Swickard: Each year has a lesson to teach

© 2015 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  In a small unscientific study looking only at myself I find that the years go by quickly. They are packed with victories and losses. If we have a loss, at least we should get the lesson. Getting lemons doesn't help unless you have sugar and water for lemonade.

            Let's look at 2015 as we think about 2016. We must remember the mistakes that were made this year so we don't repeat them. We also need to remember our victories so we have some chance to repeat them.

            George Santayana in 1906 wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Our society doesn't seem to learn. Let's make 2016 the year we learn from a previous year's mistakes.

            If there was an organization to remember society's wins and losses each year they would say you must acknowledge both the wins and losses. Losses are difficult because people gloss over them while fixating on wins.

            The biggest loss in the last few years is the loss of the truth. Truth has become the new hate speech. George Orwell wrote, "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

            Many people are afraid of the truth because an expedient political power play has emerged in our society. It is to label as racist or worse anyone who opposes the wishes of the political parties. 2015 was a name-calling year with most of the name-calling being done for political gain.

            A friend runs a political blog and has a hard time with the inclination of some posters to name-call and act ugly. I am glad he is fighting that fight because we can never have truth in our society if the name-calling brigands are allowed to take over public dialogs.

            The year 2015 will be remembered as the year everything offended someone. David Bednar wrote, "To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else."

            This year I found I could concurrently offend both Republicans and Democrats. I got hate emails from both the same week. I have written a weekly column for more than thirty years so I am used to offending people. It happens. But this year it seemed that there was a virulent practiced response to opposing ideas and that was name-calling and ignoring the truth.

            One person was very offended when I wrote about something that happened in the 2015 New Mexico Legislature. The problem for me was that I did not witness this situation myself. But I found four people who confirmed to me what happened along with two others in law enforcement who witnessed it. I would not retract my column.

            This last year the two major political parties were nationally very similar. The only thing they disagree on was which person should be elected, not the will of the people and how Congress should protect the Constitution.

            The emphasis of 2015 for the national leaders of both parties was to make government bigger. This has been covered extensively by the national press that can be identified by their political editorial leanings. Both the liberal press and the less liberal press have their agendas. If it wasn't for the Internet they would succeed.

            Many years ago Bob Hope quipped, "No one party can fool all of the people all of the time; that's why we have two parties." A friend said to one politician, "Please act as if you actually talk to citizens and not just consultants and fixers." That didn't go over well.

            Comedian George Burns was asked, "How's your wife?" He answered, "Compared to what?" That is what we have to realize each year. When we do a year in review in some ways we are often comparing to other years.

            Can we learn from 2015? Yes, but we must want to learn. We may have to change some of our elected politicians if we want real change. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, "Whenever people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government."

            We have many well-informed citizens but everyone loses when truth is politically inconvenient and so is absent from our society.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net 

Swickard: Each year has a lesson to teach

Swickard: When it is too early for formal public schooling

© 2015 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Question: when is the best age to start children in public schools? This is like the question: why not teach algebra to five-year olds? Answer: our brains must develop before we can do formal logic. The age to start formal public school education is not until the age of six.

            However, a big push in our society by well-meaning people and power-hungry politicians is that earlier contact with school makes a better scholar. They say that while ignoring the research. They have many reasons not involving the welfare of the children when they want to start children younger.

            However, others people, myself included, feel that certain brain development phases must occur for children to thrive in a formal education setting. Research which I will point to suggests you can injure young children by putting them in formal academic settings too soon.

            We should look at the research but the way many professional educators have been operating of late is to ignore all research that doesn't support what they want. They say, "Forget the research we want to have a bigger empire and employ more people."

            When I was young most students began their formal education at the age of six. The generation that sent men to the moon and returned them safely started their schooling at this age. It works. The children were in family or church daycare until it was time to start school.

            Then there came kindergarten. In the 1960s there was the adoption of public school kindergarten for many students. In New Mexico it was the middle of the 1970s when the public schools uniformly started offering kindergarten. But that kindergarten was vastly different than what we see now.

            Back then it was only for half of the day and focused on play activities. Children sang songs and played games and took naps and went home saying, "I love school." Then well-meaning people said, "Why don't we keep them all day." It made sense since parents would not have to accommodate the other half of the day.

            The beauty for the politicians was it allowed public schools to hire twice as many kindergarten teachers. And for a while that was how schools went. But then administrators started talking about changing kindergarten into a formal academic activity.

            They justified changing kindergarten to formal education for five year olds so when these young students are in fourth grade they will do better making the school seem more successful. Kindergarten now doesn't look like it did. The play and informal curriculum is gone and the five year olds are just trying to learn the six year old stuff a year early. How is that working? Terrible but no one is paying attention.

            Research at Stanford University suggests the move to get children into academic classrooms sooner comes with liabilities. There is an interesting study that even mainstream news organizations are noticing. It is: The Gift of Time? SchoolStarting Age and Mental Health.

            This research from Stanford University looks at when students start and if starting a year later would be better. There are countries that start their children later in school. What is the outcome?

            The later starting children do better on the fourth and eighth grade tests and seem to not have as many mental health issues. But the research doesn't fit the political needs of our education leaders. The vast industrial public education complex needs the young children in the system.

            And I am fine with that if these politicians will just read the research and see that they can make the first year a year of curiosity, play and social involvement but they cannot teach formal education to the majority of the five year olds.

            Further, we must see our young children by their number of day alive and not birth year. I was born seven days before the cutoff so I was the youngest and smallest boy in most of my classes. Some of my competing classmates were fifteen percent older than me that first year.

            The Stanford study, which can be downloaded for five dollars talks about all of these issues. I do wish some of our leaders would look at this great research.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net 

Swickard: When it is too early for formal public schooling

Swickard: Free college or free students from college?

Grandfather E V McKim Sr's practical education

© 2015 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  One of the talking points for politicians is free college for students. They reason that preschool to high school graduation in public education is free, why not college? It is not free, someone else pays.

            Perhaps we should debate the aim of our education system. Thomas Jefferson wrote that education had two aims, "The laboring and the learned. Few students had the ability to be (academically) learned but our country always needs educated labor."

            In today's world our public schools push all students to attend college. In 1968 it was not my intention to attend college. My Grandmother Frieda wanted me to go so I went.

            In 1917 she got a Masters Degree from Western New Mexico University in Silver City. It was then New Mexico State Teachers' College. She had come to New Mexico in 1908 from upstate New York to be a teacher in a one room schoolhouse in Three Rivers. Later she taught in White Oaks.

            Of her children only my uncle went to college. He got a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1952 after serving in the Navy during WWII. I went to New Mexico State University in 1968 reluctantly since I already was a fine photographer. My father taught at the Air Force School of Photography. I thought I had all of the education I needed.

            But my grandmother saw something in me that a college education made better. Ultimately I got a Ph.D. in Educational Administration with a focus on distance education. But I could have just been a photographer and writer. Life is a funny old dog when it comes to what we set out to do and what happens.

            America was built by artisans and laborers. Two of my great-grandparents came to America to work on the railroads, one from Sweden and the other from Ireland. My Grandmother Frieda's husband was a railroad engineer in steam locomotives.

            He only went through the fourth grade but could fix almost anything. Today some are saying that only the academics really matter. Tell that to someone with an overflowing toilet.

            In Junior High I took six semesters of shop covering tools, wood, metal, electrical, automotive, and home building during those three years. It was outstanding. I am handy enough to handle most things and experienced enough to know when things need to be fixed by someone who really knows what they are doing.

            We will always need handy people in our society. Everything will break, we just do not know when. Instead of pushing every student to college we should smile on all education, be it academic or mechanical.

            The movement for free college really is because colleges in the last twenty years have increased the tuition and fees many times the inflation rate. I went to New Mexico State University twenty years ago for my Ph.D. The tuition and fees were about six hundred dollars a semester.

            Currently at NMSU it is nearly four thousand dollars a semester so that either parents must pay the cost or the students incur lots of debt. The student-loan default rate is terrible. The solution for some is free college to keep students from going into debt. But should they be going to college in the first place?

            The college graduation rate in New Mexico is perhaps forty percent with many students just quitting. These students have student loan debt and no degree. That is one of the things driving the horrible student loan default rate.

            Many of the current graduates are either under-employed or unemployed. The college degree for many did not make life better as to supporting themselves. Now one of my favorite classes at college was a wonderful year of Irish writing from poetry to novels. But what pays the bills are the things I do which require my Ph.D. No, column writing does not require a degree, but my statistics and research background helps.

            Perhaps the current generation of college students who have graduated and cannot find a degree-required job should have explored something more practical to do. Would it be better if they had a professional trade to support themselves? They could afford college later if they found a desire to change fields.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net 

Swickard: Free college or free students from college?