Education statistics in the United States tell a grim story. The news always seems to be bad. Stats are always falling. Why is that?
I’ve argued for many years that The Biggest Mystery In American History is that the public schools can’t seem to do the fairly straightforward job of educating the young. How, by the way, do you explain this inability to yourself?
Lots of people say it’s bad luck, incompetence, unfortunate fads, unhelpful parents, video games, drugs, and many other answers that have this common denominator: they let the Education Establishment avoid suspicion of deliberate malpractice. (Even the charge of incompetence, although insulting, is exculpatory, because there is no intent.)
But deliberate malpractice is precisely the concern of this article. So let’s focus on the unending flood of curiously bad results, and ask: how much failure are you willing to indulge before you start to become...suspicious?
As for me, I’m there. There’s simply too much failure, too many depressing stats. I’ve grown increasingly comfortable with the notion that the people at the very top could not be so unlucky or so incompetent over so many years. It defies all odds. So we have to consider the next most logical explanation. They deliberately set out to transform the schools, presumably in order to transform the society. Trouble is, what they regarded as transforming, most other people regarded as deforming. The common term is dumbing-down. (It’s a matter of historical record that John Dewey and virtually all of his successors were far to the left; and visions of social engineering danced in their heads. The road to a Socialist America, they believed, ran directly through the classroom.)
At this point, the conversation gets problematical. The possibility of intent (that is, conspiracy) makes some people nervous. A college professor wrote me just last week: "Conspiracy is a flag word. When I hear someone say conspiracy I tune them out as kooks.” Similarly, a high-level executive sent me a note saying he agreed with much of my work; however, he didn’t like the word conspiracy. But I have to ask: if not conspiracy, what then?
For me, this is not an academic discussion. It has profound consequences. Namely, if we can’t honestly confront what plagued our past, how are we going to fix the future? I worry that we can’t. If we won’t even discuss the question of conspiracy, then perhaps we safeguard the ideological machinery that made so much failure possible. We give that machinery carte blanche to go on sabotaging every hope of progress.
Conspiracy or no conspiracy? That truly is the question. Note that, at this point in history, there is little to make us sanguine about the answer. Who will even vouch for the character of the suspects (that is, our elite educators)? Hardly anyone. We constantly read offhand comments to the effect that our education system is broken, top to bottom. The elite educators themselves speak like this about their own handiwork! They should know! Why would anyone disagree with them?
I can make a strong case that virtually every program and method used in the public schools (for more than 60 years) was not seriously intended to increase education but to impede it. Think of all the innovations you’ve heard about over the years: New Math, Open Classroom, Outcome-Based Education, Multiculturalism, and many DOZENS more. These things come and go so fast because the Education Establishment, after years of disappointing results, has to admit that the gimmick is flawed. (Often they rearrange the components, give them a new name, and start over. I believe that’s exactly what we saw when New Math morphed into Reform Math.) Point is, every breakthrough is soon discarded because none of them works as promised. How in the world does a group muscle its way down to this consistent level of failure? Clearly, major organizational skills are required, and relentless dedication to an agenda.
Each of these bad methods is a fascinating story. But the paradigm--the satanic and deeply revealing showpiece--for all this counter-productivity has to be Whole Word, which was introduced across the country in 1932. I’ve written a dozen articles about this topic, trying to explore all the reasons why Whole Word is a destructive fraud. It actually prevents children from learning to read. Education statistics prove that point. By imposing this gimmick in the schools, the Education Establishment created 50 million functional illiterates. Why would they do that?
Introducing a bad idea and then apologizing (“I’m really sorry!”) is one thing. Introducing a bad idea and relentlessly keeping it in play for 80 years--what else could that indicate but a conspiracy? That, at least, is my working conclusion. Whole Word (also known as look-say, Sight Words, Dolch words, etc.) would seem to be the USA’s most sustained conspiracy. 80 years, 50,000,000 functional illiterates! How many more decades, and more tens of millions of functional illiterates, would be required before you concede: this might well be a conspiracy?
I think it’s much like the case of a woman whose husband dies of food poisoning. That’s a tragedy. If a second husband dies of food poisoning, that’s bad luck in the kitchen. When a third husband dies of food poisoning, most of us have the same thought: she’s killing those guys. Perhaps you are more trusting. So how do you react when the fourth husband dies from food poisoning? What would it take for you to exclaim: she’s guilty!
I see a parallel to the pedophilia problem within the Catholic Church. Nobody wanted to believe the rumors, because nobody wants to believe something really bad about another person. In consequence, the scandal was allowed to continue. Similarly, I suspect, as long as the Education Establishment can evade responsibility for creating fifty million functional illiterates, the illiteracy problem will continue.
The point of this article is to invite everyone to reflect upon the possibility of conspiracy. Maybe I’m wrong in my working conclusion. But the thing that strikes me most forcefully is how much we concede if we refuse even to discuss the issue. I’m sure that decades ago, many parents simply refused to hear a bad word about local priests. Similarly, there are smart people now who insist that our educators couldn’t possibly stoop so low that they would, for example, undercut literacy. But literacy has been undercut, massively so.
I’m only asking, how many husbands have to die of food poisoning before you get...suspicious?
Perhaps it’s time to give credit where it’s due. My own guess is that Whole Word is the most brazen, far-reaching and successful conspiracy in American history. In my imagination this conspiracy required scores of smart, dedicated people who decided among themselves: “It’s fairer if kids are more or less equal. When everybody is semi-literate, that’s social justice. And let’s face it, the public is never going to vote for our political views. The only option is to sneak them through, and realistically speaking, dumbed-down citizens will be less likely to see what we’re up to.”
Did conversations like that occur? Lots of circumstantial evidence convinces me that they probably did. And if so, all that vast tide of illiteracy and academic mediocrity makes perfect sense.
And once you accept that we couldn’t possibly have 50 million functional illiterates by chance, and that we must be dealing with some sort of scheme, you will find it very easy to extrapolate outward to other gimmicks, for example, to New Math. The country tossed that thing in the trash in less than five years. Nobody sincerely trying to teach children how to do arithmetic could stumble into New Math. So why was it imposed on the country? We can ask the same question about Open Classroom, Life-Adjustment, Child-Centered Education, Constructivism, Bilingual Education and many, many more. One method after another that sounded good and promised much but was soon seen to be a failure. That’s the pattern. Doesn’t it make you....suspicious?
Why, it’s almost as if somebody was working to undermine public education.
(High-level educators who spend careers making sure kids aren’t well educated...that would seem to score a perfect 10 in hypocrisy. Educators and their misadventures are a big theme on the writer’s site, Improve-Education.org.)
