Letters: Liberal experiments witheducation impair learning

Marlowe Thompson's letter to The Triplicate of Sept. 5, ("Liberals do not like America as it was for 200 years), seems to be the usual Bible-thumping, flag-waving, anti-liberal tirade to be expected from conservatives today.

I used to call myself a conservative, but since I am not a right-wing Christian zealot, I can no longer claim that title. However, I do believe that liberals have done serious damage to our country over the past 55 years, but my reasons are very different from those of Mr. Thompson.

Something very strange happened to America in the years following World War II. Our public schools were snatched away from us and turned over to largely invisible and unaccountable government agencies which no one had known existed. Just where the authority to do this came from, no one seemed to know.

A process called "consolidation" swept the country. Schools became large-scale bus and food service operations, students were regimented and indoctrinated with various social engineering schemes, and teachers, once respected professionals, were reduced to unionized assembly-line workers.

Parents watched helplessly as their children were subjected to a series of bizarre educational experiments. One, called "new math," involved taking some ideas from advanced mathematical logic, reducing them down to an idiot parrot level, and teaching them to elementary students in place of arithmetic. This resulted in a generation of students who might be able to deal with an abstract "set" if they ever encountered one in the real world, but could not do simple arithmetic.

Another experiment was an attempt to teach reading without also teaching the sounds of individual letters which would enable a student to "sound out" a word for himself. The student was taught to recognize only whole words. This resulted in a generation of students who could read only words they had been specifically taught to recognize, but were lost when encountering new words on their own.

Well-intentioned? If a government agency conducted a series of medical experiments that involved injecting thousands of children with a new and untried polio vaccine without the knowledge or permission of the parents, and the experiment then resulted in thousands of crippled children, I believe the perpetrators would not only be subject to massive lawsuits and criminal prosecution, but probably to a few lynch mobs as well!

John P. Cupp

Smith River