The public education system holds some back, leaves others behind

I’m not much of a weightlifter, but I imagine that if you can’t bench press 100 pounds, you… I’m not much of a weightlifter, but I imagine that if you can’t bench press 100 pounds, you don’t try 115, but if you can do 40 reps at 100, you probably ought to move on.

Of course, there are other considerations, like whether you’re going for power or for endurance. But the bottom line is, you move up a level when the last level ceases to be a challenge. It seems to be a no-brainer.

Yet when I graduated high school, most of the people who attended kindergarten with me graduated at the same time. Which implies one of two things: Either my school system was almost completely bereft of “heavy lifters” or “weaklings,” in an academic sense, or some students were rushed and others restrained. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Certainly, I could accept the phenomenon if some students had moved ahead in their early years, hit a wall and ended up in my grade again, while others fell behind early and caught up later. Not everyone peaks at the same time. That did not happen, though. We all moved forward at the same pace.

Whatever reasoning the school district embraced in deciding to keep the class intact through all 13 years of public schooling that I attended, the end effect was this: Some students took 13 years to learn what they could have in 12, 11 or even 10, and some students were forced to learn, in 13 years, what it would have taken them 14 or 15 years to learn properly.

Which brings us back to weightlifting. As a general rule, I believe, weightlifters always lift enough weight to provide a challenge, but not so much as to strain themselves. This seems like an intelligent plan for edification of any sort, and certainly for academics. Yet the education plan for me and my peers virtually guaranteed that the most brilliant students would never be asked to give their best efforts, and the least talented students would be taught, year in and year out, that their best efforts would never be quite good enough.

Moreover, how many of these “least talented” students were simply those who developed their gifts a year or two later than their peers? The way schools teach students today, such “late bloomers” lose the most opportunity of any student, simply because they lack years of foundational knowledge when their talents finally come to fruition.

The bottom line is that “equal opportunity” provides the same opportunity to all students, which is not equal at all. The brightest do not have an opportunity to learn to the best of their ability.

My aunt, who works as a teacher, once explained to me that the educational system was designed to prepare students for work on the assembly line. That explains a lot.

On an assembly line, one works at the speed of the machinery, gaining nothing by working faster, losing much by working more slowly. Exactly as is the case with our educational system.

Perhaps you are familiar with the clip from “I Love Lucy” that features Lucille Ball at the assembly line, stuffing chocolates in her mouth, down her blouse, etc., in a desperate hope to keep up with the process. That’s the image of below-average students. Above-average students work at the pace of the assembly line, but could do much more. Only average students work efficiently on the assembly line.

As a child, I remembered that everything was a competition. Who can spit the farthest? Who can jump the most blocks of sidewalk, or tiles on a floor? The trick to such competitions is that there is no limit. You can keep jumping tiles until you run out of tiles. But in the educational system, if, at the end of the year, you jumped six tiles, they still mark you down for two. There’s no reason to work at it, or give your best effort, so you might as well jump two tiles.

When I was in first grade, we had four groups in our English class – red, blue and yellow, some set of differing colors – which were organized according to skill. I realize that I only named three colors. The fourth group consisted of me.

All four groups ended up in the same group in second-grade English class.

I guess the reasoning behind this was something like this: Students should remain in a class grouping of peers their age, and said grouping will suffer from intellectual stratification.

In other words, kids can’t move ahead because they will not properly develop social skills. Well, as is, I doubt I had more than one friend at a time, until eighth grade, and I have no social skills even now. Bang-up job on that one.

Of course, while my English skills were ahead of the curve, I could have used an extra six to seven years of calculus and physics. I have no clue in either subject. Even algebra was a struggle. Why were there letters in my math? There weren’t any numbers in “Alpha-Bits.”

So I’ve seen the issue from both sides, where standardized education has held me back, and where it has left me behind, and I wonder what’s wrong with keeping my own pace.

E-mail Marty Flaherty at mflaherty@pittnews.com.