‘Feel Good’ Folly Has Had Its Day

What do you suppose would happen to kids in a nation whose educators deemed it insensitive to correct youngsters who made errors in grammar, spelling and mathematics? And what would happen to kids if educators promoted them from one grade to another regardless of whether they had learned?

Some of the kids - the lucky ones who can learn on their own or with tutoring from parents - would be fine.

Kids who need the help of a teacher would be out of luck. They’d fall farther and farther behind, and eventually, they’d drop out.

Welcome to the United States. Today, 40 percent of fourth graders can’t read at grade level. These kids have been robbed. They’ve been robbed by a public education establishment that retreated from its obligation to teach. It has done so under the influence of an ideology that holds educators must, above all else, avoid hurting a child’s feelings. It hurts a child’s feelings to point out errors, give a poor grade or insist on such hard work as the memorization of facts and the disciplined acquisition of skills. In other words, it hurts a child’s feelings to be taught. So schools have busied themselves with committee meetings and esoteric jargon about educational process, instead.

At last, employers and parents fed up with high dropout rates and with the scandal of illiterate high school graduates are demanding reform.

One remedy, being debated here and nationwide, is retention. The feel-good fads of the 1980s led school administrators to bar teachers from retaining, for another year in the same grade level, children who hadn’t learned. Now, retention is making a comeback.

Certainly, it’s traumatic to make a kid repeat a grade. It’s also traumatic, and foolish, to ask that kids perform fifth-grade work if they can’t do fourth-grade work.

Retention ought to be in the educational toolbox. But it is not a solution. Retention is a matter of process and as such it does nothing to address the reasons a child has not learned the content and the skills that schools are supposed to impart. Retention is merely an alarm bell and if a child is lucky, parents and teachers who hear it will wake up, find out what’s going wrong and make changes so the child begins to learn.

Learning is hard work and for some kids, it’s harder work than it is for others. Family difficulties, learning styles, learning disabilities, lousy teaching, rebelliousness, laziness, peer pressure and many other things can cause a student to flounder. Only when parents, teachers and kids tackle these painful challenges do youngsters have a chance at the kind of self-esteem that lasts - the kind that results from competence.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board