Really, Really Bad

It's a process, and - until we get to where we're going, like it or not - you and I will travel on the same path and go in the same direction.

It's been a process for over a century. Actually, the current badly degraded state of public education is a direct result of the vision Thomas Sowell writes about. It is the result of policies and goals implemented during the 1960s and 1970s. It's true that certain urban classrooms had become havens for crime and despair, but the problem was nowhere hear as widespread or as insufferable as American liberals had us believe. Prior to the 1960s, literacy was more common than it had ever been, especially among blacks, and on the rise.

My belief is that what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is an inevitable outcome of allowing the government to be involved in education, but let's leave that aside for the moment. If you really want to give public education a chance to prove itself, there are several steps I think you need to take:

1. The national government must be removed from the equation altogether. We must eliminate the US Department of Education and remove any flow of tax dollars and regulation from Washington into the schools.

2. Unions must be removed from education systems and be forever banned from participation or representation. Trade unions are specifically organized to benefit themselves and teachers, in that order. They have no interest in or motivation to enhance or improve the education process.

3. All schools must be locally operated and locally funded. The highest level of organization should be the County. The administration of the schools must not be directly subject to the electoral process. Citizen representation in school administration is a farce. Education is not a democratic process. Funding should come from apportioned sales taxes.

4. All non-education activities must be removed from the schools. This includes sports, other than for physical education, as well as social experimentation and indoctrination activities like political "clubs" and so-called sex education. Guidance counselors must be limited to giving guidance related to the mechanics of furthering education. Sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists must be removed from any institution of public education. If parents feel the need for such services, they can pay for them and provide them on their own time.

I'm just afraid that it will have to get really bad before anything is done. 'Really bad' will be identified by parents becoming irate that their kids aren't learning much of anything even though they come home with fairly good grades.

That would assume that parents who send their children to public schools are even remotely interested in whether they receive an education. I don't believe that to be a good assumption in the majority of cases. The public schools have become government-supplied babysitting services. Witness the explosive growth of after school programs and school breakfast services. Mom and Dad are too busy with their careers to be bothered with whether little Tommy and Sally actually learn anything. They just need a supervised location to leave them during the day. I foresee no condition in which enough parents get irate about the state of government schools to actually force anything to change.