Who Will Save The Public Schools--Business Leaders, Teachers, or Taxpayers???

We need a revolt. Somebody has to rise up and save American education. Here are the most likely insurrectionists:

American business spends billions on remedial education; nobody knows better than business leaders how shoddy the schools have become. Bill Gates and Norman Augustine, top business executives, concluded that the public schools are so bad, they are a threat to the future of this country. For example, those schools have given us 50,000,000 functional illiterates, and citizens so uninformed they can hardly find Missouri on a map, never mind Korea. Here´s my diabolical plan: business leaders in each community should sidestep the school commissars, usurp control, and do what is best for children and society. And that is clearly one thing: teach more.

What about the teachers? Nobody knows better how undemanding their own education was. Nobody knows better how moronic the demands and paperwork foisted on them every day, and how wearying the chaos and inaneness that schools seek to mainstream. In fact, one of the saddest things in this world is talking to teachers. It´s not mainly the salaries, no matter what the unions want you to believe. The problem is the daily incoherence, danger, silly programs, no support, and a plague of administrators to make life miserable. Teachers ought to ponder their plight and decide who is responsible for it. Hint: not television. I´d love to see some raised consciousness. Teachers would stop identifying with elite educators, and concentrate instead on what is best for children and society. Bottom line: we would have a much-needed Teacher Liberation Front working inside the system. (For more on this, Google "31: Teacher Liberation Front.")

Ah, but what about the poor saps who pay for all this Education Lite? Property taxes fund public schools; and those taxes keep being assessed upward. Every year it´s the same scene--America´s educators demand more money to deliver worse results. If people looked at this situation with clear eyes, they might scream: "Let me get this straight--my standard of living is LOWER so that schools can deliver LOWER standards of education?? Are you nuts!!"

It´s amazing that educators have gotten away with their ever increasing budgets. Everybody knows that parochial and private schools do a better job with less money per student. Most people also realize that children in a tent or an abandoned building can learn-learn-learn if only the schools and teachers are committed to learning--this happens around the world every day. What you have in too many of our fancy, modern schools is something quite different: the bosses are committed to dumbing down. But why?

The truth is simple enough. For more than 80 years, the people at the top of American education have been obsessed with social engineering. Imagine Castro in charge of our schools. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and history weren´t that important. Indeed, they were considered an irrelevance or even an obstacle. In short, the schools are dumb because our top educators wanted them that way! In pretending otherwise, these faux-educators have become the biggest phonies in the land. (That´s why their prestige continues to plummet--the public is figuring it out.) Conversely, if you put people in charge who believe in education, as traditionally defined, the situation will turn around so fast, you´ll be dizzy. Kids will actually know who Thomas Jefferson is and how to multiply 26 times 49. Imagine that!

So who will ride to our rescue--business execs, teachers, or taxpayers? I know we need all three.