BUNKERVILLE | God, Guns and Guts Comrades!

Hillsdale’s president is Larry Arnn and claims the problem with the American education system is reflected in the chart above.  Depicted are the growth in students, increase in teachers and growth in administrators.  I’m not saying he’s wrong, but that isn’t American education’s only problem.  If anything, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

I want to talk about the problems, but instead of laying those out for your consideration, I think I’d rather tell you what I think needs to happen to fix those problems.  Of course, you may disagree with my point of view, but at least you’ll be thinking about the problem — and that would be a nice change.

Step One: disband the U.S. Department of Education.  The federal government has no business involving itself in educating our young people.  Education belongs to the states.  But beyond that, everyone working at U.S.D.O.E. has an advanced degree in Education.  This makes them “educationalists.”  

We should not confuse this with “educator.”  For these people to receive their post-graduate degree, they must develop a new idea in their field of study.  One may recall such disasters as “new math” and “Ebonics” or using geography to brainwash our children with lies and half-truths about Islam.  We don’t need any more “good ideas.”  

Step Two: we must acknowledge that money is a limited resource.  Nationally, our demand for money exceeds its availability — so to get around this “limited resource problem,” the people responsible for education either increase taxation to support additional spending or borrow money to pay for new schools, unqualified teachers, educationalist administrators, and textbooks that are full of lies.

By the way, the average cost of building a school campus in the United States is $21 million.  I do not know what the annual maintenance costs are.  But there are presently 98,000 (or so) public school campuses in the United States.  By estimating all ancillary education costs in a single school year, the American taxpayer is spending an excess of $2.058 trillion.  

Now given that the average high school graduate is unqualified for an entry-level minimum wage job, and after factoring in the number of college-bound students who must first take remedial classes before earning any college credits, one must ask this question: is America getting its money’s worth?

If education was working in this country, given its 1.8 million classroom teachers, why is the overall dropout rate around 20%?  If 80% of America’s high school students graduate, why are they unqualified for most entry-level positions in America’s workforce?

Is the American education system working?  Why did you send your children to a public school if you think the answer is no?  Why are your grandchildren there now?  Why would you place something as important as education into the hands of a government that has not once demonstrated any competency in designing or managing it?

By the way, what do you see when you pass by an elementary, middle, or high school?  Here is what I see — and what most students see- brick buildings inside fenced-in areas with locked entries and armed police officers standing at the gate.  The only difference between school campuses and American prisons is the absence of concertina wire running along the top of the fences and guard towers at each corner of the property.  

These young people — your children — are “incarcerated” until they reach a certain age.  With that in mind, from their first year of middle school, how interested are these “children” in learning their lessons?  We know the answer to this question from 12 years of public education’s brainwashing mechanisms — over the past 100 years.

The government shut down the country for a while due to its concerns about COVID.  This brainless act should be enough to convince even the most doubting Thomas that the government cannot be trusted with anything “vital” to the interests of the United States.  What were the children thinking while we locked them up inside their homes?  Beyond surges in electronic media usage, not much.

We should have been thinking this: are there viable alternatives to expensive “this is the way we’ve always done it” educational systems?  Some would argue that no matter what we try, as an alternative, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what we have now.  Given our technology, should distance learning be on the table?  Small learning centers could replace large school campuses within the local neighborhood to accommodate very small children and those older kids whose parents do not have access to computers or internet connections.

What we have now is this: a one-size-fits-all system that only meets the needs of a few students.  A very few.  Sure, there is an essential skill set that all students need to have: reading/comprehension ability, written communications, essential mathematics, and basic science — but the problem is that no one is asking our youngsters what they want to do with their lives.  It is their life, after all.  Shouldn’t we wonder what excites their interests?

Academic cheating is endemic in this country.  Why is that?  Because students have no genuine interest in the things they’re taught, they resort to cheating to “get by.”  Now, if this is true (and it is), given the money we’re spending on this dead horse we call public education, should anyone be asking what we can do about it?