Public schools are beyond reform and redemption

Charley Reese
Published July 10, 2001


     Public education, or, more accurately, compulsory government education, is a failure. It should not cost half a trillion dollars a year to teach people to read and write, especially when even that effort is far from successful.

     Back in the late 1800s, when compulsory government education was still a topic of debate, R.L. Dabney, a great Southern theologian, remarked, "If all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you will accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature."

     Fairly accurate prediction, I'd say, because America is the largest market in the world for trash literature, trash television and trash movies. Some of the nation's highest paid heroes are barely literate, which can be
verified by listening to almost any sports interview.

     I have observed this process of decay since 1955. Certain things have always been constant. The cry is always: Give us more money and we will do the job. The educational bureaucracy has always been given more money, and it has a done a worse, not a better, job. Another constant has been that blame has been placed on everybody but the responsible parties -- students and their parents.

     Learning, which is what students do or at least are supposed to do, is a subjective process. A child cannot be force-fed an education. If the desire is not there, if the willingness to work hard is not there -- yes, Virginia,
learning is hard work -- there's not much the teachers can do about it.

     Of course, the decay in the system is so pervasive that 60 percent of the college graduates in Massachusetts flunk the teacher-qualification exam. I have no doubt that Massachusetts will react in the typical way: either abolish the examination or water it down to the point that a moron can pass it.

     I do not believe that compulsory government education can be reformed. I have long advocated that parents get their children out of it if they can find an alternative. I'm well aware that, in a nation with more than 15,000
separate school districts, there are some schools that do a fair job -- relatively speaking. Not one, I'm convinced, could stand a comparison with a typical school of 75 years ago.

     The system today is a political system and, like everything else in our society, has been strangled by laws, rules and court orders. If you look at the areas left where a school-board member could actually make a decision,
you find there practically are none. Hence, elected school boards have become, in effect, a cover for a bureaucracy that runs itself without any democratic input whatsoever.

     Contributing to the unlikelihood of serious reform is the disunity in a country that is being destroyed by immigration and by a moronic native population conditioned to despise its own heritage.

     Consequently, there is no consensus even on what education should accomplish. Business wants it to produce docile workers and mindless consumers. Various fanatics want it to produce cannon fodder for their
respective ideological wars. Many parents just want public schools to baby-sit their brats so they can enjoy their soap operas in peace. In the meantime, colleges of education, better called institutions of no learning, are spreading the poison that education should be effortless and under no circumstances should any child have to earn self-esteem.

     And, at the same time, in our litigation-mad society, teachers and administrators alike are paralyzed into inaction.

     I have a friend, or at least an ex-friend, who is upset at my position on public education. He keeps sending me clips about good teachers. All he is doing is reinforcing my position.

     The people in the gigantic educational bureaucracy who have the least influence on the system are the classroom teachers. There isn't a one of them who doesn't know that if they speak about what's wrong with the system, they do so at the jeopardy of their jobs. They will either be fired or exiled to some educational equivalent of Siberia, and every school district has such a place.

     I wish I could just say: Put your children in a private school. Unfortunately, when a culture is poisoned, the poison spreads to all its institutions, both public and private. In other words, not all private schools are any better than the public ones.

     In the meantime, don't be fooled by cries for more money or promises of more reforms. Unless you see colleges of education (the source of a lot of nonsense) shut down, the federal Department of Education abolished and the compulsory-attendance laws repealed, you will know the reforms are a sham.

     There are simply too many people with a vested interest in getting their share of that half-trillion dollars. They aren't about to change the gravy train, and to hell with what it does to your children.