Something else occurred to me as a problem that needs addressing- special education laws and regulations. I have colleagues who come in way early and leave way late- just because they have all this extraordinarily useless documentation, in order to satisfy the law. This sort of thing wastes time and helps no students. The law for a lot of this is IDEA- a federal law that guarantees that special ed students get an education. Not a bad idea, in a way, but its execution is lamentable and has a lot of pernicious side effects. For example, it has a clause of “least restricted environment.” This means that a lot of students get “mainstreamed” into regular ed classes where they have little or no business. A lot of malcontents often pose as people who have problems- and cause discipline problems which are not handled the same way as it would be, if a regular student committed an infraction. Something really needs doing in this area. Individual schools need more leeway in deciding this matters- and most certainly special ed students should be held to the same standards of behavior as others. And, if they somehow can’t be, then they shouldn’t be in a regular classroom.
All well and good, but this comes back to my one point, which is that our Education Establishment is anti-intellectual and malevolent. They permit and ABET all the bad tendencies you speak of, so that education will proceed slowly. And all will be made into C-students... You say also there’s no head. Is that possible? At the top, at the very top, don’t we have to assume a small group who actually decide policy? My working assumption is that if we could fire the top 100 people and get some real intellectuals and Gilbert Highet types, we could change this country overnight. Our Education Establishment loves leveling and hates knowledge, that’s the curse we’re working with.