A news blurb on back-to-school sales gave me a tough dose of reality the other day. Even though most of the nation is currently in the throes of summer heat and humidity, the truth is that kids will be hitting the books before we know it.
According to a 2025 EdChoice survey, 80% of those kids will attend one of our nation’s public district schools. Our nation’s public schools have received negative ratings for years, yet when it comes to local public schools, people often give them high ratings. Perhaps that’s because we’ve all adopted several false assumptions about public schools and the quality of their education.
Those false assumptions have been around for decades, a fact attested to by 20th-century author and cultural commentator Bernard Iddings Bell. Writing in his book, “Common Sense Education,” Bell laid out seven assumptions Americans wrongly make about our public schools, showing that the education which comes out of these revered halls isn’t all many of us have believed or hoped it to be.
1. Students Are Equal in Mental Ability
This assumption is generally driven by that famous equality line in the Declaration of Independence, Bell says. But common sense and observation show that no mind is alike, and that each child varies in his ability to grasp a concept, a reality that is often driven by a child’s home life.
As a result, gifted students are held back, while others have a hard time keeping pace with the rest of the class, producing a uniformity of thought and a lack of individuality, Bell explains. “Great as are the glories of the public school system, it has paid for them heavily in the deadly complacency and stupid uniformity which has been produced from one end of the country to the other,” he concludes.
2. Mass Education Is Effective
We build upon the idea that children are equal in mental ability when we seek to educate them in a large group in order to cut costs, Bell explains. Yet, “if we have mass production it can only be a uniform production,” he says. “We shall turn out academic Fords rather than academic Cadillacs.” In other words, the broader and bigger we make our schools and classrooms, the more mediocre is the instruction.
3. Teaching Methods Matter More Than Content
Teacher training today often consists of learning how to teach this reading method, or how to best manage a classroom, or perhaps even how to harness technology to impart wisdom to children. Yet according to Bell, such “technical devices” can never “take the place of personal contact, or individual stimulation given by the teacher to the pupil.
To combat this, we must be more proactive in training our teachers “in the content of real learning.” Essentially, math teachers need to know and love math, reading teachers need to know and love books, and so on, which teaches students to copy the teacher’s love and knowledge of those subjects rather than imparting a method to the plod along with the madness.
4. Education Is About Imparting Facts
“Almost anybody can accumulate some facts,” Bell explains. “It is only exceptional people who can do anything with them once they have them.” Unfortunately, the public school system primarily seeks to impart only facts (if even that!), failing to train students how to process those facts and turn them into fodder for innovative creativity and thought.
5. Male and Female Minds Are Alike
Both common sense and scientific research tell us that male and female brains are different. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one or the other sex is less intelligent, Bell explains. It simply means that they have different strengths and weaknesses in learning.
That turns into a problem in the public school, however, because its instruction “is apt to be fitted to the feminine rather than to the masculine need,” Bell explains. Add into the mix the reality that many more women enter the teaching profession than men, and you have a situation which causes boys to get the short end of the stick in the public school system.
6. Learning Doesn’t Happen in the Summer
I strongly believe in a summer break, particularly as today’s children need time to play free beyond the four walls of a classroom. Yet Bell makes a strong case that we severely set back the mental growth of a child by taking that break – especially when no other reading, learning, or intellectual development is happening in venues beyond the classroom.
“If the public school cannot or will not provide proper summer guidance it is the parent's business to see that somehow at home the need is adequately met,” he concludes. And perhaps that is the biggest problem underlying this assumption – that teachers, not parents, are best equipped to educate children, and as such, learning cannot go on in the summer because parents are incapable of educating their children.
7. Character Development Is the Goal of Public School
In the decades since Bell wrote these words, it has become increasingly clear that public schools are not focused on character development. Nevertheless, the false assumption to the contrary speaks to a common problem we still have today, namely, that many of us treat the public schools as the “experts” capable of teaching all that a child needs to know. As such, we as parents and responsible members of our churches and communities tend to abandon our responsibility to instill character in today’s children. That’s a tragic failure, for it keeps children from knowing God and from developing the virtuous character which enables our nation to continue.
The good news is that many parents appear to be recognizing these wrong assumptions, evidenced in the fact that only 44% of parents would send their children to public school if they had an opportunity for them to attend elsewhere. Perhaps it’s time to enable more parents to not only recognize these false assumptions, but act on them and remove their children to an environment where they can actually learn and grow.
Annie Holmquist is the culture and opinion editor for 1819 News. Her writing may be found at The Epoch Times, American Essence Magazine, and her Substack, Annie's Attic.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected].
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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