Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

Education Revisited

Mike Tyzuk sends us an interesting letter in regards to my last editorial, and we had a number of nice comments in the forum. And so, I shall write more, as education is something I am dearly interested in. As is my fellow editor, Don of the Webbs.

Back in 1983 the April 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education concluded, "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people… 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. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

And have things gotten better? I don't think so. A recent study reported by Associated Press tells us:

More than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills — no matter their field of study.

The full article is available here.

The problem STARTS at first grade, or earlier. I was dumbfounded to find that kids in the preschool "Headstart" programs are not only NOT taught to read, but that their parents are prevailed upon to NOT teach the youngsters to read, for various sociological reasons. And they have the nerve to call it "Headstart"?

"No Child Left Behind", the education legislation I talked about last week, is simply the extension and expansion of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965". And so for over forty years, Americans have stood by while their entire system has been systematically subverted and degraded to the point where there very few statistics anyone can point to that demonstrates anything but failure. And those successes have been in spite of the legislation, not because of it.

To this point more than $125 billion dollars have been spent by the federal government and what is the result? We see children who seemingly have been deliberately rendered ignorant of basic skills, the history of their nation, and an understanding of Western Civilization, while at the same time being taught morally all cultures are equal and that capitalism is an evil economic system.

"Our educators have also become legal drug pushers," said long time educational observer Samuel Blumenfeld. The problem is so bad that in May 2003 the House of Representatives passed the "Child Medication Safety Act" because some schools were requiring that "disruptive children" be forced to take Ritalin or other drugs such as Adderol. "Why is 80 percent of the world's methylphenidate being fed to children?" asked Dr. William B. Carey, director of behavioral pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, when he testified before a House panel.

In February, the Education Trust and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, after consulting with higher education officials and business executives in five states, released a report that said, "For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise." The diploma, they said, "is a ticket to nowhere." It has become little more than "a certificate of attendance."

We have sown the wind, we are reaping the whirlwind.