Does your school have a truant officer? This blog will explore this key area of education.
First a little story. Many years ago I moved with my family to Argentina. It was a big job promotion and it was a totally new experience. My kids went to school in Argentina and I was surprised that one day my young daughter not feel good, so we let her stay home for the day. In the middle of the afternoon, there was a knock at my door and to my surprise, it was the truant officer from my daughter's school. That is when I realized that Argentina took education seriously. The literacy rate in Argentina is well above that of the USA as well as the general level of education.
This got me to thinking about why the level of education in the USA is so low. If you study the history of the USA, you find that when the USA was being settled and farmers were clearing land for their homesteads, they had country schools every few miles. Further, these schools were the focus of the communities and kids were expected to walk, sometime miles, to their school carrying their lunch. There was no "free" lunch in these schools. I have a collection of school books from the mid 1800's and they are clearly more advanced than most elementary books of today. This makes you wonder how we declined so much in such a short time. I get letters from a friend who is over 90 years old that are hand written in the most beautiful hand writing that you have ever seen. Compare that to the hand writing of kids today! What has happened?
My personal experience was with a two room country school that is still going today after over 150 years. The school is run by a local school board just as it was 150 years ago. We did not have a telephone when I was going to that school, so if a student was absent for some reason, the teacher in the "big room" would go to that person's home to find out why they were not in school. Bigger kids were allowed to stay home sometimes to help with the harvest, but they still had to do their school work.
I read in the paper how many of our big city schools appear to be failing their students, but is it actually the school that is failing? When I drive thru many of these bigger cities at mid day, I see all kinds of school aged kids wondering around the streets. Why are these kids not in school? It appears that the reason is that many of these schools have eliminated their "truant officers" or have made them impudent with their "modern" ideas. We need to put our truant officers back to work and have them ask the parents of these missing kids to do their jobs and that means the "fathers" of these urban kids!
Why is it that the USA, while being one of the richest countries in the world has so many citizens who are illiterate. Maybe it is because we eliminated our truant officers and most citizens don;;t even know it.
