Lee Smith
Many of the people who are saying the schools are not providing students with the knowledge and skill levels needed for today’s or tomorrow’s workforce when they were in school were high achievers. Many were the best and brightest their schools had to offer. They also received their education during an era criticized as having not provided them with the knowledge and skills levels adequate for then or today’s needs. As defective products of the problem, they are not capable of meeting the challenge of effecting meaningful and lasting educational curriculum change.This brings up the question of what qualifies this author then to speak with authority on how to affect meaningful and lasting educational reform. The answer is that he is not part of all this. Many of the reformers recognize him as the guy who would punch them in the arm and take their lunch money. The author was also the class clown. His teachers said he was failing because he daydreamed in class. They said he was failing because he did not turn in his homework. They said that, while he had learned to walk and talk on his own without any help from them, that he had some organic problem keeping him from learning. What all these teachers and counselors and evaluators and probation officers and school board members and parents and foster parents and everyone else never, ever said is that he was struggling with division because he had not mastered the times tables. They just did not know, perhaps really did not care. He knew this, and in the early part of the fifth grade, he decided his life would be better and easier if he submitted to learning the multiplication tables. For this reason, he is essentially self-educated and so has a particularly different point of view from these other self-described, poorly prepared products of the education system.In addition to being outside the public education system, another factor in his qualifications to evaluate the nation’s educational efforts is his shoes; they are steel-toed. 3
