Can we all agree there is a problem with America's attitude? I
am not anti-American, I love my country but it is time to wake up
and grow up. We don't pay our UN dues, we won't sign the Kyoto Protocol,
we basically want to live like there is no tomorrow. This is totally
unrealistic and absolutely cannot continue. Everything from our environment
to our infrastructure has been taken for granted. A report, prepared
in Washington under the supervision of a board chaired by the former
scientific adviser to the White House, warns that because of human
demand for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel, more land has
been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th
and 19th centuries combined. America is doing her part, and then
some in this. For parts of the year the Colorado River, home to several
dams including the Hoover, in North America dries up before it even
reaches the ocean. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobucher is right when
she says, "Bridges in America should not be falling down." But
they are. And the bridges are just the start of it.
We have little sense of continuity, history and geography, for
this reason we are very arrogant in displays of power with the
rest of the world. The National Geographic Survey of Geographic
Literacy found after years of war in Iraq, only 37% of young Americans
can find Iraq on a map. As many cannot identify Saudi Arabia. The
result is even worse for Iran and Israel.
Overall, up to one in five say they “don't know” where
these four countries are located.
 My
fellow Americans remind me of Private First Class Conrad Vig whom
Ice Cube speaks of in the movie Three Kings when he says, “Don't
mind him he's had no high school.” It's not that Americans
aren't good people. It's that we are on the whole uneducated and
uninvolved. Our dropout rates are high. Although figures are fuzzy
because no one wants to admit the truth roughly one third of Americans
are not graduating high school. Many of our colleges are not doing
their jobs. Monica Goodling, the third most powerful official in
the U.S. Justice Department who had to resign because of scandal,
did her undergraduate work at Messiah College and then went on
to attend Pat Robertson's law school. These schools are known as
Tier four colleges and they are the lowest performers on the scale.
The college choice may not matter, though. National statistics
show that only ten percent of college graduates and sixteen percent
of graduate students read on the level they should. Another astonishing
statistic is that roughly four percent of college graduates are
actually functionally illiterate. On the whole we aren't
doing a great job of educating our teachers, so they can educate
the next generation. One third of all secondary school math teachers
have neither a major nor a minor in mathematics.
There were issues from the beginning. William Torrey Harris, a
leader in American education, felt that correctly managed mass
schooling would, “result in a population so dependent on
leaders that….revolution would be a thing of the past.” The
American system of compulsory schooling and the social engineering
by the corporate world did not produce a system that had the student's
mind in mind. Starting in the first decade of the twentieth
century, school was looked upon as a branch of industry and a tool
of government. The ability of Americans to think as independents
had to be curtailed. It is difficult to believe such long range
social engineering exists, but it does.
 From
the fiasco of whole language to the continued battle over creationism,
we can't even guarantee a student will graduate being able to read
much less understanding evolution. “Whole language?” you
ask? During the 30's and 40's American public schools massively
converted to non-phonetic reading methods. They stopped teaching
phoneme awareness and started teaching the disastrous whole word
method in which the unlucky student has to memorize entire words
through sheer repetition. Dr. Seuss is probably the worst thing
that ever happened to American education. I suspect he knew that.
The illustrious Mr. Geisel says, “That damned Cat in
the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for
a textbook house and they sent me….two hundred and twenty-
three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and
I almost went out of my head.” Children taught that same
list could read the Cat in the Hat and nothing else.
In 1951, Harvard professor Robert Ulich wrote in Crisis and
Hope in American Education, which outlined the weaknesses
of the current system, mentioning as key factors in its failure “the
lack of a coherent curriculum in schools and undergraduate studies,
the rule of the credit-system, the widespread application of
tests, the broad range of choice for the students—which
allowed the avoidance of intellectually demanding courses and
impeded coherent and sequential learning—the lack of selection
in schools and undergraduate studies, and the clinging to a 'single-ladder'
school system.”
In 1967, the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project stated, “few
will be able to maintain control over their opinions.” Award
winning teacher John Gatto notes, “between 1967 and 1974,
teacher training in the US was covertly revamped through coordinated
efforts of a small number of private foundations, select universities,
global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all
coordinated through the US Office of Education and through key
state education departments like those in California, Texas, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and New York.” This effort to revamp continues
in the form of creationist battles that failed in Pennsylvania
but seem to be winning in Texas. This pedagogic decline serves
a highly centralized corporate economy very well, indeed.
There has been a steady increase of intellectual blindness over
the last century or more. This intellectual decline has allowed
us to deny our plummeting status, our inability to contribute to
the betterment of the world, and the sources of the problem. The
rules and realities of pecking order exist whether we wish to acknowledge
them or not. In 1945, the US produced forty percent of the world's
goods, and until the early 70's we were the biggest exporter in
the world. Today, our deficit is astronomical and we are the biggest
importers. We think of ourselves as “god blessed,” but
we are not. We work harder, are less healthy, have a lower standard
of living than many. On the treatment of mothers, for example,
we are not even in the top ten. Our life expectancy is also low
compared to many industrialized nations. Bad education allows us
to allow our religious and corporate organizations to control our
policies, which really puts a lid on innovation and diplomacy.
What do we do to fix it? Honestly, I don't know. I don't
know how to come back from a large percent of Americans not being
able to identify the country we are at war with, on a map. We are
so entrenched here. The NTA, the NEA, the universities, the state
and local governments, it's not conspiracy it's inertia. Only those
who are absolutely forced to change, will. Can we change? I don't
know. America was founded by religious pioneers, two groups not
known for their rationality. Unfortunately, this coming century
may be lost to us already. We may have seen our “Golden Age” come
and go. This very well may be the Chinese century.
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Flesch, Rudolph. Why Johnny Can't Read. New
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Gatto, John Taylor. "Some Lessons Form the Underground
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