Can anyone possibly write about our system of education in this country and make it even a mildly interesting read? I certainly hope so, and I’m always willing to give it the old college try, because I think that perhaps the most dangerous entity at work in this country today is our system of government education.
We love to talk about illicit drugs, crime in the streets, sexual predators, and pornography—all things we recognize to be damaging to our culture. We condemn these things while praising our system of education.
How screwed up is that?
Our government schools are killing the spirit of our children and, in the process, our country. They are destroying the greatest civilization mankind has ever known. The America you grew up in will bear little resemblance to the America your grandchildren will grow up in—unless something is done, and done soon, about education.
Early in 2006, I made a simple, off-the-cuff statement on the air that seemed to anger some people. “Teachers unions,” I said, “pose a graver long-term threat to freedom, prosperity and the future of this country than do Islamic terrorists.”
As you might expect, the comment created a bit of a sandstorm.1
By the time I hit the air the next day, I’d had plenty of time to think about what I’d said, to consider the consequences of my offhand remark. I knew there were many dedicated teachers out there who might have been offended by my words. I also knew that most parents were operating under the assumption that their children were getting a good education at their local “public” school.
So, after a great deal of soul-searching, and bearing in mind that I wanted to maintain at least a modicum of credibility with my listeners, I made a decision. I needed to address those intemperate remarks I had made as soon as I returned to the air the next day.
So, after going through the requisite Rah-rah! It’s me on the radio! introduction, I reminded the listeners of what I had said the day before. I detailed the angry e-mails, and my consideration for the feelings of the good teachers you will find here and there.
Then I told the listeners that, after considerable deliberation and introspection, I had decided that what I had said the day before was absolutely correct.
I wouldn’t retract a single word. In fact, I repeated it for those who might have missed it. Only LOUDER.
There is no greater long-term threat to our continued prosperity, economic liberty, freedom, and quality of life in the United States than that presented by teachers unions. And that includes Islamic terrorists.
Subject: Your comments
Name: Georgette _________
E-mail: G*******@comcast.net
Now you’ve lost me. I’ve been listening to you for years, but no more. Your comments bashing teachers today were inexcusable. Right wing elitist fascist jerks like you need to be taken off the air. To compare teachers with a terrorist group is wrong. I’m going to share your comments about teachers with the other teachers at the school where I teach, and I promise you that when we call your advertisers you will be wishing you had picked another group to pick on.
Your days are numbered.
Ohhhhhh! Georgette knows how to say “bashing”! She also knows that whenever you’re criticizing a conservative (she wouldn’t know what a libertarian was) you need to use the word “fascist” or “Nazi” or include a reference to Hitler, or you lose points. Isn’t it nice to know that Georgette is a teacher?
But I digress…
Maybe Georgette does have a point. The comparison may be a bit unfair. After all, there is one glaring difference between teachers unions and Islamic radicals: Most Americans recognize the threat presented by the Islamofascists. Not so with the teachers unions. Far too many Americans still think the teachers are on our side.
A quick review, and I’ll try to disabuse them of that notion.
Look at it this way: What can the Islamofascists do to us other than kill us? Their most effective weapon is violence. Unless they actually do decide to attack us with one of those long-rumored weapons of mass destruction, their power is limited. Yes, they can kill individuals—a hundred at a time, or thousands! They can hijack a plane, blow up a building, or strap a suicide vest to some poor sap. Yes, they can cause a momentary disruption in our economy, a ripple that fades within months or weeks or days. They can be cruel and wreak chaos and tragedy.
Well, guess what? We’ve been through all that before, and we survived.
We can recover from the destruction that may be visited on us by these Islamic radicals. But can we recover from the damage being done by our hideous government schools?
A massive terrorist weapon might destroy a city. Our government schools will destroy a generation.
There are millions of our children in government schools every day. Those schools are responsible for making sure that these kids learn what they need to survive as adults in the world.
Face it: they’re failing.
That means that the future of those kids—that is, the next generation of adults, who will have to keep this country going for the next thirty or forty years—is in jeopardy. Those kids aren’t getting what they need to cope in a free society. They are being educated to become perfect myrmidons, in love with government and suspicious of liberty.
Far too many of the high school graduates of today couldn’t get promoted to the seventh grade thirty years ago. Without the government to care for them, they will face a future of chaos and want.
The failure of our children to learn…now that’s a real danger to our society.
The real problem here is not so much the teachers unions as it is our system of government schools itself. But we can’t fix that system as long as the unions are standing in the way…and standing they are.
THEY’RE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS…NOT PUBLIC SCHOOLS
First, let’s get our terms straight. Our so-called “public schools” are government schools. They’re operated by the government, using government employees, on property owned and controlled by the government, using government funds. And they should be identified as such—if only to reveal the malicious wizard behind the curtain.
Supporters of this destructive system would object to such candor, of course, since most Americans know that to identify something as a “government institution” is to brand it as inefficient at best, destructive at worst. To refer to these schools as “public” is to associate them with rank-and-file Americans. We haven’t been nearly bad or incompetent enough to have earned that negative association.
Child abuse is neither always obvious nor intentional.
The most rampant form of child abuse in this country is not only legal, but committed routinely. It is the act of taking what arguably is, or should be, the most precious things in your life—your children—and placing the responsibility for their education in the hands of the government.
There’s no escaping the fact that our country has problems…huge problems. I believe, however, that these problems have a common cause—that being the ignorance and stupidity of people whose “education” (if you want to call it that) was inflicted at the hands of the government schools.
Year after year, our wonderful government education system cranks out hordes of young men and women who are completely unable to cope with, let alone understand, our culture, our history, our institutions, and what it takes not just to survive but to thrive in America.
We’ve reviewed the alarming facts already. Average high school graduates cannot tell you the responsibilities, or even the names, of the three branches of government. They can’t tell you the name of the vice president, and probably don’t even know that there is a designated third in line in the presidential succession.
They can’t make change or do basic mathematical computations without a computer or calculator. They can’t read apartment leases, balance their checkbooks, or read maps. They certainly have no understanding of capitalism or free enterprise, and couldn’t write a one-paragraph description of what constitutes a profit. You would die of old age before you could find a freshly minted government high school graduate who could tell you the difference between a profit and a profit margin.
A disgusting portion of this government school effluent ends up in remedial courses in college before they can take on any actual college-level material.
A few years ago, I bought a dozen golf balls from a fine-looking young man at a driving range. The balls were cheap—ten bucks a box. I tend to lose a lot of golf balls. Unfortunately, the cash register was on the blink. Today cash registers are computers and they actually figure the sales tax.
You can see this one coming, can’t you? The young man couldn’t figure out what to charge me for sales tax. The $10 part he figured out just fine. But adding 6 percent to that figure had him almost in tears.
Finally he asked me for $12.50. He was nailing me with a 25 percent sales tax instead of 6 percent. It was an off day for all of us—for me, for him, for the tax system.
I didn’t want to humiliate this young man by calling attention to his ignorance, so I told him I’d bought a box of the same golf balls the day before and the total was $10.60.
He breathed a sigh of relief and took the money.
And this is what we get after twelve years of taxpayer-funded education?
You’re damned right it is, if we look to government to get the job done.
Our wonderful government educational system produces graduating classes of young Neanderthals with no sense of individuality, no sense of self-worth, and no understanding of what it means to live in a truly free society.
Internationally, our educational system is a laughingstock with a well-deserved reputation for mediocrity, if that. America may be admired for a long list of things, but our educational system isn’t one of them.
Most of the rest of the industrial world is putting us to shame when it comes to education. Our children rank way below those of most European and Asian nations when it comes to testing on the basics. The European kids score higher on math, reading, and science tests than our children. It’s an embarrassment.
In the spring of 2006, John Stossel hosted an excellent ABC special called Stupid in America. As Stossel reported, American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by the time they get to the high school level, American kids are well behind those in most other countries.
After the report aired, teachers unions called Stossel everything but a Child of God; they even demonstrated outside his office in New York. The lesson? Don’t screw with teachers unions.
As part of Stupid in America, Stossel gave parts of an international test to students in an above-average New Jersey school. The same test was given to some students in Belgium. The Belgian kids made our kids look like morons. When the results were announced, the Belgian students themselves called the American students “stupid.”
Why do we put up with these atrocious standards? Why do we allow our local governments to seize such huge amounts of cash from us in the form of school taxes, and then spend impossible amounts of money not educating our children, while we sit back like a bunch of numb-minded dolts and do absolutely nothing?
Aren’t we better than this? Don’t we want better for our children? At some point don’t we start to understand that government has failed at the task of educating our children as badly as it has at almost everything else it’s tried?
Oh, was that too harsh? All right, I’m listening. Think real hard and try to come up with one government program that works really, really well.
Social Security? Yeah, right. I know that Democrats like to call Social Security the most successful program in the history of our federal government, but it’s failing, folks. It’s going to be bankrupt before your children are old enough to collect benefits, and every attempt at any meaningful reform is demagogued by Democrats who are more worried about votes than about your retirement years.
Medicare? Medicaid? The Postal Service? Surely you jest.
Come on, I’m waiting!
To illustrate the folly of allowing the government to handle our most difficult life challenges, let’s try a little experiment. Ready?
Pretend it’s 1850. Try to put yourself in the mindset of someone living in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, I’m going to ask you to consider four different tasks to be accomplished in the next 150 years. All I want you to do is sit down and think about how you would go about accomplishing these goals. I know, you won’t live long enough to see them all come to pass, but surely you can develop the basic framework needed to get these tasks done.
Then, after thinking about it, I want you to tell me which task you believe would be easiest to accomplish. Here are your choices:
There you go. Remember, you’re considering these tasks from the perspective of someone living in 1850. Which one of those do you think would be easiest?
Unless you just want to screw with me a bit, you’re going to chose number 4—building a system of paved highways. Good choice. And you should know that this is the only item from that list that was actually accomplished by government.
Items one through three were accomplished by the private sector, by private individuals working in our competitive free enterprise marketplace pursuing private goals.
So, tell me, who decided that this government, which can’t do anything as efficiently and well as the private sector,2 is somehow the best-qualified entity out there to educate your child?
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University. In June 2005, she wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal about math education in our government schools. In the early 1990s, she noted, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a new set of teaching standards that “disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator.”
Wonderful. Just wonderful. That’s like saying that we don’t need to teach history because any child in need of a historical fact can just look it up in a history book.
Helps explain that clerk at the driving range, doesn’t it?
Ravitch’s column noted that researchers Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton had compared a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 “contemporary mathematics” textbook commonly used in our schools. In the 1973 book, the index entries under the letter “F” included words like factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions. What about the 1998 book? Families, fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, Ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival. Reading this, another “F” word comes to mind—as in “What the F are these people trying to teach?”
My guess is that the only reason you tolerate this hideous system of government education for your child is because you don’t realize that there may be a better way.
We’re going to work on that assumption, but before we do, let’s put another misconception to rest.
Would you think I’d finally gone off the deep end if I suggested to you that these government schools really don’t exist for the purpose of truly educating your child in the first place? What if the people who developed our system of government-run, compulsory education had other goals in mind?
Allow me to suggest to you that our government schools were designed not to foster excellence through knowledge, but rather to insure that the American masses are relegated to an insipid, dull existence where they have barely enough knowledge and drive to sustain themselves in an anti-individualist society, but not enough of an education to understand how thoroughly our system of government is destructive of individual initiative and the quest for excellence.
May I also suggest that while these schools are busy robbing our children of their uniqueness and ambition, the collectivist left regards it as an added bonus that these schools just happen to provide employment for hundreds of thousands of loyal government workers—government workers who become good little government union members.
Are there people wiser than I who might go along with such a preposterous idea?
Why…as a matter of fact there are!
If you want to know what the people who designed this whole mess were thinking, John Taylor Gatto has done a lot of the homework for us. The author of The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problems of Modern Schooling,3 Gatto was a teacher, and by all accounts a good one: He was named New York City’s teacher of the year three times, and won the state title once. As blogger Russ Kick4 writes, Gatto “became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness and love of learning that every little child has from the beginning.” So Gatto began to dig into the routs of our education system.
Now here’s something that Gatto turned up that should give you a big clue about how our schools were designed. In 1988 the Senate Committee on Education expressed concern that the nonstandardization of education brought on by local control was actually teaching the children too much! The committee report said, “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.”
Are you grasping this? By their own admission, the legislators entrusted with our children’s education were mostly concerned with making sure your children wouldn’t learn so much that they’d become discontented little worker bees in their later years.
Think of the number of ways our government stifles initiative through tax and regulatory policies. Isn’t it to the advantage of a government bent on suppressing individualism and individual initiative to rob its citizens of their drive to excel?
I’d tell you to go find Gatto’s book to learn more, but in case you don’t, here are a few more of the gems he’s turned up. With luck, the 2 x 4 of undeniable facts will hit you hard enough upside your head to convince you that something is very, very wrong.
The outrages date back to the turn of the century. As psychologist and education “reformer” John Dewey wrote in the 1890s:
Every teacher should realize…that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
Oh, that’s just dandy. Here we were, thinking that these teachers were there to teach our children—and now we learn they’re there to maintain some sort of proper social order. As determined by whom? Interesting question.
Try this one: In 1905, Elwood Cubberly, the future Dean of Education at Stanford, defined schools as factories “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products…manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”
There you go. Your child is merely raw material that is to be transformed into some finished product manufactured according to government specs.
Now, listen to the Rockefeller Education Board, which funded the creation of many government schools. Gatto quotes the board:
In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
If those words don’t bother you, then you’re part of the problem.
We’re talking about your children here. You need to give serious consideration to the possibility that you’ve willingly surrendered them to a system that was designed, and is being operated to this day, to see that all but the very brightest are safely passed through the system to become simple obedient Americans, ready to spend the rest of their lives working menial nine-to-five jobs while obediently paying their taxes and remaining subservient to the omnipotent Imperial Federal Government of the United States.
You may be an unwitting accomplice in the destruction of your own child’s initiative.
That’s a provocative charge, but deep down I know you recognize the truth. You know that our system of education is a disaster; now you might even suspect that it’s all by design! Now all you can do is wonder whether the government educational establishment ever was, or ever will be, truly committed to educating our kids.
The ugly truth is that any actual educating that takes place in these hideous operations is merely a by-product of the process of creating safe, complacent citizens—while providing jobs for underqualified teachers, many of whom would have little chance of earning a comparable salary in the private sector. These people, led by their unions, are hell-bent on ensuring that no one comes along and upsets their monopoly apple cart.
The problem with so many Americans is that they will quickly agree that our government schools are horribly broken, and perhaps beyond fixing—except, of course, for the one where they’re sending their children. Your child’s school is doing a great job, right?
One Gallup Poll showed that more than three-quarters of Americans are satisfied with their child’s government school. As John Stossel pointed out in his special, these parents—and that may well include you—just don’t know any better. They have no idea how much better these schools would be if they simply introduced one element into the mix: competition.
Say the word “competition” around government school teachers, though, and you’re likely to get your palm slapped with a ruler.
There is no greater sign of our delusion about the value of our government schools than those insipid MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE ____________ SCHOOL bumper stickers. How sad.
I’ll see your bumper sticker and raise you one: MY PAPILLON IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR STUDENT. Come on, folks. Wake up and smell the ignorance. You might as well put a MY CHILD CAN TIE HIS SHOES bumper sticker on your minivan. After all, it’s entirely possible that many “honor students” can’t.
As things grow progressively worse in our government schools, administrators and education “experts” are working hard to come up with even newer and more innovative ways to fix things. Try some of these ideas on and see how they fit your idea of a quality system.
In one government school system, teachers have been instructed to stop using red ink to grade papers. Red, after all, is an angry color. Our precious children have a negative reaction when they see red on their papers. We have to be sensitive to their precious little egos…so no more red.
Some schools have abandoned the grading system altogether. No more A, B, C, D, and F. Why? First of all, because you never want to tell a child he’s failing. That could have such tragic consequences for his precious self-esteem. (Never mind that when this kid gets into the private sector, his boss will have no qualms at all about pointing out his failures—which he’s certain to have if no one ever challenged him to improve his work.)
One school was so determined to get rid of the negative consequences of grading with letters that they changed to geometric shapes! Now there’s an incredible advance in educational theory: Instead of As, Bs, and Cs, grade with circles, triangles, and squares! “Look, Mom! I made straight triangles!” What a delight when young men and women across the country can brag of never having received a square on their report cards. That ought to look impressive on a resume.
Florida, on the other hand, actually grades its government schools. If a school is particularly pathetic, it can even receive an F! Still, the Self-Esteem Police have a way of twisting the most embarrassing failures into knuckleheaded successes. Several years ago, a school in the Orlando area got an F for the previous year’s efforts. When the children showed up for the following school year, though, the teachers and staff were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “F is for Fantastic!”
Can you imagine what you’d do if your child brought home a few Fs on his report card, and excitedly told you that these grades were “fantastic”?
In the Gwinnett County government schools in suburban Atlanta, they’ve gone even further—they’ve turned our traditional grading system directly on its head. A Gwinnett County parent sent me a document entitled “Weekly Folder.” “This document grades the student on conduct, work habits and behavior,” the paper explained. Here, according to the legend printed on the Weekly Folder, is what those grades mean:
Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here? D is the best grade you can get, and A is the worst? What possible purpose does this serve—other than keeping the parents and kids confused enough that they stop complaining altogether?
Agreed, then: Our government schools have been failures at educating. But you’ve got to admit, they’ve been marvelous successes at political indoctrination. And much, if not most, of their efforts in this direction have been leftist-inspired.
We are a nation that loves government. The more the merrier. Self-reliance is out; government reliance is in. Think about it: When people find themselves up to their necks in trouble, the current fashion is to start screaming for the government to do something to save them. It never seems to be up to the individual, always the government.
Have we come by this sense of government dependence honestly? Or is it the inevitable result of our government-controlled educational system?
Look at it this way. If your children go to a Catholic school, you can expect them to be taught that Catholicism is pretty much the way to go. Ditto if they attend a Jewish school or a Baptist academy. Why, then, shouldn’t you expect your children to be taught the infallibility of government while attending a government school? Do you really expect a faculty of government employees to stand before your children and teach them that, as Henry David Thoreau once said, “That government is best which governs least”?
As a government operation, your local public school comes to praise government, not discredit it!
The next time you get a little bored, try a little experiment: Check your child’s textbooks to see how our Bill of Rights is being presented. Harcourt Brace,5 a major publisher of schoolbooks, published a social studies “activity book” that had a page addressing the Bill of Rights. This one is a real eye-opener.
Consider the Second Amendment. Now, if you’ve still got that copy of the Constitution lying around from our earlier activities, a quick glance will show you that the Second Amendment protects our right to keep and bear arms. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” it says simply and directly.
How does the Harcourt Brace textbook present that fact? Try this: “The Second Amendment says that states may enlist citizens for a trained militia [army] and provide and train them with weapons.”
Can you believe that? That is a complete perversion—and a politically correct one at that—of what the Second Amendment actually says. Not one mention of “the right of the people…,” just a quietly vague reference to the government providing weapons to the army. How can this be viewed as anything other than a blatant attempt at indoctrination? It’s clearly an attempt to disabuse these young minds of the idea that the Second Amendment has anything to do with our individual right to own firearms.
Is this the kind of education you want for your children?
How about the Tenth Amendment? This amendment was written to limit the power of the federal government. It reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Well, that’s not the Harcourt Brace version. Here’s your indoctrination: “The Tenth Amendment says that any powers not given to the federal government may be passed on to the state governments and the people.”
“Passed on”? Where does the Tenth Amendment say anything about “passed on”? You can’t “pass on” something you don’t have, and the Tenth Amendment clearly states that these powers are “reserved by” the states and the people, not “passed on” to them. That’s a huge difference, and clearly quite a little spin job by someone with an agenda. Step right up, folks: government schools preaching the doctrine of omnipotent government!
Since you won’t hear about these guys in a government school, allow me to call your attention to a couple of characters named Marx and Engels, who in 1848 wrote a little tome called The Communist Manifesto. It’s a much bigger book than this one, actually, and the authors are noticeably less funny than yours truly. Somewhere in its many pages, however, Marx and Engels actually list the ten things they feel are necessary to clear the way for a Communist society.
Several items on that list are pretty darn interesting,6 but the one that’s relevant to this discussion is Number 10—last but certainly not least:
“Free education for all children in public schools.”
Now why do you think that’s on their short list of things to do? Because they knew that the quickest way to bring about a change in the basic structure of society would be to seize control of the hearts and souls of just one generation. Take one generation, destroy their love of true freedom, instill in them a reverence for government and a rejection of the concept of individuality, and you’re on your way.
That, more than anything else, may accurately describe the role of our government schools today.
The upside, if there is one, is that the problem also can be fixed in one generation.
The fix? Competition. End the government monopoly on education and give the competitive free market a chance.
American history is filled with examples of the free market beating the socks off government institutions when given a chance to compete.
How long did it take you to switch from the United States Postal Service to UPS for shipping packages? I used to work in a Postal Service bulk mail facility. I can still remember one fall night as I was standing at the top of a platform. Boxes were coming up one conveyor belt. I would take those boxes, read the zip code, and then send them down the appropriate chute. I was taking great pride in doing the job accurately and fast.
Suddenly the conveyor belt delivering the boxes to me came to a halt. Another postal worker walked up the ramp to my position.
“Look,” he said. “I’m the union foreman on duty tonight. You need to slow down. You’re getting these packages sorted too fast.”
“Why is that a problem?” Damn, was I naïve.
“If the supervisor knows we can work this fast, we won’t be able to get as much overtime when Christmas gets here.”7
Amazing. Intentionally doing a poor job in order to get more hours. Unions. Gotta love them.
Whether the task is delivering packages to Grandma, or well-educated children into the world, the problem is the same: Our government is a case study in bad motives and bad results. And the answer, in both cases, is competition—in the form of school choice.
Before we discuss how to proceed, though, let’s take a little shopping trip.
To Moscow.