This trend of scholastic failure has a precise beginning which was preceded by a long history of educational prosperity. In the radicalism of the 1960s, the American left came to dominate a newly emergent education bureaucracy (culminating in the Department of Education), leveraged teachers as collective-bargaining-chips (forming the nation’s largest labor union) and commenced upon a nationwide social-engineering experiment (intent on redefining human nature). This consolidation of progressive authority over education precipitated an immediate and disastrous decline in America’s academic competitiveness.He might have added that it was in the early 70s that the idea of a school being in loco parentis, a substitute parent, as it were, was dropped and student rights became a major cause celebre of the progressive left. When that happened the authority and ability of schools to maintain discipline began a long, slow collapse. It also precipitated a long, slow increase in the cost that taxpayers would have to bear for schools that became increasingly dysfunctional.
Paulette continues:
Naturally, not every rural American school adopted wholesale the progressive lesson-plan. But the pseudo-social-psychologists constituting state and federal education bureaucracies ensured that all public schools were influenced through federal guidelines, textbook revisions and a leftward lurch in scholastic literature, evaluation standards and political climate. The liberal coup of university faculties and the rise of quasi-substantive degrees in “education” further ensured that all future teachers would be subjected to the crucible of progressive indoctrination.The feeling one gets from reflecting on the miserable state of many public schools today is that the first step in reforming them needs to be to reclaim them from the grasp of the progressive theorists and leftist unions which have dominated American education for the past fifty years.
This centralized education bureaucracy and its misguided reform policies resulted in a gradual replacement of traditional educational values — such as discipline, competition and ethics — with a creed of self-esteem, diversity and relativism. Gifted programs have been abandoned as “elitist,” whereas (in an academic version of blaming the victim) one out of every eight students is now labeled “disabled” and remanded to “special education.” SAT scores had declined so sharply by the mid-1990s that examiners were forced to “re-center” the grading scale by adding 100 points to test scores in order to maintain the 800-point average.
Another aspect of the decline of authority has been the decline of moral authority. With the secularization of schools it has become increasingly difficult for schools to maintain high standards of dress, language or behavior. Any such standards are seen as an unwarranted and needless imposition of an arbitrary standard unrelated to educational performance.
Paulette goes on to argue that the solution to our nation's educational malaise is privatization and the marketplace and he makes an impressive case. He concludes with an apposite quote from English philosopher John Stuart Mill who wrote in On Liberty (1859) that:
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments.Paulette's column should be read by anyone concerned about America's fall from academic preeminence and might well be followed by a viewing of the film Waiting for Superman.