I lost my battle and realized that it would take me five to 10 years to help change the state curriculum, and my 8-year-old would be in high school by then. So we put our kids in private school and moved on.
There is no FDA for education. We have to keep asking the toughest questions about education, at every level: What are they teaching? What has to be proven effective?
Take a closer look at whether children are learning the skills in math, grammar, and writing and the knowledge of history and science they must have to succeed in any field. Some children are getting what they need, and some still are not.
Barbara Bronson Gray, MN, RN
Editor in Chief+ + + + +
What do you think? Write me at bbg@nurseweek.com.
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Look for Barbara's next Editor's Note March 17.