USA Dumber Each Day...New Report Says: "Blame The Education Establishment"

Jack Nicholson famously said, "You can't handle the truth."

Well? Do you really want to know why the country is dumb and getting dumber, so much so that Tom Friedman of the New York Times announced that educationally we are "a nation in decline," with serious consequences to follow.

Maybe you, like me, don't trust the New York Times. Never mind. All the pundits have said the same thing for more than 50 years. Public schools are dysfunctional; our fellow citizens are dumber each year; and this galloping decline will undercut the great American success story.

What the heck happened to us? Did cosmic rays burrow through our brains? Surely it's logical to assume that there is a specific cause for our deterioration. But what could it be?

How do we proceed in all areas of human endeavor when there is a failure? We find the people calling the shots and demand to know, hey, what's the problem?!

Truth is, our Education Establishment is presiding over a national nightmare. But no one wants to state the obvious: the people in charge of the public schools must be responsible for the decline of those schools.

Educators--the ones who make policy--are guilty. That's precisely the verdict of a new report on Improve-Education.org. "41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt" explains how our top educators conspired to dumb down the schools.

At this point, you might wonder, but why would they do that? Again, it's obvious if you know the defining thing about them. The elite educators at Teachers College and so forth tend to be collectivists, dedicated to ideological goals, obsessed with social engineering. These top educators are not primarily interested in the academic and intellectual aspects of life, things like reading, writing, arithmetic, history, etc. That's the problem.

Long story short, our Education Establishment has created a make-believe world that I call the Big Pretend. They pretend to be committed to education; the kids pretend to believe they are being educated; parents pretend that the ongoing charade has some substance; the media and big universities pretend not to be guilty of aiding and abetting (but they are); and so we slouch dumbly into the future.

If you want more productive workers and smarter citizens; if you want the American economy to prosper; if you want this society to be as successful in the future as in the past, we have got to reverse the educational decline. We need better public schools, even if we have to fire all the top educators and start over. In fact, that might be the only remedy that actually works.

The urgent need now, in the United States, is that we honestly confront the intellectual bankruptcy inside our schools. Only then can we start to fix the problem.

Please see "41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt." A companion piece is "38: Saving Public Schools." Both on Improve-Education.org.

USA dumb. Educators guilty. That's the story. Please report it.