People In Favor Of Dumb Schools, Wave Your Arms In The Air Like You Just Don´t Care

Better still, make silly faces and tell knock-knock jokes.

Even better, put a bag over your eyes and flee to a dark room. Hide. Maybe then you won't notice the creeping dumbness crippling the country.

Maybe your conscience won't bother you as the schools dumb down additional tens of millions of children, making them ignorant and semiliterate.

Maybe you've already forgotten a time when people knew stuff: who Napoleon was, where Japan is on a globe, the number of stars on the US flag. Ah, those were brash and vibrant times. People could make references to common information and know they would be understood. Yes, I'm telling you the truth!

People would say things like, "Nice play, Shakespeare." Uh, maybe I need to explain this. Shakespeare, you see, wrote plays. So when somebody did something goofy, people would say, "Nice play, Shakespeare." Well, you have to take my word for it. It's a clever remark. People would laugh. Really!

But never mind. All that is gone now. There is no common knowledge, no common culture. People know what they know and their friends know. But nobody knows what the people across town know. We're seeing the ultimate atomization of a population. Everyone is separate, everyone is alone, everyone knows close to zero. That's the secret, don't you see?

Our elite educators have stolen the icing off the cake, the cherry off the banana split, the rainbow from the clouds. They are the dark angels of dumb, and they can't stand your learning any little thing. They have devised a medicine cabinet of pedagogical poisons, all designed to empty what is left of your brain. One of these gimmicks says that teachers should celebrate "prior knowledge." Well, little robots, that's the only kind you are going to have from now on--what you bring in the front door. Assuming they let you take it out. It's quite possible they won't approve of what you brought through the front door. In which case your mind will be strip-searched, and all that useless nonsense will be confiscated. In such cases, you won't have new knowledge, you won't have prior knowledge, you won't have no knowledge. You'll be perfect.

Well, maybe we have to applaud a job well done. It takes a kind of genius to create a population as ignorant as ours is today. Just look, we have 50 million functional illiterates, people who can't read beyond ordering a cheeseburger, filling the gas tank, or figuring out which streets to take to the mall. Schools are like Celebrity Jeopardy for Kids: foods that start with C, sounds a cat makes, distances that are not one mile. And those are the Honors Programs.

Doesn't it make you wonder, what kind of sickos are so in love with ignorance? Personally, I think facts are fun. I know that knowledge is power. There's my educational philosophy. With just those two slogans you could build world-class schools.

But our educators--what are their beliefs? Facts are wasted time; and knowledge is power they don't want you to have. How can they control you if you know anything? How can they dictate every detail of your life if you have a single opinion?

Thomas Jefferson said it so beautifully. You can't be both ignorant and free. So which is it, bub? You prefer ignorance? You like what the educators have done to you? Schools today are sort of like a lobotomy without the surgery. Didn't hurt at all, did it?

Admit it, you don't know what a lobotomy is. You don't know who Thomas Jefferson is. I'll tell you, he was a president of the United States. Oh, sorry. You don't know what the United States is either.

They have taught you well. Our Education Establishment has turned education into a one-word oxymoron. Night descends. That barking dog you hear is us. "Nice Shakespeare, play." Makes just as much sense, doesn't it? "Play Shakespeare, nice." They all compute. That's the genius of our world now. Everything computes. Nothing computes. You're alive but dead. And why should that matter if you don't know? How could you know? You're in a dark room, with your eyes shut and a bag over your head, making sure you couldn't possibly know.

Because let me tell you, just start to think about it, even for a minute, then the pain will start. These images will stab through you, these vistas and visions, bright with energy and light, of you in a world full of information and knowledge and the excitement of dancing facts. Not all slack and stupid and dull like now. No, this is you smart and getting smarter, learning stuff and knowing things, full of the most wonderfully interesting details, so that for the first time in your life, you feel alive. And you imagine yourself looking back with this huge swell of gratitude for all the dedicated schools you attended and the earnest well-educated teachers who awakened the fire in you. And you feel a joyful communion with these teachers and these schools and all the other students in them. And a friend does something silly and you say, "Nice play, Shakespeare." And everyone laughs.

(For more about educational malfeasance, see "41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt" on Improve-Education.org.)