03/12/2006: Lest you believe that education reform means increasing spending on education, raising teacher salaries, spending more money on schools, and optional transfers to public schools, Thomas Sowell will send you back to the drawing board in his landmark book, Inside American Education.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about teacher unions. They protect incompetent teachers; they systematically undermine parental authority. Sowell provides ample illustrations of the teacher unions, not the least of which is that they virtually control a cartel that provides a terminally deficient product. Unfortunately, your kids are on the receiving end.
It doesn’t end there.
It’s not just the teacher unions…it goes all the way back to the universities. The education departments–even in the Ivy League universities–have the most incompetent of faculty, their scholarship severely trailing that of other departments. The students who go into teaching are often the bottom-rung. These incompetent teachers find themselves filling the role of amateur psychologist, using curricula designed to indoctrinate rather than educate. Examples include “values clarification”, death education, and–that old time favorite–sex education.
It doesn’t end there.
Educators and administrators–in spite of being from the lower rung of the education totem pole–constantly lecture concerned parents that they (not the parents) are qualified to decide what is proper for the kids. Meanwhile, SAT scores are stagnant, and other countries are outperforming Americans in the critical areas that impact a nation’s ability to produce intellectual capital.
It doesn’t end there.
Universities are centers of left-wing indoctrination. From gay rights to race baiting to speech codes to classroom bullying to campus activism to shouting down opposing speakers, university administrators have effectively said, “f*** you” to all dissenters.
It doesn’t end there.
Sowell provides tangible examples in which students were unfairly put on probation (one–a Harvard freshman–committed suicide); one (Steven Mosher) was kicked out of the Stanford PhD program for the capital offense of revealing the truth of Red China’s population control programs. Meanwhile, physical assaults by left-wing activists on other students were systematically overlooked. Sowell provides details, footnotes and all.
It doesn’t end there.
His chapter on the exploitation of athletes is enough to make your blood boil.
While many proponents of college athletics will make the argument that “money from sports helps build academics”, Sowell illustrates that this is bovine scatology. In fact, the athletes often get screwed: very rare is the college coach who pushes his athletes to finish their degrees. Regarding the college athlete, Sowell has this to say:
In effect, the college athlete in big-time sports is buying a lottery ticket and paying for it with his body and four years of his life.
Think about that as you consider the terrible graduation rates of student-athletes. On the positive side, you have schools like Georgetown; on the other exteme, Sowell highlights Memphis State (now University of Memphis)–a school for which I root because I lived there–which failed to graduate a basketball player for ten years!
The education establishment has responded by spending its treasury of union money to fight all substantive critics. They defend their cartel through stonewalling, blaming parents, blaming society, blaming legislators, and blaming that “we aren’t spending enough money on education.”
I’ll give a personal example of this.
As a college senior, I gave a presentation at the 1990 Florida section of the Mathematics Association of America. The keynote speaker was then-Florida Education Secretary Betty Castor. She had recently returned from a trip to Japan.
She began her speech by complaining of the lack of funding for education. She then provided a comparison of the American and Japanese education systems:
(1) their teachers are no better than ours
(2) their level of funding is no better than ours
(3) their students aren’t any more fundamentally gifted than ours.
To Castor, the defining difference was parental participation. Japan did that better than we did.
She contradicted herself: if the defining difference is parental participation, then why did she intone that the problem with our system is a lack of money, when in fact our system is as “funded” as Japan’s?
Sowell provides examples of such contradictions.
On the bright side, Sowell concludes that we have the ingredients for a successful education system; however, those ingredients exist outside the education system. We also have no shortage of funding for education. He concludes that the problems are largely institutional, and reforming the institutions is the key to reviving American education.
This can be done economically. Parents can remove their kids from government schools and either homeschool them or put them in private schools. It is a financial sacrifice, but it is doable.
As for the universities, sunlight may be the best remedy: professors like Sowell and Mike S. Adams (UNC-Wilmington), and students like Ben Shapiro (USC, Harvard) highlight the follies of looney professors. More professors and students need to come out of the woodwork and expose these abuses. When alumni and corporations start withholding their money, these institutions will start taking notice.