In some parts of the country a new school year is beginning today.
America's state-funded concentration camps for minors, erroneously
called public schools, are opening their gates. While George W. Bush and
Al Gore debate who should be the next "education president," vast sums
will be promised to our vaunted educational bureaucrats. And like some
nitwit who attempts to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it, America
will continue to pour money on its "education problem."
But the flames will reach higher as a column of thick black ignorance
continues to fill the land. WGNU radio host Bill Borst, who taught
history at Maryville University, recently said that "money drives out
true education." (This is known as Borst's First Law of Education.)
Perhaps this has not always been the case, but it's how things work
today.
The more we spend on the nation's schools, the worse the system gets.
Under the current shopping-mall regime, if you increase spending on
education you get lower test scores. And if we continue in this
direction long enough, we'll bankrupt the country while raising up an
unprecedented horde of ignorant barbarians.
TRENDING: America's most dangerous demographic
As Hillary Rodham Clinton likes to say, "it takes a village." But
sometimes it just takes a village idiot. Who else could be managing the
education bureaucracy? Unless, of course, you postulate a more
Machiavellian theory of education's failure, in which the wily
bureaucrats have purposely sabotaged the system so they can scream for
increased funding and higher pay to fix it.
The best-educated 13-year-old I ever met was from a one-room
schoolhouse in Bolivia. This youngster knew more about history than the
average American college graduate. Thinking of him, one has to suspect
that bureaucracy is not the answer. Perhaps education necessarily
demands something personal, something that engages the individual as an
individual -- instead of as cog in a machine.
Giant creaking machines manned by cogs are not all-in-all sufficient.
The individual child is lost in the crush. Meanwhile, the machine runs
on cash. Lots of cash. More and more cash. Increasing injections of
cash. The one-room schoolhouse was cheap by comparison.
People need to understand that we've got an educational machine in
this country, manned by cogs. It is a giant political factory full of
cynicism and bitterness. It clunks along, cranking out graduates like
sausages at a sausage factory. It embodies the principle of mass
production. The crafting of individual students, of care and attention
to how their minds are taking shape, is lost in the hugeness of the
project. There is simply no way to account for the individual.
I've got a teaching credential, and getting it had nothing to do with
knowing how to teach or having something to offer. You go through the
educational sausage factory and instead of getting packaged as a wiener
(though you might feel like one), you get a work permit as a supervisor
in America's educational gulag. Then you can legally "hang out" with the
inmates and commiserate over the dullness of the textbooks. Unless, of
course, you're an enthusiast for political correctness. In that case
you'd likely be juiced up at the thought of taking charge over what Rush
Limbaugh calls the "young skulls full of mush."
Nothing Bush or Gore is offering will change any of this. And nothing
they propose to do will stop the wastage, or the loss.
What I want to know is where in the United States Constitution is
education mentioned? How did we end up being promised "education
presidents" and federal laws dictating the curriculum of local schools?
Today there are federal laws involving such things as school-to-work
programs and Outcome-Based-Education. Each local affiliate of the vast
education gulag is carrying out a host of federal instructions. Millions
of children are being monitored day to day. Their behavior and
performance is noted and recorded. It seems that America has a Soviet
system of schooling tacked onto a capitalist society.
As you might expect, many schools are indoctrinating children with
political correctness. While Johnny is not learning how to properly read
and write, he is learning how to be multicultural and unisexual. He is
learning to prefer dolls to army men.
Don't forget the homosexual angle, either. A subtle homosexual
propaganda is creeping into many public schools -- from kindergarten up
to the university level. If "Heather Has Two Mommies" or "Daddy's
Roommate" is your idea of what children should read, then consider Bill
Borst's claim that
American educationists are showing films of "naked couples of both
heterosexual and homosexual relations ... to elementary school children
in sex education courses all over the country."
A year ago I got a letter from a concerned father who claimed that
same-sex on-campus kissing was taking place at his daughter's high
school. Perhaps the readers of this column will confirm or deny that
this is going on in our schools, but however that turns out,
Homosexuality has been advertised
as "cool," if not attractive, by the propaganda of political
correctness.
How's that for combating AIDS?
You want to know what a madhouse this country has become? Attend a
local university. There you'll find professors whose Marxist thinking is
unreformed. You'll find feminists and environmentalists who are teaching
politically-loaded theories as scientific fact to the bosses and
managers of tomorrow. If the country is not headed toward bankruptcy
with the inculcation of such ideas, then the moral relativists are
right. If we continue to get away with a culture of stupidity and lies,
in which the great intellectual achievements of the past are superseded
by socialist or multiculturalist rant, then error and truth are the
same.
But you cannot laugh long after drinking arsenic.
Education in this country has become a public nuisance. What is
dispensed as gospel on campus after campus is dangerous to the republic.
In fact, we might improve our situation by cutting the education budget,
bulldozing the universities, and forcing the professors to get real jobs
as
janitors and hamburger flippers.
But a more basic problem is discipline. We cannot effect a real
solution because we haven't any spine left -- no grit to grit our teeth
with. If you don't have discipline you can't drive a bulldozer over the
local school of social sciences. It just won't happen.
Almost a decade ago, Edward Luttwak compared U.S. schools to those of
other countries, noting that it was discipline in the classroom that
facilitated learning, not an increase in spending per child. Other
countries spend far less per student than we do, and get far better
results. But we've come to believe -- as a society -- that traditional
discipline is repressive, that it shrink-wraps the soul.
On my first day working as a teacher almost 15 years ago, I can
remember the vice principal taking me aside and saying: "Don't lecture
to the students more than five minutes or you'll lose control of the
class."
Luttwak says there is a "lack of diligence" in America. It is an
abdication that extends across the spectrum of authority. In far too
many cases there is no strong hand where a strong hand is needed,
especially with young out-of-control boys. Instead of traditional
discipline we have Ritalin -- a drug with which we treat something
called Attention Deficit Disorder. In other words, it is used to treat
the normal misbehavior of boys. (The emphasis here should be on the word
"normal.")
But in 1900 the average sixth grade school boy had a better education
than the average high-school graduate today. And juvenile delinquency
was roughly one percent of what it is today. In those days, of course,
boys who acted up got a strong hand. There was a will to punish and
correct. Today we must approve the most idiotic performance, because we
don't want to crush the poor child's self esteem.
The sad reality is, we've become too lazy to discipline children.
So thank goodness for major drug companies. Instead of "just saying
no" to drugs, parents and schools and doctors are now saying yes to
Ritalin. Imagine the turn-around that this represents. It is immoral and
dangerous for a 14-year-old to self-medicate with street drugs, but it's
OK for his doctor to write a prescription for something that does much
the same thing.
We're so blessed today. We can put the brats on Ritalin and hand them
over to the nanny state. Behavior will be continuously monitored and
evaluated, and the prescribed injections will be given, until the poor
creatures are ready for the labor market.
It is disgusting what's happened to us. One more generation of these
public schools and we'll be a race of monkeys on speed.