MISSOURI WATCH: PLEASE KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MISSOURI CLASSROOMS

I trust my friends who are professionals in the field will forgive me for saying this, but sometimes I have to conclude that the critically important effort to provide the best education for Missouri's young children is better left to someone else. I say this not because I believe professional educators are sinister or even counter-productive, but because they very often strive to complicate certain areas of reading, writing and arithmetic far beyond what is needed to restore the quality in all three basic subjects.

The creation of any professional group, whether it be teachers, engineers, lawyers or doctors, tends also to create its own language, a vernacular that is peculiar to each grouping. This has the advantage of not only creating an atmosphere of expertise within the profession, but it also tends to eliminate discourse from outsiders, in other words, the general public. Like lawyers, who have a wide assortment of writs at their disposal, the professionals within the field of education have in their specialized dictionary a long list of words and phrases that have little or no meaning to John Q. Public, which is us.

This special dictionary entitles our superintendents, principals and teachers to converse among themselves with little or no danger that we, the unwashed and uninformed, will understand what is being said, proposed or mandated. In all fairness, the education profession didn't start this practice, and I suppose it's perfectly normal to expect that they would adopt it, because, frankly, the system really works.

It is possible to sit in a meeting conducted by high ranking educators and understand very little of real substance. Some 35 years ago I attended the organizational meetings of the state's first Junior College Commission, which went out of business rather quickly when its scope was hopelessly limited and its power virtually non-existent. I will now confess that when I attended these meetings, the language being used by the state's professional educators was far beyond me, almost as much as the language I attempted to learn, and failed to do so, when I took French 101.

I have tried reading, on several occasions, the complete text of Senate Bill 380, which was given the title of Outstanding Schools Act by its authors. I readily admit there are segments of this extremely lengthy bill that make little or no sense to me. The vernacular is not unlike that used by Parisians, particularly when they are speaking so as to avoid comprehension by illiterate Americans.

If the dangers of undue and unnecessary complication were not apparent to the authors, several of whom I greatly admire and personally treasure, when SB 380 was being written, they should now be extremely obvious, given the wide range of interpretations now available for what the bill says, what it proposes and how it is to be implemented. Numerous Missourians have charged that SB 380 is nothing more than the so-called Outcome Based Education, a phrase that sends conservatives into a snit not unlike the one thrown by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives when he was a guest on Air Force One en route to Israel. At least OBE opponents haven't shut down state government, and for that, we can all be grateful.

OBE opponents claim that SB 380 will accomplish what they are attempting to prevent: the dumbing down of students in public elementary and secondary schools. I have no way of knowing whether their charges are true or false, but if true, they have saved all of us a lot of trouble. Whichever side wins, the curricula of Missouri's public schools must not be made easier. Students must be taught more, not less. They must study more, not less. They must attend classes more, not less.

If making our classrooms truly areas of learning is what OBE is about, then I'm for OBE. If OBE is pro-dumbing, then I'm anti-OBE. I think I speak for a majority of Missouri adults who are the ones, after all, who pay the bills and in the long run enjoy the rewards of better educated children or suffer the penalties of an under-educated generation.

This desire to see the educational standards of our state's public schools improved is perhaps old-fashioned. Shoot, I'm so far behind the times that I still favor the teaching of Latin, at least two years of it. Otherwise, the subjunctive case will be lost forever. When I mentioned the word subjunctive to university seniors, they look at me as if I were from another planet. As for understanding the nuances taught by Latin, I might as well be on Saturn and my students on Jupiter.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is seeking approval of its revised educational standards from the folks who presumably run the agency: members of the Missouri State School Board. This panel is a good one, with several outstanding, competent individuals on its roster, and I have great respect for the expertise of several commission members, as well as the agency's professional staff. Whether the new standards will be approved, or sent back once again for a rewrite, is unknown at this moment. In reading them, I confess that, even though I am sometimes frustrated by the language, they seem to be common-sense objectives that state a goal in which I am in perfect sympathy: improved schooling for the kids of our state.

I have listened to too many university presidents complain about how much of their budgets are now going for so-called high school remedial work. In other words, several of our tax-supported colleges are providing schooling that should have been given to high school students, grades 9 through 12.

If I believe educational reforms are too important to be left only to professionals, then I also know that it is too important to be left in the hands of professional politicians. We don't need the wisdom of aspiring politicians or special interest groups in our classrooms, nor do we need their agendas, whatever these might be, driving efforts to stamp their particular beliefs on the minds of Missouri's children.

There is nothing at all political about pure education, which is a science, not a conservative or liberal philosophy.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.