Congressman Billybob Sez: Ignorance in America

HIGHLANDS, N.C., Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Congressman Billybob Sez: Ignorance in America

This here's the 330th Report ta the Folks Back Home from the (More er Less) Honorable Billybob, cyberCongressman from Western Carolina.

I still remembers the one-room school house I attended, where Miss McGillicuddy taught us a love ov book-larnin in partic'lar, n ov the rich panoply ov life in gen'ral. Mos ov all, she taught us what education don stop when the las school bell rings. It's a lifelong pursuit.

But ma able assistant, J. Armor, Esq., izza eggspert inna area ov education. He's been at it fer 23 years n countin, n that don include two grades skipped, n a year ov teachin college. So I'll turn this over ta him.

There's an important (and very sad) book out by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, called "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America." (For an eye-opening experience, try an Internet search on "Dumbing Down"). The book's main point, that the nation is becoming progressively dumber, is underscored by a poll released last week by the National Association of Scholars and conducted by Zogby International. The poll asked the same 12 questions posed to high school seniors in 1955, but in 2002 it posed the questions to college seniors.

Regrettably, today's college seniors did worse than high school seniors of a half century ago. The respective percentages that the college students got right was 53.5, compared to 54.5 for the high school students then. The survey used a sample of only 401, so given the margin of error it's possible the modern college students know slightly more than the mid-century high school students. Even if that's so, that is "damning with faint praise."

As bad as this situation is, it gets worse if one looks back another 50 years. Last published in 1895, McGuffey's Readers for Levels One through Six were the standard textbooks used in elementary schools in 37 states. Today's college students would have even more trouble with the sixth grade assignments in McGuffey's than the questions on the Zogby survey.

We'll prove that to a fare-thee-well in a moment by quoting some of those issues. But first, a comment about the difference between "dumb" and "ignorant." They are not synonyms. Dumb actually means limited ability to learn. Ignorance means not having learned, regardless of ability. Dumb cannot be cured, but can be accommodated. Ignorance is entirely curable. That is why the tide of ignorance sweeping over the United States today is so pathetic, especially considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on "education" today.

Since most commentators on this subject use the word "dumb" rather than "ignorant," I also do so, with this caveat understood.

The background of the Zogby study can be found on this website: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=\Culture\archive\200212\CUL20021218i.html

The article there includes a click link for the NAS, a link for the 12 questions, and a separate link for the answers. (Be sure to enter this address into your browser as a single line.)

Boxed sets of reprints of McGuffey's Readers can yet be found in larger bookstores and can be ordered on the Internet. A revised McGuffey's is still used in a few schools, but you can bet your bottom dollar they're not public schools. I strongly recommend that modern Americans who consider themselves well-educated, take a look at the materials presented to elementary students a century ago. It is a very humbling experience.

To keep this column short, I offer just the first five questions from the Zogby survey, and five samples from McGuffey's Reader of 1895. I state up front that despite being grossly over-educated, I made mistakes on both these tests. (Hint for those who take a crack at the modern quiz: The Battle of Waterloo did not take place in France.)

1. Which is the largest lake in North America? 2. What is the national language of Brazil? 3. In what country was the Battle of Waterloo fought? 4. Who made the first non-stop transatlantic solo flight? 5. What professions do you associate with Florence Nightingale?

McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader required students to read, understand, and also read aloud with proper pronunciation and inflection from 111 excerpts from British and American prose and poetry and the Bible. Students were expected to know the rules of oratory as well as the rules of grammar.

Here are the first selections shown under the first five letters of the alphabet: Joseph Addison, "Discontent.- An Allegory" (about Socrates and the legend of the Temple at Delphi); Sir Francis Bacon, "Studies" (on the nature and purpose of education); John C. Calhoun, "Inventions and Discoveries" (on the effects of inventions such as navigation instruments, the printing press and the steam engine); Richard H. Dana, Jr., "Homeward Bound" (an excerpt from his novel, "Two Years Before the Mast"); and Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Value of the Present" (essay on the meaning of the present, from Hindu, Byzantine, Greek, Roman and Christian perspectives).

The fact that modern college students are often illiterate in their own culture and that of others is not the fault of the students. The capacity to learn has not been lost; students have the same, or better, capacity to learn now as ever before. What has been lost is the commitment of schools at all levels to expect and require that students actually learn.

The loss begins with the majority of the teachers, from elementary school and extending (sadly) through many graduate schools. All teachers have college degrees; many have advanced degrees. The results of teacher testing in the few states bold enough to require such tests, suggest that teachers would not do much better, either on the NAS questions or the subjects in McGuffey's Reader, than the college seniors who were asked the NAS questions.

The dumbing down of America begins at the top, where the various schools of education are generally the weakest departments academically within their universities. Then, by way of their "credentialed" graduates, the dumbing down is passed on students at all levels. The basic problem is the assumption that possession of a degree means possession of knowledge.

A scene in "The Wizard of Oz" demonstrates this. The Scarecrow asks the Wizard to "Give me a brain." The Wizard responds by giving him a Diploma. The Scarecrow immediately recites the Pythagorean Theorem (which he gets it wrong -- it's the "sum of the squares," not "sum of the square roots" of the legs of a right triangle). In the real world, diplomas produce no such result of instantaneous knowledge. In fact, depending on the institution and the field of study, the receipt of a diploma may be a guarantee of ignorance, not knowledge.

Based on results of teacher testing, and also on the results of student testing which indirectly reflect the abilities of the teachers, there is a hierarchy in the knowledge possessed by teachers. At the bottom are public school teachers generally. Above that are charter school teachers (who are public school teachers in a better environment with more selectivity). Above that are the teachers in private and parochial schools. And at the top are the parents of home-schooled children, some of whom lack degrees but whose children/students rank highest in achievement, pound for pound.

This is not to say there are no excellent teachers in public schools. There are.

But the best and brightest of the public school teachers find themselves constantly swimming upstream like salmon, against an increasing tide of mediocrity in all levels of the schools. More and more of them either move to better schools or quit the profession in disgust. It is instructive that no public school system makes a point of interviewing their teachers who quit to find out why they are leaving. Perhaps the administrators already know the answers, and are afraid to ask the questions.

The fundamental question about the results of education is not "What students have completed how many years of education?" It is, "How much have the students learned?"

My grandfather dropped out of high school to support his family, when his father died relatively young. Yet by the end of his life he had become both well-educated and successful in his career. He was in school when standards of achievement were high -- when texts like McGuffey's Reader were used for all students. He probably knew almost as much when he dropped out as my father did when he graduated college. Perhaps with one and a half advanced degrees, I know as much as my father did, then. The three of us provide a snapshot of the general decline of American education.

The simple fact is that college graduates today know less than high school graduates of a half century before. And both groups are less educated than elementary school graduates of a century before. We are now spending both the money and the time to "educate" students for 16 years -- elementary, middle and high school, plus college -- and getting worse results, than six years of education -- elementary school only -- at the turn of the last century.

Those who claim that American education today -- across the board -- is adequate to the needs of the next generation are dumb as dirt. Or more accurately, they are bone-headed in their ignorance. Most Americans, both children and adults, can be educated. But the educrats, those in charge of the public school education systems today, are apparently incapable of education. The only long term hope for the nation is to take back the public schools from the incompetent hands which have brought them to their current, sorry state.

(About the Author: Congressman Billybob is fictitious, but prolific, on the Internet -- the invention of John Armor, who writes books and practices law in the U.S. Supreme Court. Comments and criticisms are welcome at CongressmanBillybob@earthlink.net).

Thank you for pinging me on this, madfly.

There's no argument that a dumbing-down has taken place, and no argument that it's a serious matter. Thomas Sowell, Charles Sykes, Martin Anderson, Roger Kimball, and others have written penetratingly on it. However, any attack on the problem must confront things that no one particularly wants to grapple with: the demographics, institutions and process incentives that gave rise to this moronification of America.

You're probably thinking "why would conservatives be afraid to wrestle with the government-run school system? Isn't that one of the usual grists for our mill?" Yes, it is, but virtually no one tackles the thing around the waist. The heart of the matter, addressed directly, makes us look like hate-filled, racist, sexist conspiratorialists, so we tend to avoid it.

Instead of my usual circumlocuitous approach, I'm going to deal with the matter directly. That way, everyone can be shocked to the gills and get over it all at the same time, and we can all go back to pretending that there's nothing wrong that a few quick fixes like vouchers wouldn't cure, just in time to get smashed for the New Year.

1. The government takeover of education, which began in the 19th century, was not because traditional private American education was failing its mission, but because it was far too successful. It answered to the desires of parents that their children be taught, not indoctrinated. It produced young men and women capable of standing straight, thinking straight, and looking out for themselves. More often than not, a school was founded on a religious basis, and incorporated the tenets of that religion in its policies and curricula. Parents were likely to choose a school partly on the basis of its religious orientation.

Horace Mann and his fellows wanted a government school system as an instrument for religious culling, and for inculcating a collectivist ethic in the populace, generation by generation. (His statements about the desirability of eliminating private academies give testament to this.) The rapid emergence of "teachers' colleges" whose mission was to produce instructors for government-school classrooms was a part of this thrust.

2. The combination of compulsory attendance laws and state regulation of the schools under a facade of "local control" created an interest group -- the "educrats" -- whose major goals were, if not diametrically opposed to educating children in the traditional sense, at the best did not regard that as a high priority. Preservation of their jobs and the promotion of their status in society mattered far more, and still does. Whenever any supposed mission of government schools seems to compete with advancing their personal and occupational interests, the educrats sacrifice it without hesitation -- and that includes the interests of parents and children.

3. This created a "part filter" that acts to enhance the standing and well-being of teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats who promote the educratic agenda, while puting a definite pressure on genuinely learning-oriented persons to leave the occupation, or at least leave the system for the private alternatives.

4. The educrats quickly "discovered" -- really it was a matter of the process incentives, rather than a conscious discovery -- that they would progress faster toward their goals by concentrating their attention on politics rather than education. Political power has an innate centralizing tendency, so the notion of "local control" quickly became quite formal and meaningless. True authority over curricula, policies, spending rules, hiring and firing, and all other important aspects of the State's education system was pulled upward into the state capitals and "departments of education."

5. Imposition of ever more elaborate schooling requirements by the state capitals accelerated school spending rapidly, which served several purposes:

It enriched the educrats as a group, and increased the incentives for the career-minded to consider working in the government-run schools;
It enhanced the status of the particular politicians and bureaucrats associated with the State education machine;
It made the possibility that families would "sacrifice" their tax dollars by sending their children to private schools ever more remote;
It politicized the nature of the schools, by creating and perpetually intensifiying the political contests over what was to be taught, who was to teach it and to what degree of rigor, and what peripheral matters (e.g., non-scholastic activities, sports, physical fitness, social engineering, political indoctrination) were to be addressed inside the school system;
It bestowed immense power on the educrats' unions, which became unofficial components of the state education bureaucracy.

6. After World War II, the addition of really large-scale social engineering missions (e.g., racial integration, assimilation of immigrants, elimination of distinctions between the genders, etc.) to the schools all but destroyed the possibility that they could perform any classical educational function. How can one educate, even with the best will in the world, if half one's students don't speak English, or regard the classroom as a place of confinement rather than opportunity, or feel no obligation to maintain classroom decorum?

7. Concerning the ascendancy of educrat notions such as "self-esteem uber alles" and their pernicious effects on what remained of the educational ethic, it is unnecessary to comment.

The critical fact to keep in mind is that the educrats regard the current state of affairs as satisfactory, even excellent. It gives them what they want: cushy, high-status jobs (1200 labor hours per year, on average) at salaries well above the national average, with low or no performance expectations, and with political shielding from any adverse consequences of their decisions.

There are some blots on their triumph, of course. Some schools are dangerous to the body as well as the mind, and the educrats have taken some casualties from this. However, this also has political uses in enhancing educratic prestige, by allowing them to don the mantle of selfless warriors who'll brave shot and shell in their devotion to our children.

The part filter has grown stronger, and its pores finer, over the years. At this point, one will find essentially no good teachers or decent individuals in the system's bastions, and few even in its marches. Every government school anywhere is under the yoke, required by law to promulgate certain creeds and practices regardless of their veracity or the effects on their students (e.g., busing for racial balance, sex education, classroom inclusion even for the unfit). The supposed virtues of the school systems of well-to-do suburbs, to which better-heeled families flee, are entirely comparative, and largely cosmetic.

The above undoubtedly sounds harsh. It is, however, the truth. Worse yet is to come.

Political power has had many uses for the schools as instruments of propaganda. Mostly, the propaganda has been "to the left," as anyone who's ever had to fight a "global studies" teacher's tendentious presentation of the United States as an evil oppressor will attest. But the schools have also been indispensable in nurturing something that all rulers and would-be rulers love: a climate of fear.

Think about the number of ways in which a government school creates fear. It teaches fear: sociopolitical, economic, ecological. It encourages fear in tangential ways, by emphasizing racial, ethnic and gender conflicts rather than effacing them. It even makes us fear one another within its very walls.

Imagine this: you're a typical young American of ten years of age, confined to fifth-grade classrooms for six or seven hours per day. To get to them, you have to pass through a "combat zone" that might extend a mile or more, in which gangs and rogue elements fight a continuous battle for control of the school neighborhood. Then you have to pass through metal detectors nominally designed to screen out weaponry, but this merely reminds you that knives and guns make it into the school every day. At the end of the day, there's that combat zone to be negotiated again before you're safe at home.

Some of your classmates are several years older than you are, are much larger and stronger than you, have no interest in learning anything, and regard force and intimidation as perfectly acceptable ways to get whatever they want, from you or others. Some might not even share a language with you. They do largely as they please, which might well include the routine commission of major felonies on school grounds.

The teacher can't discipline these classmates of yours. The school and our society have policies that protect them from any serious consequences of their actions. They have a legal right to be where they are, disrupting what they like, threatening what they like, and lording it over the rest of you. Their parents, if they have any, are indisposed to take a hand in correcting them. Other forces will scream "racism," "ethnicism," or "sexism" if you even speak out against it -- and they have friends, some in high places, who can make the consequences even more unpleasant.

If you aren't gripped by fear under conditions such as these, check your pulse; it's a good bet that you're dead already.

Though the educrats themselves are probably not fond of this kind of fear -- it cuts across several of their social-engineering agendas -- other political forces love it. It helps to sustain a climate of uncertainty and conflict in which everyone looks to the State for protection. The powers that be have no real incentive to undo it, and reap several major benefits from permitting it to continue.

No one planned this aspect of the government schools, but now that it's this way, it's very useful to a number of forces that are difficult to oppose. Some of those forces are right out in the open, such as the black-separatist movement, the Hispanic-nationalist movement, and the Democratic Party.

It's not possible to reform something whose innate incentives are perverse enough to have produced this result. Nor is it possible, given the "public choice" dynamics of all political action, merely to legislate a set of curatives and consider the job done. As long as the system exists, it will be a magnet for the worst men in the world: those who seek to bend young minds to their own agendas, whether out of a misguided sense of mission, as a route to wealth and power, or from a simple pleasure in victimizing the helpless.

After a century and a half of maneuvering and the operation of inexorable incentives imbedded in the government school system, we have reached the educrats' end game. Our children leave school just as ignorant as they entered, if not worse, and sometimes morally ruined. They who are responsible for this devastation are legally untouchable, protected by a system as impervious as the civil service. Their adjuncts in the larger society will rally to their defense at the slightest hint of a threat to their standing. No politician, no matter how conservative, dares speak the truth about them -- and many politicians regard them as a useful stick with which to beat us down and keep us cowed.

We outside the educrats' circles are left with only one move. Only one "reform" can possibly work: to leave the government schools empty. Eventually, to close them down, rescuing not only our children but our money from the maw of this evil machine.

Sauve qui peut!

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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