==================================================================
The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070
==================================================================

THE NEW AMERICAN -- August 8, 1994
Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated.
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI  54913  414-749-3784

==================================================================

ARTICLE: Overview

TITLE: "THE STATE OF OUR DECLINE"
       ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SUBTITLE: "A POSTMORTEM ON PUBLIC EDUCATION"

AUTHOR: William F. Jasper

==================================================================

"This country, I think, has been plagued with negativism about education 
long enough," U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley declared at a 
February 11, 1994 news conference after addressing the annual meeting 
of the American Association of School Administrators. "I think what we 
can do is get positive about education -- that's number one."

To Riley, "getting positive" appears to mean ignoring the accelerating 
implosion of the government school system. To Mr. Riley, the former 
governor of South Carolina, and his boss, the former governor of Arkansas, 
"positive" appears to mean aggressively and unconstitutionally expanding 
the reach and control of federal bureaucrats over all aspects of education. 
"Positive" means more legislation, more statist nostrums, and more education 
fads marching under the shop-worn banner of "reform." And, of course, 
"positive" means more money -- always more money.

IRREVERSIBLE DECLINE

"Education is the most important expenditure we can make in this country," 
says Riley. "I used to say in my state that whatever we spend on it, it's 
the right thing to do. But you don't want to waste money, you don't want 
to have fraud, you don't want to have waste of any kind."

Is Riley dreaming or living on another planet? Waste and fraud are 
synonymous with the public education system, and have been for a long 
time. And not just waste and fraud involving economic resources, but 
more importantly, waste and fraud involving -- to use a favorite term 
of the educationists -- "human resources," i.e. students.

Public education, says Myron Lieberman, a nationally prominent educator 
who has spent decades in the system teaching and consulting at all levels, 
"is in irreversible and terminal decline." Unfortunately, the public school 
system has become so extensively intertwined with all areas of our society 
that it threatens to drag our whole civilization down into the grave with 
it.

Any honest appraisal of the precipitous academic, social, and moral decline 
of our schools over just the past three decades must admit that this 
unparalleled plunge has been a horrendous disaster and one that we cannot 
sustain. Yet if we look at all the current indicators and project the lines 
down the road even a couple of years, a nightmare looms. It is certain that 
a continuation of the present course will bring an imminent dissolution and 
overthrow of our entire society.

A LOOK AT THE SCORE

Most surveys of the state of American education begin with a genuflection 
to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report of the National Commission on 
Excellence in Education that shocked many Americans from complacency 
with its claim that "the educational foundations of our society are being 
eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as 
a nation and a people." The claim was true. However, it, and the report's 
facts that supported that claim, were used with an ulterior motive. The 
subtitle of A Nation at Risk was The Imperative for Educational Reform, 
and the Commission, as well as the educational establishment that supported 
it, had their "reform" agenda all laid out and ready to offer the newly 
awakened American public. Those "reforms" have been working their way 
into the schools for the past decade and are responsible for much of the 
continuing chaos and decline. In many cases they have exacerbated it.

Nevertheless, A Nation at Risk did shine a much needed spotlight on the 
"dimensions of risk before us." Among the Commission's findings were these 
bleak facts:

* "International comparisons of student achievement ... reveal that on 19 
  academic tests American students were never first or second and ... were 
  last seven times."

* "Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests 
  is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched."

* "Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in public 4-year 
  colleges increased by 72 percent and now constitute one-quarter of all 
  mathematics courses taught in those institutions."

* "Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline 
  from 1963 to 1980."

* "Business and military leaders complain that they are required to spend 
  millions of dollars on costly remedial education ... in such basic skills 
  as reading, writing, spelling, and computation."

ACADEMIC NOSE DIVE

So, after a decade of "reform" in which a couple trillion more dollars were 
"invested" in our schools, where do we stand academically? According to test 
scores and a host of reports, we were snookered again. By every conceivable 
measure -- academic, social, moral, spiritual, economic -- the public school 
system remains a colossal disaster. Let's look at some of the key 
"indicators":

* Ninety million American adults cannot write a letter complaining about a 
  billing error, figure out departure or arrival times on a bus schedule, 
  fill out a bank deposit slip, or comprehend instructions given to 
  prospective jurors.

* Twenty-six percent of U.S. public school students are in special education 
  classes. In other countries just one to three percent are unable to learn 
  in regular classes.

* SAT scores made minuscule gains but are still barely above record-low 
  levels, and substantially below scores of the 1960s. A newly revised 
  (and dumbed-down) SAT will make future comparisons impossible.

* American students spend only about 41 percent of their school day on core 
  academic subjects (math, science, history, English) and the majority of 
  their school time on subjects relating to AIDS, environment, driver's 
  training, multiculturalism, consumer affairs, and family life.

* Thirty percent of all college freshmen in 1989-90 enrolled in at least 
  one remedial course: 21 percent in remedial math, 16 percent in remedial 
  writing, and 16 percent in remedial reading.

* A 1990 survey of 200 major corporations found that 22 percent of companies 
  were teaching reading, 41 percent were teaching writing, and 31 percent 
  were teaching computation to their employees.

* Over 25 percent of students drop out of high school and fail to graduate.

The litany of horror stories goes on and on. Of this much we can be sure: 
As a nation, we have been on a nose-dive, dumb-down course for 30 years; we 
cannot continue on this course without soon becoming "brain dead." Far from 
reversing this trend, the vaunted "reforms," as we shall see, have usually 
accelerated the decline.

SOCIAL CHAOS

As important as academic achievement is, it is far from being the only -- or 
even primary -- index of school performance. The public schools, goes a 
perennial cliche, provide an essential "socializing" function and a cultural 
glue that hold us together as a nation. The facts speak otherwise:

* In a national survey of school violence by the American School Health 
  Association, 8.8 percent of eighth and tenth grade students reported 
  being robbed at school, 19 percent reported being threatened, and 9.5 
  percent said they were attacked.

* According to a U.S. Justice Department study, 500,000 violent incidents 
  occurred every month in public secondary schools in 1988.

* Thousands of public schools have become prisons, with metal detectors, 
  their own huge police forces, and drug-sniffing dogs. Still, thousands 
  of guns, knives, and other weapons find their way into schools each year.

* Public schools are the "market" where many kids buy their drugs. According 
  to one survey, 57 percent of high school drug users said they bought their 
  illegal substances at school.

* Forget simple rules of courtesy and civility: Foul language, disruptive 
  behavior, vandalism, graffiti, littering, and ignoring or talking back 
  to teachers are the order of the day in many schools.

However, the chaos is not confined to the school grounds, but spills out 
into society, too. Deaths from suicide in persons aged 15 to 19 more than 
tripled between 1960 and 1988, from 3.6 to 11.3 per 100,000. Deaths from 
homicide in the same age cohort nearly tripled during that period, from 4.0 
to 11.7 per 100,000. The number of pregnancies per thousand girls aged 15 
to 19 rose from 12.6 in 1950 to 31.6 in 1985. The number of abortions for 
the same age group jumped from 15.7 in 1972 to 30.8 in 1985.

In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood, Neal Postman reminds us 
that as recently as 1950 "in all of America, only 170 persons under the 
age of 15 were arrested for what the FBI calls serious crimes (such as 
murder, forcible rapes, robbery, and aggravated assault)." That was one 
in every 250,000, or .0004 percent of the pre-15-year-olds in the country. 
"Between 1950 and 1979 the rate of serious crime committed by children 
increased 11,000 percent!" Arrests of juveniles under 18 years of age for 
violent offenses increased more than 57 percent between 1983 and 1992 -- 
and continues to skyrocket. From 1983 to 1992, weapons violations among 
juveniles jumped 117 percent, while those charged with murder or non-
negligent manslaughter rose by 128 percent.

CRIMINAL EDUCATION

Still another sad indicator of our descent into anarchy was demonstrated 
in a Wall Street Journal article of June 16, 1994, "Police Teach Getting 
Arrested Safely 101." According to the article, a high school in Prince 
George's County, Maryland is now having police officers teach students 
how to behave when being arrested. Well, why not? The schools pass out 
condoms based on the premise that students cannot learn to control their 
hormones and therefore must learn to fornicate "safely" whenever the urge 
strikes. Obviously one can't "moralize" to students about avoiding criminal 
associations and behavior likely to get them into trouble; just teach them 
how to "safely" comply with police procedures when being arrested for the 
behavior the schools expect of them.

"For well over a century, supporters of public education in the United 
States and the United Kingdom have asserted that it would reduce crime," 
notes Myron Lieberman in Public Education: An Autopsy (1993). "'Open a 
school, close a jail' -- this was a prominent mid-19th-century rationale 
for education." "In fact," Lieberman writes, "crime rates have increased 
along with the proportion of children educated in public schools and the 
duration of their education." Further, he observes that "the one serious 
effort to study the issue concluded that public education leads to higher 
crime rates." The effort he refers to, a 1987 study by economist John R. 
Lott Jr. for the International Review of Law and Economics, also found that 
"higher levels of totalitarianism are associated with increased expenditures 
for schooling." Lott noted that "these results strongly challenge the 
presumed public goods relationship between schooling and democracy."

The positive relationship between government schools and increasing crime 
rates has been known for some time. In 1886, Zachary Montgomery, who was 
nominated for U.S. Attorney General, pointed out that the government school 
systems of the New England states were proving false the anti-crime promises 
of the public school advocates like Horace Mann. In his book, Poison Drops 
in the Federal Senate: The School Question from a Parental and Non-Sectarian 
Standpoint, Montgomery noted that the 1860 census figures showed Massachu-
setts, home of Horace Mann and cradle of the public school movement, to have 
one criminal to every 649 inhabitants, while Virginia, where education had 
been left under parental control, had only one criminal to every 6,566 
inhabitants. Suicide was also more common in the six northeastern states 
than in the six mid-Atlantic and southern coastal states -- one to every 
13,285 versus one to every 56,584. Montgomery attributed the striking 
differences to the state-controlled school systems of the northeastern 
states which undermined parental authority and family influence while 
neglecting religious and moral training.

The public schools are also failing miserably in their supposed function of 
transmitting to the next generation the knowledge and understanding requisite 
for the survival of the American political-economic system. As one example, 
Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov reported in the June 1991 American Economic 
Review that according to a survey they conducted in Moscow and New York 
City in 1990, attitudes toward free market systems and principles were 
remarkably similar in both countries. Unfortunately, the attitudes were 
not favorable toward markets in either country. In his 1989 study of American 
voting habits (The Unchanging American Voter), Eric R.A.N. Smith concluded: 
"The growth of education in the United States ... may have done many things, 
but it did not contribute much to the public's understanding of politics. In 
sum, education is not the key to the public's understanding of politics."

MORAL DEPRAVITY

If the frightful social pathologies rampant in our schools and society give 
cause for alarm, however, the shocking moral and spiritual decay should even 
more so. Nothing more clearly shows the utter depravity of the public 
education system than the unrelenting and increasingly militant campaign 
by its leading lights to de-Christianize the schools and purge from them 
any mention of moral absolutes and eternal verities. Step by step the 
campaign has proceeded: prayer, the Bible, Christmas carols, Christian 
holidays, any mention of God -- all have been evicted from public schools. 
Our Christian heritage has been stricken from the textbooks. But, as we 
know, nature abhors a vacuum; and once cleansed of Christian influences, 
the schools could not possibly remain neutral. Far from it. They have been 
converted almost completely into temples of humanism and New Age paganism.

Do we exaggerate? Not in the least. Even ten years ago, no force on earth 
could have, all at once, imposed on our schools the kinds of vile curricula 
and programs that abound in today's classrooms. Parents would have revolted 
and teachers would have been arrested for corrupting the young. But patient 
gradualism has had its way; like a cancer, the most hideous vices have crept 
into the schools and spread their malignant influence everywhere.

Consider the following:

* Condom distribution has become widespread, together with "responsible sex" 
  programs, which are reaching to ever lower grades with ever more explicit 
  and perverse material.

* Homosexuality, at first barely broached in connection with AIDS education, 
  is now increasingly presented as a legitimate (even preferable) alternative 
  "lifestyle," or natural "orientation," with adult homosexual activists 
  being allowed to proselytize in the classroom.

* School-based clinics dispense not only contraceptives but abortion-referral 
  information.

* Widespread "values clarification" and situation ethics programs and 
  psychological surveys attempt to undermine the moral and spiritual values 
  taught in the home.

In passing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the American Founding Fathers 
provided that "religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good 
government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education 
shall forever be encouraged." It goes without saying that they would be 
aghast at the abominations we have allowed into our schools under the guise 
of "education."

ECONOMIC INSANITY

To add bitter insult to grave injury, the financial cost for this 
disgraceful miseducation continues to rocket into the stratosphere. 
Education spending accounted for 29 percent of the combined state and 
local government expenditures in the 1991 fiscal year, according to a 
recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study, Government Finances: 
1990-91, revealed that state and local governments spent a record $1.06 
trillion in fiscal 1991, an increase of nine percent over the previous year. 
Education was far and away the largest area of spending, at $309 billion, 
followed by welfare at $130 billion, health care at $81 billion, law 
enforcement and public safety at $80 billion, highways at $65 billion, 
debt service at $52 billion, and administration at $48 billion.

University of Rochester economist Eric Hanushek estimates that annual per 
pupil expenditures, adjusted for inflation, rose from about $2,700 to $4,900 
from 1965 to 1989. During the same period, Peter Passell pointed out in the 
New York Times for March 20, 1994, "Average class size fell from 25 to 18, 
while the proportion of teachers with a master's degree rose from a quarter 
to half and median teacher experience went from 8 to 15 years." Teacher 
salaries rose steadily between 1982-83 and 1989-90, increasing by an average 
of $765 per year above inflation.

But, typical of most government operations, the lion's share of the massive 
sums spent on public education never reaches the classroom; it is eaten up 
by the droves of administrative jackals, who continue to multiply faster 
than rabbits. A 1990 study by Fordham University researchers found only 32.3 
percent of the $6,107 spent per pupil in New York City schools actually made 
it to the classroom. Likewise, a study of 110 Wisconsin schools by the 
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found only 33.5 percent of education 
dollars made it to the classroom.

New York City has more school supervisors than does the country of France, 
and the state of New York has more than the whole of Europe. Of course, a 
huge lobbying force of professional, full-time leeches has grown up in 
Washington and in state capitals to perpetuate and expand all education 
programs. The Committee for Education Funding (CEF) is a perfect example. 
A massive lobbying coalition made up of dozens of universities and education 
organizations -- AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American 
Association of School Administrators, American Council on Education, Council 
of Chief State School Officers, International Reading Association, National 
Education Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals, 
National School Boards Association, etc. -- swamps Congress with "experts" 
who testify in favor of increased spending.

Economist James L. Payne's study of testimony before Congress on spending 
programs yielded some startling insights. Among his findings were that the 
ratio of witnesses in favor to witnesses opposed to spending programs was 
145 to 1. Very likely, the same ratio holds true for education spending, 
where the miseducation lobby is always lavishly represented, but where 
parents, students, and taxpayers seldom are.

WHO KILLED EDUCATION?

By now it should be obvious that the public education system is totally 
bankrupt -- economically, academically, socially, morally, and spiritually. 
In fact, it is dead. It is a rotting corpse that should have been buried 
long ago. Yet, like the "living dead" in a grade B horror movie, it refuses 
to die, refuses to be buried. Why? Because a huge self-interested horde of 
educrats who profit handsomely from the corpse have convinced a gullible 
public to keep it on a life-support system fueled with our tax dollars and 
our children.

The education lobby tells us that great, wondrous changes are in the offing. 
"Restructuring" and "reform" are in the air. But the promises are as empty 
and deceitful as those that have gone before. All of the fatuous bromides 
being offered -- national goals, national standards, merit pay, magnet 
schools, "choice," site-based management, vouchers, outcome-based education, 
charter schools, business partnerships, peer review, total quality management 
-- are pathetic attempts to hide the stinking corpse. And they are being 
offered by the same hucksters who have conned us so many times before.

The 1983 Nation at Risk report stated: "If an unfriendly foreign power had 
attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that 
exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, 
we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.... We have, in effect, been 
committing an act of unthinking, unilateral disarmament."

While it is true that no "foreign power" has "imposed" our educational 
disaster upon us, it is not altogether true that we have done this to 
ourselves. A close examination of the "reforms" of decades past that 
produced our present catastrophe shows that the individuals and organiz-
ations most responsible do indeed constitute a power "foreign" to our 
republic and to Christian civilization.

From its very beginnings in the last century, the public education movement 
was a subversive enterprise lead and guided by humanists, atheists, 
socialists, and utopian communists. Transported here from Britain by 
Robert Owen, the "father of modern socialism," in the early 1800s, the 
idea of state-controlled schools soon took root among the liberal Unitar-
ians who had seized control of Harvard. One of the Owenite leaders of the 
day was the influential writer-editor-intellectual, Orestes Brownson, who 
later converted to Catholicism and turned against the plans of his erstwhile 
comrades. According to Brownson:

        The great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert 
        our churches into halls of science. The plan was not to make 
        open attacks on religion, although we might belabor the clergy 
        and bring them into contempt where we could; but to establish a 
        system of state -- we said national -- schools, from which all 
        religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught 
        but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which 
        all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children....

Many years later, in 1932, the head of the Communist Party, USA, William Z. 
Foster, would announce that his organization was committed to the same evil 
plan. In his book, Toward a Soviet America, he stated: "Among the elementary 
measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural 
revolution are the following: the schools, colleges and universities will 
be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and 
its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being 
cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie 
ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical 
materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist 
society."

This communist vision for education was shared by many of the leading 
educationists of the day. Like Foster and Owen, John Dewey, the "Father 
of Progressive Education," deplored Christianity's division of humanity 
into the saved and unsaved. "I cannot understand," wrote Dewey in A Common 
Faith, "how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and 
spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the 
conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is 
committed."

Dewey's Fabian Socialist colleague at Columbia University's Teachers College, 
George S. Counts, wrote in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order (1932) 
that "teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of 
their conquest." Toward what end? They must "influence the social attitudes, 
ideals and behavior of the coming generation." "The growth of the science 
and technology," said Counts, "has carried us into a new age where ignorance 
must be replaced by knowledge, competition by cooperation, trust in 
Providence by careful planning, and private capitalism by some form of 
socialized economy."

FOUNDATION FUNDING

But this radical scheme for our schools could not have been popularized 
without the aid of some of America's great fortunes. The big tax-exempt 
foundations -- Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and others -- have played a 
major role in advancing virtually every major subversive influence in 
education in this century. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller Jr. set up his 
General Education Board (GEB), a private institution funded by the 
Rockefeller Foundation, that would have immense impact on American 
education. What was Rockefeller trying to accomplish through the GEB? 
According to the GEB's memorial history, it was the "goal of social 
control." And the GEB left no doubt as to who it expected to be exercising 
the "social control." In the Board's Occasional Letter, No. 1, GEB Chairman 
Frederick Gates remarked:

        In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people 
        yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. 
        The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, 
        unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a 
        grateful and responsive rural folk.

These foundations lavished so much money onto communist and socialist 
causes that demands were made for Congress to investigate. In 1953, the 
Congressional Special Committee to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations 
was established. Norman Dodd was appointed staff director of the committee. 
His extensive investigations led him to charge: "The foundation world is 
a coordinated, well-directed system, the purpose of which is to ensure 
that the wealth of our country shall be used to divorce it from the ideas 
which brought it into being. The foundations are the biggest, single 
influence in collectivism."

In a personal interview with Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither, 
Dodd was shocked when Gaither admitted that he operated the foundation 
under directives "to the effect that we should make every effort to so 
alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger 
with the Soviet Union." Dodd was equally shocked by revelations in the 
minutes of the Carnegie Foundation. According to the minutes, Carnegie's 
board of trustees determined soon after World War I that "we must control 
education in the United States."

The Carnegie plotters, said Dodd, recognized that the task "was too big for 
them alone, so they approached the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion 
that the portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled 
by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should 
be handled by the [Carnegie] Endowment."

The deal was struck and American education has been ravaged by foundation-
financed subversion ever since: evolution, removal of prayer and the Bible, 
school consolidation, removal of phonics, sex education, global education, 
textbook subversion, teacher unionization, forced busing, and on and on. 
And today the same Carnegie-Rockefeller-Ford revolutionaries are promoting 
false solutions -- national goals, national certification, choice, vouchers, 
charter schools, etc. -- to "solve" the crisis they have created. If adopted, 
these "solutions" will complete the revolution for the "new socialist 
society" envisioned by Comrade Foster.

END OF ARTICLE

==================================================================

THE NEW AMERICAN -- August 8, 1994
Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated.
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI  54913

==================================================================
