Public schools could do a lot better; everyone agrees. What nobody agrees about is the reason for their low performance. I call this mysterious mediocrity THE EDUCATION ENIGMA. The question is: what happened to American education? Remember, this country spends vast amounts of money on education, but somehow manages to create 50 million functional illiterates.

You might almost suspect that our Educational Establishment is not genuinely committed to education as most parents define that term. This, precisely, is my own conclusion.

I've been writing about education for 25 years; the more I researched, the more cynical I became. At this point I would argue that our public schools are crippled by an array of bad ideas because our Educational Establishment was often more committed to leveling than to academic excellence. And the proper strategy now is to confront this regrettable history; expose and eliminate all these bad ideas; and create a better future.

I've collected 50 of my favorite essays and excerpts in a book titled THE EDUCATION ENIGMA -- What Happened To American Education. It's a fast, lively read covering a great variety of entertaining topics. But the central message is very sober and serious: our public schools have been deliberately dumbed down; and we can deliberately smarten them up.

If you are concerned about education in the US, please skip over to Amazon and order THE EDUCATION ENIGMA. This little book, I believe, can do more to save the public schools than anything else out there. In less than 140 pages, the reader gets a sweeping view of the history of American education, the thinking of the top educators, the inner workings of many of the major sophistries, a guidebook to all the problems in our schools, and a map to a better future.

Not convinced? If you really want to confront the madness of American education, you need only stare at this number: 50,000,000. That's how many functional illiterates our educators created. They did this by promoting a reading pedagogy that cannot possibly work. This gimmick has many names but perhaps the best-known is Whole Word or Sight Words. I'm particularly fascinated by this fraud because it's blatantly unworkable and it turns out to be a paradigm for almost a dozen other bad ideas. Without the presence of Whole Word in American education, we couldn't be so sure -- so serenely confident -- that our educators were often dealing from the bottom of the deck. For more about the flaws in Whole Word, please see "37: Whole Word versus Phonics."