There comes a time when an institution has been so badly damaged that the best thing to do is to junk it and start over. The American schools have been in trouble for as long as I can remember. It’s worth remembering that the nation has been at risk due to educational failures since 1983 saw the publication of “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform.” But despite repeated reforms, the public schools of America have continued to get worse by nearly every statistical measure.
And it’s little wonder. Consider, for example, this recent communiqué from the College of Education at California State University, Sacramento.
There are four main goals that we have and will continue to focus on in the college, which are expressed in the acronym TEACH:
Transformative Leadership
Equity and Social Justice
Action
Collaboration
Human Differences and Diversity
Of course, they only teach education, not mathematics, so one shouldn’t expect these professional educators to be able to count to five. Perhaps they expect that “one-two-three-many” should suffice for the intellectually lobotomized victims of their trained thought-executioners, after all, we’re reliably informed that it’s enough for rabbits. A keen observer might also note that nowhere in the concepts expressed by these fiver main goals is anything even remotely related to a traditional education as the average parent understands one to be.
This is particularly significant in light of an appeals court’s decision to declare war on the homeschooling families of California. The school Nazis are not the least bit concerned with educating the children, but rather making sure that it is their values that are instilled into the state’s children, not the parents’, and so have transformed the public schools from purported centers for collective learning into avowed intellectual death camps.
There is no point in attempting to fix such a lethally poisoned institution. Let the male teachers withdraw en masse from the system; they are not wanted anyway. Let no child be left behind as the illiterate and innumerate graduate with their meaningless degrees. Let the universities continue to devolve into remedial reading programs for unmarried women. Embrace the failures of the system with enthusiasm, because the sooner complete control is turned over to the cave-dwelling control freaks who seek to run it, the sooner the schools will collapse in ruins. Knowledge will still be accessible to those who seek it.
One cannot fix what is not broken, and the schools are working as they are designed to work. This is not a battle that can be fought and won; it is not a battle that should be fought. Homeschooling is but a stop-gap; in the long term, it is technology that will put an end to the 100-year American experiment with Prussian pragmatism. But until that day, do whatever you must to extricate your children from the system, teach them well and watch with confidence in the future as the professional educators immolate themselves and their system in a self-administered act of faith.
