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My neice has just recently graduated with an elementary school education degree. It took her six years to get though college, and not because she had to work at an outside job. No, she just couldn't pass her courses and had to repeat many. In fact, she kept changing her major because she couldn't pass her courses. Finally, she told her parents that she had chosen elementary school education because anyone could pass that major.

You think I want this dumb rock teaching my grandchildren?

Finally, she told her parents that she had chosen elementary school education because anyone could pass that major.

I was at one time an elementary ed major. I remember looking around in classes and realizing these people would be my peers in the workplace. That, combined with a few other things, was what persuaded me that I didn't belong. I wanted to go into the ed system to change things and found that was not going to be the case.

Your story reminds me of something that happened to me in college. I was required to have 6 hours of free electives -- any subject -- and I had only taken 5 hours. I wanted to take something that would be easy for me, because I was really loaded down at the time as a chemistry major with senior level classes and labs. I tried to talk my adviser into letting me sign up for algebra, which I hadn't taken because I had placed out of it. I knew that I could just show up for class but I wouldn't have to study.

Dr. Akers wouldn't let me do it. Instead, he made me sign up for geography. He said "don't worry. It is a course for education majors. It is very easy, and you won't have to study, but at least you will learn something." He was right, but being in a course that was full of elementary education majors was a real eyeopener. Many of them could not understand simple concepts about weather or topography. The courses I had to take in my field of study to get a BS would have blown their minds.

I think the following sums up my thoughts on government schools:

Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board as they occur in a Document called Occasional Letter Number One(1906): In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for the embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way...