What Is An Education? – The Failure of Public and Private Schools - My Story

I have never claimed to be the smartest guy around, but if you asked many of my school teachers you would get a wide range of answers. Everything from “You will never be admitted to college”, to “He’s a great student, has a real love for history”, and “If you are going to pass this class you are going to have to read more each night”. Why the range of opinions, simple. I had a learning disability that affected my grades in some subjects more than others and some not at all. So sit back and enjoy my education story.

For Kindergarten, First, and Second grade I went to school in Bradenton Florida, about an hour south of Tampa, Florida. This was where I got off to a bad start. My kindergarten teacher was very nice, but taught very little. She never covered phonics, and never really looked at any of my hand writing papers. How do I know this? My mother kept all my school work to be used many years later to show all the warning signs that many teachers missed or ignored over the years, instead of looking for answers to my problems. So without a foundation in phonics, and ignored warning signs I got a very shaky start to school.

During the summer between Second grade and Third grades my family moved to Americus, Georgia, which in rural South Georgia. It was 1973 and Southern Georgia was still struggling with desegregation issues. Most white families had put their children in private schools, a fact my parents did not know. I spent Third grade in a class of 40 students, and being one of only two white students. Add to this the white teacher, who was against desegregation, trying to prove that blacks and whites could not learn together. The result was I learned nothing that year. The next year my parents enrolled my sister and me in a private Christian School where I repeated Third grade. I also spent Forth grade and Fifth grade at this private school. The teachers knew something was holding me back, but they blamed my problems on the Third grade public school teacher. Again no one was seeing countless warning signs of the problem.

Then my luck changed. My dad’s company transferred him to Bossier City, Louisiana, where we spent the next five and a half years. Bossier City is a military town and has an excellent public school system. Sixth grade through the middle of Eleventh grade were very good years. In those subjects where I struggled the teachers took the extra time I needed to help me catch up and pull my grades up to C+’s and B-‘s. Also in Ninth grade I entered the Air Force Jr. ROTC program at my high school, and gained two very important teachers and mentors. First was retired Coronel James Huggins the Senior Instructor of the ROTC program, the Second was retired Senior Master Sergeant Billy Yount. Both of these men looked past my academic problems and focused on the areas I excelled in. They both realized that grades were not the true measure of intelligence, and they opened so many doors for me to learn in unconventional ways. Both of these men encouraged me to pursue college, something no other teacher had ever done. For the first time in school I did not feel like a misfit.

But as is with all good things, they must come to an end. And in January 1984 my dad’s company once again transferred him to a new city. This time to Laurinburg, North Carolina, this is about an hour south of Fayetteville. At that time North Carolina was ranked 49th in education, and from my point of view Laurinburg had to be one of the worst in the state. None of the teachers were concerned with whether or not I learned anything. Once while having more trouble than usual with a certain subject, I asked the teacher for help and was told “If you haven’t learned this by now, then you will never be admitted to college, and if by some miracle do get accepted, you will flunk out the first semester”. Great encouragement don’t you think? In spite of this discouragement, I did graduate from high school, I did get accepted to a small State University, and that was when everything changed.

I was accepted to the Pembroke State University, and because of my low SAT scores had to go through the University’s College Opportunity Program. A program designed to give marginal students the chance to go to college and succeed. Pembroke had assembled some very talented and committed instructors for this program, and these instructors immediately picked up on my problem and began to identify my disability. My instructors asked if had any papers of my work in grade school, for which I produced the box of papers my mother had saved over the years, and the papers from twelfth grade that I had not yet thrown out. One instructor in particular was shocked at seeing all the warning signs that had been ignored over the years. You see I am not ADD or ADHD, I have Dyslexia. I have a form of the disability that only reverses certain letter and number combination. It gives me extreme headaches people that “I flunked spelling and I’m proud of it”, and then I explain why. For the next year my instructor (Mrs. Straital) worked with me three times a week to relearn Grammar, and learn how to overcome the Dyslexia.

Because of Pembroke and the College Opportunity Program, I finally received the help I needed to get an education, and I have never stopped learning.

Most of my teachers in school simply missed the signs of my problem, not because they did not care, but because of lack of training. Schools are so busy trying to make the different shaped student/pegs through the one curriculum/round hole that they cannot actually tell the difference between a peg that does not fit and one that is bent.

Yes there are two teaches which took many years to forgive their cruel remarks, but I have and I pray that they changed.

I have told this story so that you will understand that I truly understand the problems of our education system, and that I yearn to prevent others from going through what I went through. Education is knowledge, and without knowledge you cannot succeed.

Never stop learning.

Gerald