It's been going on now for decades. Every year a new report comes out to lament the fact that the education system in America is no longer educating another generation of young Americans, no longer providing the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, along with any real knowledge of civics, geography, or history.

What worries me is that no one seems to care anymore. Other than polls that say people are concerned about education, there is no evidence that they have a clue regarding how to fix the problem or that they disagree with the politician's answer of throwing billions at it, while expanding federal control over it. I always remind people that you will not find the word "education" in the U.S. Constitution because the Founding Fathers understood it was best provided at the local level.

It is no accident that, in the same time period since the 1960s, as our educational system has been undermined, we have seen our society undergo ugly changes. They have in- cluded an attack on marriage and the family, and even the Boy Scouts of America, ad- vocacy of "alternative" sexual lifestyles, the legalization of pornography, the depreca- tion of religious faith, the rise of the drug culture, and all those things that lead any great society to decline and failure.

Largely unnoticed is that, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educa- tional Progress, every day that school is in session, 3,000 secondary school students drop out. In the 2003-2004 school year, nearly 540,000 students will leave before earning a high school diploma. The graduation rate is 69 percent and far worse in urban school districts where fewer than half graduate. The education of children and youth is not that difficult if done correctly, but that process is now in shambles.

I regret to tell you that President George W. Bush is just one more in a long line of U.S. presidents who have permitted the education system to come under the control of the federal government. Indeed, under Bush 43, the U.S. Department of Education, the chief perpetrator of this obscenity, has virtually doubled in size, due to his advocacy of a "teach to the test," the absurd cookie-cutter notion that all children and youth learn at the same pace and must, from coast to coast, regurgitate the same answers. We have come a very long way from the one-room schoolhouses that taught all grades and some- how managed to produce students with excellent skills.

On April 26, 1983, "A Nation at Risk," a report on the state of education, was released. This report stated: that "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 a people." By then, the process of undermining our educational system had been in place since the 1960s. It began by modeling our system on one used by the former Soviet Union. The fruits of that effort had shown up by 1983, and they have gotten steadily worse since then.

In June, "The Nation's Report Card: Reading 2000", issued by the National Assess- ment of Educational Progress, reported that the nation's fourth and eighth grade stu- dents had shown only slight improvement in reading ability over the past two years and that the nation's high school seniors entering the workforce or headed for college were worse readers than those in the twelfth grade in 1998. For years, many colleges have had to teach remedial reading to freshmen.

In April, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author, David McCullough, testifying at a special hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, stated: "We are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate" and igno- rant of the basic philosophical foundations of our constitutional free society. He noted that only three colleges in the United States require a course on the Constitution in order to graduate. They are the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Naval Acade- my at Annapolis, and the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs.

In May, McCullough charged that the teaching of American history was being deliber- ately destroyed by "rotten" history books that embraced "multiculturalism" and "cul- tural equivalence," as opposed to demonstrating why some cultures have proven supe- rior to others. McCullough called the history books in today's schools "deadly." He said, "It's as if they were designed to kill anyone's interest in history, rather than encourage it."

Noted education professor, Diane Ravitch, has just published a book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn. Sharply criticizing today's textbooks, she said:

"Students who learn about the world from these texts are unlikely to understand why some civilized nations flourished and others languished, or why people vote with their feet to leave some places and go to others…Nor will they have any deep knowledge of the great ideological, political, economic, and military struggles between democratic nations and their totalitarian adversaries in the 20th century."

There was a time when local school boards were in charge of local schools. Those days are long gone. Today the teachers' unions control all aspects of education in America, and they dominate the U.S. Department of Education. They are considered a keystone of the Democrat Party, U.S.A., and acknowledged by all as extremely Liberal. As such, they have worked hard to deconstruct the former system of education that produced well educated students up to the years of the 1950s and replaced it with a system that now produces children and youth deliberately rendered ignorant of the basic skills, of history, of civics, of geography, et cetera. Add to this, the massive infusion of lies about the earth's environment throughout the entire curriculum.

Little wonder that one of the fastest growing trends in America today is home schooling. So long as parents have a choice between sending their young sons and daughters to the failed schools of the nationally imposed educational system or teaching them at home, many are choosing the latter. They are heroes. The students passing through our public educational system have become its victims.

Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, Communications Director of the American Policy Center, and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs," posted on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com). A compilation of his past columns, entitled Warning Signs, is published by Merril Press. In addition to Warning Signs, Caruba is the author of A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam and The United Nations vs. the United States, both of which are available from the National Anxiety Center, 9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, New Jersey, 07040.

This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics, civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.

POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS

POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE

Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.

Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs, International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests, Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy

INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

---

THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA

An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis

Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor

Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic, Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues

Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity