John Wilder: The Destruction of the American Education Society – On Purpose

“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.” – Horse Feathers

Remember, if you teach homeschool, you can’t get fired for drinking on the job.

Jimmy Carter doesn’t deserve all of the blame he gets. He handled inflation poorly, energy poorly, lost a lot of helicopters in the desert.  Oh, wait, was I talking about Biden?

Nope.  Carter.  One of the biggest things to blame on Carter was the creation of the Department of Education, which he did in an election year to get more votes.  Of course, Carter didn’t start the rot, that really started with Franklin Roosevelt, who attempted to federalize education, because he wanted to further centralize power.  Roosevelt started a quite lot of rot, but it took longer for some of it to surface than the run time of Avatar 2.

What has happened since education has come under the control of the feds?

How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb?  One, unless he needs help.  Then it’s still one.

Previously each state and local area ran its school system.  The schools themselves were, generally, of excellent quality.  But a bigger bureaucracy led to two things.  The first is the activation of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  Dr. Pournelle’s description of it is below:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Sure there are local school boards that are awful.  I’ve heard horrible things about Los Angeles, and other large cities.  Why?  Because the boards are so large that they have to have massive infrastructure – the idea of the neighborhood school disappears, replaced by massive numbers of administrators in a Soviet-style collective.

I couldn’t answer my daughter’s question, “What does a ballerina wear?”  I couldn’t put tu and tu together.

To make this better, we add in the feds???

Yikes.  That’s like solving an ingrown hair with a flamethrower.  It works, but what’s the cost?

Good teachers, for one.  Teaching has always been an important profession, and with local control, the messages that went out to the kids reflected both American values, and local values.  Even if you didn’t agree with the values of Los Angeles, you could move to a place where the school district mirrored your values, like mine, which has classes in PEZ™ dispenser maintenance.

But with federal control, you get federal rules on what can and can’t be done.  The result was the second problem with federal control:

Indoctrination.

I tried to indoctrinate a hairdresser, but I couldn’t condition her.

Schools used to start with teaching basic skills.  If there was a student who wasn’t getting it, they were flunked.  Try to flunk a kid today?  It can’t happen.  The result in (as I recall) the Baltimore school district is that the parents are suing the schools because, after 13 years of education and a diploma, graduates can’t read.  For the sake of the school district, I hope the plaintiff’s lawyer went to school there.

But why can’t the students read?

The idea was that there was a certain minimum competence in reading, writing and math that was required and expected.  The basics of history and geography were also taught, as well as classic literature.

And that was it.  Bring your own lunch.  Need someone to talk to?  Go talk to your friends.

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