Cynical about politics? It’s all a circus? Think again. Actions have reactions; political decisions have far-ranging consequences. Nowhere is this more vividly clear than in the arena I study a lot, education. For 100 years there has been a war against you and your world, a successful war, so much so that Bill Gates and Norman Augustine, in a 2007 government  report, said that our country’s future is in jeopardy because the public schools are so dysfunctional. Why? Because our educators, for political/ideological reasons, made them that way.

The evidence is all around you. We have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. Could that happen by accident? We lose jobs to other countries because our students are not taught to read, write and speak Standard English. Survey after survey shows that ordinary citizens can hardly find Idaho on a map, never mind Iraq. David Brooks of the N.Y. Times just wrote: “Generation after generation, American workers were better educated, more industrious and more innovative than the ones that came before. That progress stopped about 30 years ago.”

How did our educational establishment manage to attain such depths? Steely resolve, I’d say. Consider the almost absurd tools our educators devise. Most math programs (varieties of New New Math) seem cleverly designed to keep students from doing any real math. Most reading programs (Look-Say, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy) seem cunningly designed to prevent children from becoming fluent readers. Most courses seem calibrated to achieve dumb and dumber. The cop-out is: “They can look it up.” We are told that students who are taught few facts are learning to do high-level critical thinking. About what? About nothing, evidently. 

There, in that small paragraph, is the whole story: a war against the knowledge and rigor that workers, at all levels, must have. No math, no reading, no facts. What’s left?

You want better workers, smarter citizens, a wiser world? The process starts with better educators, not the destructive ideologues we have now. Here’s a modest proposal: if Bill Gates wants to do something for education in this country, he could start by giving a golden parachute to all the big shots at Teachers College, etc. What we need in charge of education is successful people from the real world.

My impression is that there are two kinds of educators (I mean the people with PhD’s): the Rousseauvian/Hippie/Romantic/Permissive sort that hates rules and standards of any kind; and then there’s the Collectivist/Socialist/Communist/Totalitarian sort that hates this country and this civilization. Such different motives, but I believe these people reinforce each other. You can figure out for yourself that neither sort is going to care much whether your child can read or count. To the degree that either sort is successful, your world is diminished.

Now, before your patience is gone, I want to mention two places where you can continue this investigation at your leisure: a new book and a site.

“The Great Reading Disaster” by Mona McNee and Alice Coleman relates the educational crisis in the UK over the last 50 years. Much the same story as here but more out in the open. The Labour Party, often in power there, was proudly Socialist and pursued radical egalitarianism via the tactics of dumbing down and illiteracy. This is probably not a book for the casual reader, but if you are curious about the reading wars--i.e., the vendetta against phonics and the celebration of a lethal hoax called Whole Word--this is a fine source. (I have a longer review on Amazon.)

For an historical essay covering many of the same points on this side of the Atlantic, please see “30: The War Against Reading.” (It’s on my site Improve-Education.org, along with related essays about Rudolph Flesch and John Dewey.)

You may wonder how I can be so sure about some of the conclusions in this article. More than anything else, it’s the 50 million functional illiterates. We had almost 98% literacy a century ago; then a long dark tide rolled in. It’s difficult to imagine how all this decline could happen by accident. Here's what I think is a pretty parallel. When a woman loses one husband to food poisoning, we think, Oh, bad luck. When she loses two, we think, Well, she certainly is careless in the kitchen. But when she loses three husbands, everybody thinks the same thing: UH-OH.

Want more evidence? Watch Jay Leno when he goes JAYWALKING. All those uninformed people, and they are parents,  citizens, voters. People couldn't be that uninformed unless our schools were working extra hard! I say we owe Leno a debt of thanks. Accordingly, Improve-Education.org named him Educator of the Year.