A few years ago, I was working with
an independent candidate for congress in the Midlands of South Carolina and
since I know a little about education, he asked me to give a speech to his constituents
about the “failure of education in America.” While researching that speech I became
more and more convinced of a theory I already held; that far from being a
failure, The American Education system is doing just what it was designed to
do. Its latest triumph was the election of Barak Obama in 2012.
The founders of our country
understood the importance of educated citizenry. Thomas Jefferson said. “If a nation
expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what
never was and what never will be.” In
the early years of the country’s founding, education was mostly done by the parents.
Children were encouraged to attend school, but it was not until the mid-18th
century, when America adopted the Prussian system of education
that compulsory school laws were enacted by the states.
One problem with education at this
time was that there were no colleges producing Ph.D.’s in America. Rich families
began sending their sons overseas to earn their Ph.D.’s from what was considered
the best school system in the world. The Prussians, after being soundly defeated
by Napoleon had completely overhauled their system of education. The Americans
who earned their doctorates under the Prussian system returned to America and implemented
the system in the U.S.
There was just one problem: Instead
of producing a crop of highly literate, patriotic and motivated citizenry, the
Prussian system was designed to create a highly educated elite who would rule
over a cadre of barely literate serfs who were well-suited to become cannon
fodder for the industrial revolution. Progressives like Horace Mann and Thomas
Dewy strongly advocated the system. When Edward Everette, America’s first Ph.D.,
became the Governor of Massachusetts in 1852, He had to deal with an influx of illiterate
Irish immigrants. He implemented the Prussian system, and was successful in turning
out a continuous line of undereducated workers to turn wheels and move levers and
do the other mundane, drudgery that comprised much of the work of the day.
The results of the Prussian system
are evident today as schooling has moved from the responsibility of ones
parents, to that of government indoctrination centers, not too unlike the
madrassas in the middle east that turn out the ignorant ideologues who get on airplanes
with explosives stuffed in their underwear.
I have experienced the results of this
system with my own children. When my youngest child was in the third grade, Her
teacher, in a government sanctioned attempt to boost their self-esteem, had her
students create poems of their names. My daughter Kelly’s went something like
this.
Kinde
Enthusastic
Laughing
Loving
Young
I’m not kidding: in all of the poems,
almost every other word was misspelled. The teacher had apparently not even
attempted to correct their spelling, or maybe she was afraid it would hurt their
precious self-esteem, or it could have been that the teacher didn’t know how two
spell either, as she thought these billboards of ignorance were appropriate to
hang on the wall in the hallway outside the class for all to see. Did I mention
this was a magnet school?
And yet, they had just completed a
six week unit on saving the rain forest.
When my son was a sophomore in High
school, he took economics as an elective-that courses like economics, and
civics are no longer required subjects is another story—don’t get me started. On the first day of class, his teacher showed
off his communist party membership card and suggested that all his student join
the “party.” Last I checked, communism and free market economics are about as
far apart from one another as one can get.
In the eighties, PBS aired a series
called The Constitution: that
Delicate Balance. The programs consisted of a series of panel
discussion where pointy-headed elites sat around and debated the ins and outs
of the US Constitution. It was a fascinating series. Several years later, when I
was Associate Dean of a small technical school, we were required to have a “Constitution
Day”, where we attempted to educate the students on the constitution. I was put
in charge of the festivities. The first year, I borrowed videotape of the PBS
series and played them on the TV in the lounge. At one point, I walked into the
lounge to find a student looking at the screen. I walked over to him. The
conversation went something like this:
Student: What’s that about?
Me: The Constitution
Student: The Consttiution?
Me: Yes.
Student: What Constitution?
Me: Our Constitution
Student: Our Constitution?
Me: Yes. Our Constitution
Student : A
New Constitution?
This graduate of the state high
school system seemed completely ignorant of our Constitution.
The next year, I got several members
of the staff to read sections of the constitution aloud in the student lounge
during the hour before evening classes started. The reading was heavily advertised
around the school. Once the reading started, the lounge, normally a buzz if
activity at this hour, quickly vacated. It seemed that not one student was even
the least bit curious about the document that rules their public, and increasingly,
their private lives.
In World War II, the army began testing the
literacy of its soldiers. It found that of the 18 million people tested, 96% of
whites were literate, and 80% of blacks. By the Korean War the number of illiterates
had jumped by 500%. In the70’s, during the Vietnam war, the army was tested
again and they found that only 27% of draftees and enlistees were capable of
reading at a level needed to complete their military duties.
Testing by the national education
association in the 90’s showed that 40% of blacks tested could not read at all and illiteracy among whites had
quadrupled.
Attempts to reform the system have
met stiff resistance, including opposition to home schooling and vouchers.
Obama’s first foray into public education after his first election was to take
action to close down several charter schools in Washington DC, forcing the
underserved minority population of those schools back into the maw of the Prussian
monster. The NEA, perpetuates mediocrity
in America’s school by fighting against teacher ratings and the dismissal of
poor performing teachers.
For over 150 years, our public
education system has defined literacy down. It’s little wonder that on election day 2012
the most popular Google search was “who’s running for president?” The American public
education system has finally achieved its goal off having an ignorant,
complacent voting populace who, like a school of fish, chases after the
shiniest object, even at their own peril. How else do you explain that the people
who voted for Obama overwhelmingly prefer spending cuts over higher taxes, when
Obama promised the opposite, they overwhelmingly oppose Obamacare, yet they
voted for it. They overwhelmingly oppose gay “marriage,” yet they voted for it.
Videos about “Obama’s
stash” and Obama phones
on YouTube have led to Obama’s victory being called the Santa Clause vote.
Ignorance of the founding documents seem to have left many of us believing that
our rights come from the government, not from God. If it’s true that Americans get
the government they deserve, then let us await our just deserts. We now have a
nation that ignorant. How long will we be free?
