Challenge to education

In the emotional debate over the failures of American education, there occasionaly are very useful pieces of advice. One of these came last week in Rockport from James F. Orr III, chairman and CEO of Union Mutual Insurance Co.

Mr. Orr’s succinct observation:

“Stop bashing educators.”

Speaking during a two-day symposium on the restructuring of Maine’s education system, Orr pointed out that while there are abundant critics of public schools, there are few people lining up with constructive suggestions for change.

The conference examined a recurrent theme in recent business and education seminars, the failings of the American education system, and it produced a consensus that has been strong among those who hire the products of that system and that now is being openly discussed by educators themselves:

The public education system in this country works acceptably well, even superlatively, in the way it prepares a minority of students for a college education. It is failing, however, in the important mission of preparing the majority of students for work and a productive life in an increasingly competitive global economy.

Orr’s company, with 3,000 employess, 75 percent of them educated in Cumberland County, is a good example. He says that the county’s public schools prepare students adequately for a university education, but he see a wide gap between their preparation and the non-college student who frequently shows up at the personnel office without basic mathematics and communications skills.

There are many good teachers. There also are some poor ones, but the pattern of inadequacy pointed out by Orr and others has little to do with specific teachers. It has its roots in the dissolution of the nuclear family, in the related lack of personal motivation and aspirations on the part of students and in the objectives of an educational system set up to aggressively skim the cream for colleges while a majority of students just pass through to jobs in agriculture and manufacturing.

Those jobs no longer exist.

It does no good to blame the teachers.