Broken Schools, Broken Economy And Broken Culture?

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, Box 751, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@alltel.net

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In August 2007, National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” showed public schools were in serious trouble—one-third of American eighth graders couldn’t perform basic math, one-third of all teachers left the profession after the first three years, and by five years, one-half had left. A black child in Washington, D.C. had a less than thirty percent chance of learning basic math skills before he turned ten. The odds that any given ten year-old in a large American city could read were about fifty-fifty, and six in ten for the nation as a whole. Only one in five students entering college were prepared for college-level mathematics, reading, writing, and biology. Our students are basically ignorant of American history!

Allen Bloom, in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, said: “In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and––as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art. The greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible—provided access to the seriousness of books.” That, however, he saw as shifted, saying: “Real religion and knowledge of the Bible have diminished to the vanishing point.”

The Islamic cultures revere the Koran. The communist societies Centralize Marx’s Das Capital, but the Bible, basic to the foundation of our culture, is at best deemphasized in public education. Why? In the name of freedom of religion we have undermined the basis that helped to establish our freedom.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects the population of the US to be about 439 million by 2050. Nearly all will be a direct consequence of the U.S. immigration policy and our failure to enforce laws against illegal immigration. Immigrants and children born to immigrants will comprise virtually all of the projected net increase.

Over the last forty years we have poured vast sums of money into our schools, but it has not done the job. With the economic recession and possibly a depression coming on, we need to face up to the fact that we have fallen into the trap referred to in the Bible where it says, “…in the last days…men shall be ever learning…and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (2 Tim. 3:1-7) Whether this scripture verse is referring to the end of a culture, nation, or humanity or all three, only time will tell.

Dr. Rudy Crew, Superintendent of the Miami-Dade County public schools with 356,000 children said, “When I was young, my father used to give me a hard shake to wake me up. Then he’d stick his head right up next to my ear and say, “Rudy,” in his deep voice. “Rudy, time to get up. Sun’s coming up and something good is gonna happen today.” But Crew sees the breakdown in our public education in that the expectation in learning has faded.

Things are changing as the population is shifting. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that between 1993 and 2003, population growth rates for youth ages five through nineteen was higher in the U.S. than in any other industrialized country. In those ten years, 4.7 million children entered the public schools with sixty-four percent or about 3 million being Hispanic, while white enrollment dropped by 1.2 million. Attached to this, in 2006 NCES reported that our fourth graders are scoring twelfth in the world in math skills after such nations as Singapore, Latvia, and Hungary. Our eighth graders were fifteenth, even below Malaysia and Slovakia. And by the time they reached the tenth grade, they had fallen to twenty-forth place.

Our educational establishment is occupied with equalizing educational achievement for all races, as the East Asians tend to excel the Whites, and Blacks the Hispanics. They seek to correct this. Yet, it has been realistically observed that, “Not only are our children not able to keep up with the better-equipped competition coming from India and China, but if things don’t change very soon, all these tens of millions of our sons and daughters will grow up to be adults unable to function in our economy.”

There is the lack of academic motivation, self-discipline, and a lack of a positive world-view on which to attach our learning. Are we losing our soul as a culture? We talk about the global economy, the synthesis of all religious beliefs, and the technological revolution, but our schools are broken, as we are facing a broken economy. We need change—the right kind of change! The public schools are broken, the economy is breaking, and behind it all is the breakdown of our culture. We are neglecting the foundation on which our whole nation was founded—“We are endowed by our Creator.” The right change is a return to the basic faith of our land!