Imagine if you bought a car, and it turned out to not only have lousy mileage, it kept breaking down completely. Every time you take it back to the dealer’s mechanic, it only gets worse. The mechanic keeps stiffing you for more and more money, yet the distance between breakdowns steadily diminishes. Worse, it starts pumping out toxic gases that poison your kids, turning their brains to mush and affecting their physical well-being.
Would you keep going back to the dealer and forking out more money? Hell, no, you’d quickly conclude that the car is a lemon and the mechanic is a lying, greedy con-man. You certainly wouldn’t risk your kids riding in it ever again.
So, why do we let public schools get away with the same scam?
Australian and New Zealand educational standards have been steadily collapsing for decades. Teacher’s unions — the mechanics in this analogy — keep demanding more and more money, yet the performance of the car — schools — only gets worse and worse. And now its toxic fumes are poisoning our kids into believing that women can have penises, it’s racist to stop black people from stealing things, and retarded teenagers from Scandinavia are world-class experts.
Believe it or not, public schools in the US are even worse.
You’ve probably heard the news that ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year. Our high school kids are less equipped for a job or college than at any time in three decades.
Why isn’t anyone in Washington or anyone in our $800 billion education bureaucracy sounding the alarm and declaring this a national emergency? It certainly puts our national security, our technological superiority and our economic prosperity in grave danger.
Instead of outrage, it is almost as if Americans have become anesthetized to bad news about our kids.
The US National Commission on Excellence in Education recently published a report that concluded: If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
OK, I tricked you: that wasn’t recent — it was 40 years ago. Hands up who thinks the “mediocre educational performance” of 1983 has actually been bettered in 2023?
If you think I’m blowing one bad report out of proportions, the National Assessment of Educational Progress report that came out earlier this year found similarly dismal student performance in the public schools. Reading and math proficiency collapsed over the past four years in part because of the teachers unions’ insistence that public school stay closed during COVID — a national act of child abuse.
One of the greatest obsessions of the political left is “inequality”. The gap between rich and poor.
Well, we know what the greatest antidote to inequality is, and what the single biggest determinant of class in America (and Australia and New Zealand) is: education.
So, why isn’t the left marching on schools, chanting, Shame, shame, shame?
Because one of the most powerful lobby groups on the left is teacher’s unions.
They are so captive to the teachers unions that they do nothing about what is arguably the most regressive policy in America: our failing public school system. The decline in test scores is only half the story. The other part of the story is that the biggest declines in learning and achievement are among the poorer families.
I’m the furthest thing from an education expert, but I have had five kids. It’s pretty clear that three essential components to an enriching education are discipline in the classroom, high expectations and a classical curriculum. This isn’t that complicated. It’s not like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
Today, most public schools fail all three of these standards.
Takimag
Where standout successful education nations like Japan and China place heavy emphasis on classroom discipline and explicit instruction, Western schools peddle post-modern pap like “student-directed learning” (which is bureaucratic waffle for, “Give the kids internet access and tell them to figure it out for themselves”).
Instead of a classical curriculum, ours is bloated with nonsense like gender theory, climate change, and “Aboriginal (or Maori) perspectives”. As if the animist superstitions of Stone-Age tribes who struggled to count beyond twenty have anything useful to teach about, say, algebra or quantum physics.
And high expectations? Oregon this week announced that demonstrating an understanding of maths, English or science was no longer a requirement for students to graduate. Expecting correct answers to mathematical problems is condemned as “racist”. And don’t even dare ask kids to write a legible, let alone grammatically correct, sentence.
Parents, home-school your kids.
