What Schools Teach
by Renny Hartmann

For the last half century, American education has been hell-bent on experimenting destructively with radical practices and methods, until most urban elementary students can't read on the fourth-grade level. Why people aren't rioting in the streets over this horror beats me. For minority communities, this education is the worst disaster since slavery. It has led directly to racial preferences and concomitant resentments, polarizing and dividing the nation. It cheats any student, minority or not, from true achievement.

Despite all of the high falutin' mission statements about schools as child-centered organizations, poor education creates a permanent drag on individuals and the economy for years. But instead of correcting the issue, we deliberately produce millions of ill educated, unemployable, wretched graduates. On whom we've already spent hundreds of billions. Officially a half billion (federal, state, and local) dollars a year for public education, but if private educational costs, remediation on the college, armed services,  and job levels are accounted, almost a trillion dollars and still counting annually and still counting..

Regardless of much is spent for early poor education, one of the laws of primacy in psychology is, what you learn first you learn best. As Forrest Gump says, "Stupid is as stupid does."

If we want to know how this dreadful situation developed, we only have to take a cursory review at what education has been offering in recent years. Not much. If you don't believeme, look up and down the main concourse at any local mall or on any street corner for the green hair, belly rings, and tattoos. I rest my case.

The reason for the stupidity is decades of stupid educational theories and practices. I'll just run through a short list:

• Whole Language--reading without vocabulary, grammar, coherence, or syntax
• Whole Mathematics--math without numbers or right answers
• Social History--history without dates, or people, or places, or events
• Values Clarification--ethics without morals
• Nonjudgmentalism--a corollary to values clarification: non-decisions without ethics (and a subset of self esteemism)
• Sex Education--sex without ethics (some liberal male guy thought it up)
• Multiculturalism--everyone's culture without Western civilization and Christianity
• Multiple Intelligences--learning without thought
• Self Esteem—replaces pride and honor (bad words) without character and integrity
• Learning is fun—lying to kids without even using humor
• Cooperative education--group work without responsibility
• Cognitive Thinking--reasoning without knowledge
• Process--activities without end
• Relevant education--immediate gratification, preferably at the mall

Let's take a pop quiz. Here's a trick question: How many of the above are conservative or Republican ideas?

Sit outside any grade school--but don't get caught--and see the children eagerly running into their buildings. They can't wait to get to class. Monitors have to slow them down. How do we murder their enthusiasm and natural curiosity? Maybe one answer is they already know the difference between real fun and fake adult fun.

Take a trip to any American fun spot like Six Flags or Disney World. What are people basically doing? They're standing in line for 45 minutes for an 8 minute ride on an abbreviated tilt-a-whirl, modified golf cart, or ersatz waterworks. Maybe kids enjoy it, but as a former kid myself, back in the day, in the Dark Ages, I don't remember that we thought standing in lines for hours to ride around in circles was great fun.

Today in class, older students (anyone in third grade or higher) no longer even think videos or Power Point programs are fun. It's a fight to keep them awake and following a plot, which is a term they've already forgotten. They've seen this and done that. They've funned out by the second week of kindergarten. So we should stop trying to fool them, and certainly stop lying to ourselves, and start arranging schools as periods of concentration and effort. Given a chance, students will make up their own fun, which likely won't include their teachers or any malingering liberals.

At the moment, we are neither providing fun, a complete joke as an educational method, nor teaching for knowledge. The result is students are stupid.

Remember the immortal message of that great philosopher and wordsmith, John Wayne: "Life is hard. It's even harder if you're stupid."