Here´s a wild story...some wacky website says Jay Leno is our foremost educator...?

Sure, you figure that headline is the set-up for a joke. Not so. Jay Leno--via his segment called Jaywalking--is doing more than anyone else to showcase the failures of our public schools. Accordingly, a website named Improve-Education.org declared Leno the Educator of the Year for 2008. (Yes, my site. I take full responsibility.)

Not a tough choice. Think about it. The guy´s playing against a weak field, almost a vacuum. So many official educators are better described as anti-educators. Bingo, you´re back to Leno. He shows the problem: people are uninformed. He illuminates the obvious solution: schools should teach more information. Geez, you´d have to be an educator not to get it.

Sorry to be so tough on educators (i.e., the managers at the top), but they´ve earned it. I´ve been studying this field for many years, and let me tell you, it´s like walking through some weird sci-fi lab. The goal seems to be to create unintelligent life forms. Start with Whole Word, so kids can´t read. Move on to Fuzzy Math, so they can´t count. Filter out all facts and information from the real world, the scientific world, the historical world, the scholarly world, the industrial world...We are talking about Fact Free Zones, endless information deserts, giant black holes of Nothing Happening.

What else can you conclude when Leno asks ridiculously easy questions and people don´t know the answers? Where is the Eiffel Tower? Where did the Pilgrims come from? Where is the Panama Canal? Who is the vice-president? What body of water lies to the west of California? How many senators does your state have?

Educators are so busy trying to mold attitudes and opinions. They don´t seem to have much time left for teaching the basics. And here´s a dirty little secret that is woven through this tapestry. For decades our educators have manipulated their tests, grades, standards, even the SAT´s. They play with the curve, rewrite the questions, rig the results, and somehow manage to allow a fair amount of cheating. The goal, I assume, is to make sure that nobody realizes how bad the situation is. Whoops. Leno goes Jaywalking and ruins everything!

What is Leno actually doing? Just trying to get laughs. Provide entertainment. Nothing more. But in the process he effortlessly exposes the ed landscape. His tiny little simple questions are like flash grenades going off. What?! There are people who don´t seem to know any history, geography, science, politics. We´re not talking state capitals here. Surveys show that many of our citizens don´t know where the states are, as in, "Here´s a map, point to Idaho."

Add it all up, folks, and you know why Bill Gates and Norman Augustine, major business leaders and big brains, concluded in a government report last year that our public schools are dysfunctional and thus a huge threat to this country's economic future. Dumbing-down is NOT how you build a healthy economy.

Now, just for readers of this column, I want to present the Ultimate Quickie Test. It´s impossible to cheat on, impossible to rig or get around. People who can´t answer all these questions need to return to high school. The principals of their last schools should be fired. Fair´s fair.

When Columbus left Spain, he went in what direction?

The two elements in water are what?

The square root of 16 is what?

Name three planets.

How many time zones in USA?

The two sides in the American Civil War are what?

Add 29 to 63. Subtract 29 from 63. Multiply 29 by 63.

Italy juts into what body of water?

Name a novel, poem or play written before 1900.

You know what´s really scary? There are educators--yes, so-called experts with PhD's--who will claim this test is much too difficult, that it´s not fair to this or that kind of student. And where does this kind of excuse-mongering lead? Nobody knows nothing. The country is paralyzed by collective amnesia.

Remember, total time in school through graduation from high school actually adds up to about 10,000 hours. Let´s say somebody doesn´t know all these easy questions. You have to ask yourself: what were they doing all that time?? Or perhaps the question should be phrased this way: what were the schools doing to them all that time? We can rule out educating.

Related Resources: two years ago I created The Quizz--100 easy questions every high school graduate should be able to answer (#20 on Improve-Education.org). It was a take-off on Jaywalking, and my first tribute to Leno. Then I created the Educator of the Year for 2008 award (see Proclamation on Improve-Education.org). Finally, on YouTube you can find the "World´s Easiest Test," another quick quiz (it's graphical and sort of fun).

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