Most people agree that former President Jimmy Carter is one of the nicest, humblest men on the planet, but many others believe his was one of the most disastrous presidential administrations in U.S. history, ranking right up there with James Buchanan.
Carter’s biggest folly was the creation of the Department of Education in 1979.
Since the creation of the DOE, the American education system has gone into the toilet. According to the Pew Research Center, out of the 35 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has an overall ranking of 24.
Richmond County School Board Trustee Venus Cain says local school boards are hamstrung by the federal and state governments that mandate virtually every aspect of how public schools operate.
“Sure, they hand out buckets full of money, but they also tell us how to spend it, and we can’t change how the money is spent. We have no choice,” Cain said. “They (the DOE) dictate everything we do, from the curriculum to what is served in the cafeteria.”
It was the late musician/artist Frank Zappa who first sounded the warning bell in the 1980s.
“After all the student rebellions in the 60s, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it,” Zappa was quoted as saying.
History class followed by being downgraded by the DOE to a ‘noncritical’ learning area, meaning that a teacher did not need a masters degree to teach the class; however, the teacher credentials don’t really matter because the DOE creates the curriculum.
Teachers no longer exist to teach but to indoctrinate according to a script provided by the federal and state educrats.
When I was in ninth grade at Evans High School, my social studies teacher was one of the football coaches. Not only did the coach make it clear that he did not want to be teaching the class, he did not know what fiat money was and insisted that the U.S. was still on the gold standard.
I recall when my daughter was in fourth grade, she came home with a study sheet on Benjamin Franklin. The bullet point sheet credited Franklin with discovering electricity, helping craft the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution and spent multiple paragraphs stating that Franklin, like most of his contemporaries, was a slave owner.
First of all, Franklin did not discover electricity. People of the time knew what electricity was. They just did not know how to harness it.
Also, Franklin did have a slave. Franklin’s slave was his best friend, and as was the custom of the time, the two men shared a bed when traveling; the “slave” designation was for protection, after all, no one would mess with someone who had papers showing he was the property of Ben Franklin.
After reading the study sheet, I immediately wrote the teacher and inquired why she missed adding in that Franklin was the first postmaster general, invented the Franklin stove, established libraries and fire stations and was the president of the Pennsylvania Abolishment Society.
Her response was, “I am not allowed to teach anything other than what is in the curriculum.”
To further compound the problem, the DOE forces school boards to use standardized testing, and if the schools do not meet “annual yearly progress,” then funding is taken away. This has not only led to memorization rather than critical thinking among students, but it has also led to teachers being accused of cheating so that the school system can pass AYP standards and continue to get the funding needed to operate.
A century ago, many schools only went through the eighth grade, and I am willing to bet that most people today could not pass the eighth grade civics exit exam of 1923.
Prior to the DOE, high schools offered practical courses such as welding, auto shop and home economics; however, the pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington D.C. decided the goal was to increase college enrollment, and so the technical school track was eliminated.
The result of that brilliant plan has been several generations of college graduates that owe thousands of dollars in student loans and cannot change a tire or balance a checkbook. They can, however, work complex algebraic math problems, but that is not a skill needed in most jobs.
Local school boards could simply decline federal funding, but educators have become used to having state-of-the-art buildings with computers and other gadgets in every classroom, and school children are now accustomed to being given free breakfast and lunch, so giving up funding is not an option for most school boards.
“The tax base would never be that strong for us to operate without the funding,” Cain said.
For parents who can’t commit to homeschooling, and many families are finding clever ways to be able to teach their kids at home, the only option is for parents to be vigilant and pay attention to what their kids are being taught.
After all, we changed their diapers and cleaned up their vomit as babies, so the least we can do, if we love them, is take control of the information being fed into their growing brains.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
