[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17836-17837]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             A TRADITIONAL EDUCATION IS THE BEST EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Sherwood). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak briefly on two or 
three important topics or issues in education. First, we have done a 
more

[[Page 17837]]

than adequate job in bringing down class sizes in most places around 
the country. What we really need to work on now is bringing down the 
size of schools.
  At very large schools, some young people feel like they are little 
more than numbers. Most kids can handle this all right, but some feel 
that they have to resort to extreme, kooky, weird or, unfortunately at 
times, even dangerous behavior to get noticed.
  At small schools, young people have a better chance to make a sports 
team or serve on the student council or become a cheerleader or stand 
out in some way. Young people today would be better off going to a 
school in an older building, but in a school where they did not feel so 
anonymous.
  I read a couple of years ago that the largest high school in New York 
City had 3,500 students; and then they made the wise decision to break 
it up into five separate schools and their drug and discipline problems 
went way down.
  The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hill) and I, on a bipartisan basis, 
introduced a bill to set up a special program within the Department of 
Education to give incentive grants to school systems that would 
establish programs to decrease the number of students at any one 
school. We got $45 million for this in the last omnibus appropriations 
bill, but we need to pursue this much more aggressively. Small schools 
mean individual attention and individual opportunities. Gigantic 
schools, unfortunately, centralized schools unfortunately, breed weird 
behavior and even help lead to Columbine-type situations.
  Secondly, Mr. Speaker, this so-called teacher shortage is one of the 
most artificial, contrived, and easily solvable problems that we have 
in the country today. There would be no teacher shortage if we removed 
the straightjacket of education courses and let school boards use 
intelligence and common sense to hire teachers. A school board should 
be allowed to consider an education degree as a real plus but not be 
restricted or harmed or hindered by it. Right now, in most places, if a 
person with a Ph.D. in chemistry and 30 years' experience in the field 
wanted to teach, he could not do so because he had not taken a few 
education courses. This is ridiculous. Right now, a person with a 
master's degree in English and who had been a successful writer, say, 
for a magazine or for newspapers for years could not be an English 
teacher in a public school because of not taking a few education 
courses. This is crazy.
  Someone who had been a political science professor at a small college 
for several years and then had several years' experience on Capitol 
Hill, for example, could not teach American government in a public high 
school without a required education course. This is stupid and it is 
why we have this artificial government-induced teacher shortage that we 
are seeing this publicity about.
  We could wipe out this teacher shortage overnight if we would allow 
school systems to hire well-qualified people even if they had not taken 
any education courses. I repeat, an education degree should be 
considered a plus. It should be considered a good thing when 
considering someone for a teaching job. School superintendents and 
principals have enough common sense intelligence and experience to hire 
some well-qualified person to teach who has degrees and experience but 
simply lacks an education course or two.
  Thirdly, Mr. Speaker, David Gelernter, a professor of computer 
science at Yale, said we are headed for an educational catastrophe or 
education disaster, he used both terms, by placing computers in 
classrooms for small or very young children. He said some seemed to 
believe if we give children what he described as a glitzy toy with 
bigger and bigger databases, we have done all we need in regard to 
education. He said we need to get back to the basics, especially in 
elementary and middle school. He said we still need to teach reading 
and writing and arithmetic and history and science, and we need to 
teach these things before we give kids computers and then wonder why 
they cannot add or subtract or write a grammatically correct sentence 
or know even basic history about their own country. This was said by a 
man who is a professor of computer science.
  Computers are not the end all of education. We need to get back to 
the basics before we end up in the educational catastrophe or disaster 
that Professor Gelernter predicted.

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