Schools as Facilitators in Collapse

I stayed up late enough to get the new Pat Buchanan column. Seems he's not a big fan of the performance of the public schools. It's not all that surprising, given that he has eyes and a brain.

An NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] test of 12th-grade achievement was given to what the New York Times called a "representative sample of 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005."

What did the tests reveal?

• Since 1990, the share of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20 percent to 27 percent.
• Only 35 percent of high school seniors have reached a "proficient" level in reading, down from 40 percent.
• Only 16 percent of black and 20 percent of Hispanic students had reached a proficient level in reading.
• Among high school seniors, only 29 percent of whites, 10 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of black students were proficient in math...

Factor the dropouts back in, and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black kids starting in first grade, about one in eight will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and one in 33 will be able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, one in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only one in 20 will be able to do high-school math.

Yet, as columnist Steve Sailor writes on VDare.com, the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014."

We're not going to make it. We're not even going to come close.

Given the incredible inability of the schools to perform, I have suggested that we simply burn them down. A bit drastic, to be sure, but reform isn't going to happen. It's just not. Parents, especially parents who aren't very involved in the education of their children, can't stand being told that their children aren't performing well enough. This tends to reflect poorly on them. "Are you saying my son ain't smart?" Neither do the teachers wish to be bringers of the bad news. "No ma'am. I guess he just doesn't test very well." Instilling self-esteem, not knowledge, is the raison d'etre of the infernal institutions.

Tangentially, how stupid do we think kids are? They know when someone else is better at something; and most times they know when we're tricking them into believing otherwise. When my brothers and I would play wiffle ball out in the yard, we'd have to pitch to the younger ones. If you threw a strike past them and then had the catcher whip it into the yard to signify a hit, the kid never bought it. "You hit it! Run the bases!" "No I didn't. You threw it!" "Oh, well, try again." A kid who stumbles through a reading of a Seuss masterpiece knows he's not getting things right if he has any sense at all. Telling a bloke that he did well when he didn't isn't going to help his self-esteem; it's going to make him resentful. But what the deuce do I know about kids? Thus I digress.

If you are a parent and you send your kids to the public schools, it had better be because you honestly can't afford to do otherwise. A good parent can augment the paltry education children now receive at the taxpayer's expense with the hope of mitigating the onset of dullness and brain-death, but be forewarned. The task is an arduous one. With careful attention, your child may be able to read chapter books some day. He may even know how to add and subtract numbers.

Things will become increasingly interesting in coming years when the GDP plummets because no one possesses the know-how to perform a nominally sophisticated job. Take engineering, which I happen to be studying: one needs to possess a plethora of skills, some of which are learned while in school, most of which are acquired on the job. An engineer who ceases to update his repertoire after graduating will soon be working in another field. Clearly, one must be able to read and do simple math in order to serve as an engineer. A piece of paper alone is useless; the entire value of a diploma is determined by the extent of the education upon which the degree is based.

But don't worry. In the future, we can all work at Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Watching the country's economy crumble will be a mite entertaining. Forgive me my decadent joy, but it's not every lifetime a fellow gets to see the collapse of a once mighty superpower.