Op Ed: Home Learning Center Best Tool for Teachers, Parents, Kids, Budgets

(SALEM) - When I was 2, my Dad gifted me with a straddle-seat "Learning Desk". It sported a “worktop and chalkboard” AND a “Learning Console” with scrolls for A-B-Cs; the square, circle, oval, and cross; and a "map" with city, plain, coast, and mountain illustrations.

Other scrolls carried many more visuals, to which you wrote your own "stories" for every imaginable image: Charts, sketches, cartoons, "store-fronts", "factories", "offices", and more --with an additional list easily accessed and affordable.

The chalkboard encouraged “working notes”; the desktop provided practical support for complete drafts --and a sharp pencil, too. At 4, I received "Uncle Wiggily" - first visualized storybook, relating life-experience for the redoubtable rabbit-character. The book had short-segment stories. You added your own choice of ending-incident picture, from a selection of sixteen, slipping them into heavy-paper/frame at end of each story-segment. So, for 16 segments, applying each ending-illustration, one had no less than 256 possible story-climaxes!! That was in 1922. I’ve been writing about “the media” and “the learning process” ever since! My Dad was an accountant, and one-time investigative reporter at the Baltimore SUN. We were a working-class family, and proud of it. But somehow he found the dollars for this “decent beginning” even then...perhaps because we lived in Elizabeth, NJ, even then a drab port enclave for New York City. Many millions of American families have done-likewise over all these years, with holiday gift-giving devoted to millions of purchases for children, often intended to start, support, assist, strengthen, drive and help out in every way in the pursuit of more learning --ever since.

That solid-seeking for the-best-possible learning outcome has spanned the generations, building the American pursuit of learning; and then happiness in a better occupation thus made possible, for many generations now.

That intense interest and dedication to “improvements for the kids” has resulted in resounding growth in the home-learning movement over the past several decades; most recently substituting --and often improving-- on what has been widely available in the so-called “American common school.”

That same intense interest and dedication to “improvements for the kids” is what is also driving the absolute and overwhelming demands now for the solid planning, affective application, and effective funding for all levels and kinds of educational enterprise, across this entire nation.

One thing we’ve all learned, if sometimes “the hard way”, is that we have overwhelming responsibility to ourselves and our progeny to see to it that this is NOW accomplished; while still possible democratically and despite the despotic dangers and allied obstructions thrown up for both economic and social reasons by some -- citing outmoded and disproven social and economy theory as potential justification. Now comes the 21st Century and ONE HUNDRED YEARS of both technological and social-governance "progress" --affecting every other segment of society and economics strongly-- except that “common school”, now known to have fallen far behind, in the past three decades especially.

Now every family is “under the gun” to prepare youth for a new and demanding Century in which information is already paramount; and the education to make it work for self-and-family is demanded at levels and in areas never before contemplated. Longtime experience is now proving that those with college-or-more education --or special training for special characteristics discovered-- will inevitably “do better” economically, at higher levels, much faster; and with the greater satisfactions thus made possible, in both work and acquisitions. BUT we still face exceedingly difficult plans, programs and actions to “make it so” -- particularly for middle- and working-class families forced into the huge-hole of class-distinction forced upon them by now- limited means for making “the American Dream” into a working reality. The “common school”, originally designed to build complacent workers for widespread agricultural and industrial demands, in the last century, has fallen into disintegrated and class-shaped chaos for far too many, via far too-distorted curricula ill-planned for 21st Century needs. The U.S. economy has been distorted --some say positively and purposely perverted-- against all but the top ten percent or so of families (by annual income) ever since the advent of the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I and Bush II regimes, reinstituting the “royalism” we thought defeated in 1776. Perhaps it is time for the universal home-learning center, putting into widespread, family-oriented, cost-effective, easily-accessed and highly practical learning situations for every member of every family. Based on the billions of operating assets already at work in the Internet worldwide, and on open-and-cheap access for every family via democratically-controlled supply as a commonsense utility, that is a practical realization of rational and commonsense realities now right at hand. Given the Internet, simplified home access at low rates when the web-world is fully opened, with easy and interesting parent-involvement for essential guidance, we can have "the home learning center" in full panoply and extreme impact; not only on our education system, but on occupational change- demanded, on social integration, on economic understandings leading to effective income planning, and on and on and on... That’s why the Home Learning Center is the best possible tool for teachers --as well as parents AND the kids-- because it supplements at home the same basic and now essential-access to the Internet for classroom activities; adding even stronger reasons for parental participation, for guiding the children AND for personal improvement and job readiness.

We can NOW --for the first time, right in step with the 21st Century-- bring into being what is NOW required to help every family and every family member --no matter economic status or social setting-- realize that promise of “the American Dream” so vaunted over the past one hundred years.

Details differ and will continue to so-do for the practical steps towards this ideal situation. In a democracy so beset by problems --whether of our own making or forced upon us by worldwide developments-- that, too, is as it must be...and surely NOT UNexpected, given the thirty years of neglect we’ve allowed to encrust what we call our common-school system.

In Oregon, we can take first-steps to “DO whatever it takes” for providing the greatest potential return on dollars we will ever experience -- refunding, rebuilding, reforming that whole system. With that accomplished --thus reversing those decades of dreadful neglect-- THEN we can begin the demanded next-steps to move the system into the 21st Century --having achieved what should have been done all those decades-before.

Editor’s Note:
This is adapted from a national magazine report published in Nineteen Seventy-Nine, copyrighted by LMA. Detailed documentation for success of the Learning Center concept.