Education is not rocket science. As corny as it sounds, you simply have to take care of the basics (the 3R’s) and then creatively teach children as much knowledge as each one can handle

Educational decline: who is to blame?

There is endless chatter in the media about K-12 education: why are the schools so bad and what should we do?

There is also an avalanche of excuses: it’s the fault of the parents, popular culture, the kids, the Internet, the 21st century in general, and of course that old reliable, never enough money. It’s the fault of everything and everybody but the people actually in charge.

Siegfried Engelmann, one of the country’s real educators, explains the fraud in education today: “The big lie is that if kids have reasonable attendance and fail, the kids, their parent, and the home are responsible. No, the school is the designated agency for instructing kids and should be held accountable. Usually, it is not difficult to show the failure was caused by faulty instruction and lack of response to evidence that the kids were in trouble.”

For many years I heard this comment about our Education Establishment: “Oh, they mean well! They just can’t get their act together.” Finally I realized that they do not mean well; and they have their act completely together.

It’s very unpleasant to confront what that act is: the dumbing-down of the schools in order to advance a political agenda, exactly as John Dewey prescribed almost a century ago. (Charlotte Iserbyt coined the book title “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” about 20 years ago.) We would like to believe that our leaders mean well. Unfortunately, our educational leaders do not mean well. That’s my conclusion. As a result, you find that our public schools are overflowing with bad ideas.

Here are some examples from “Credentialed to Destroy” by attorney Robin Eubanks: “In a state meeting I attended a few years ago, I listened while a high school math director of one of the largest school districts in the state told his audience that the district would be disciplining any principal or teacher caught offering ‘sequential methods for solving math problems.’…In tracking both the reading wars and the math wars, it became undeniably clear that there was a consistent conscious pattern to reject what had been proven to work well for most students.”

Bill Ayers, former terrorist and now radical educator, bragged that the Left had “absolute access to the community, the school,…the classroom, and that is where it should do its movement-building.” This man is a known murderer. Look how jauntily he plots the transformation of our country.

So if we want to improve the schools, we need a tough-minded clarity. When a house isn’t built right, fix the house and punish the people who built it.

I see many articles in the media where some business or political leader will say that schools are a mess and then propose a plan that doesn’t deal at all with: 1) the reality that a clique of progressive ideologues is creating the mess or 2) that the first priority is to teach reading, arithmetic, and basic facts. Typically, the proposals we hear deal with everything but the underlying problems.

Common Core is now especially a threat, because it seeks to lock in all the worst practices from the last 50 years: Reform Math in the teaching arithmetic; Whole Language in the teaching of reading; Constructivism in the teaching of knowledge. As Robin Eubanks argues, you can look at all the methods used in the public schools and you will invariably conclude that the inferior ones seem to be preferred.

My own sense is that we could easily improve the public schools, and spend a lot less money. Education is not rocket science. As corny as it sounds, you simply have to take care of the basics (the 3R’s) and then creatively teach children as much knowledge as each one can handle. That’s how you create educated citizens. We aren’t doing this now.