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.

The basic function of the school was education.  Sometime around 2006, though, the competence level was reset to “breathing”.  Now?  Biden’s Department of Education wants “projects” that increase Critical Race Theory usage in schools.  The same initiative is called “Promoting Informational Literacy Skills” which essentially involves coming up with ways to convince kids that The Current Thing is correct, i.e., not to “do your own research” and to only trust .gov sources.

I guess she was just biden her time.

The bureaucracy was bad enough, but the indoctrination is worse.  The difficulty is that most school districts compete for federal money, and when they accept it, every single rule applies.  Remember, the first rule of government club is that you do whatever the government says.

Back during Obama, the Department of Education even put out a “letter” that indicated they would investigate any school who didn’t discipline students the way the Leftists in Washington wanted.  So, suspensions and detentions essentially ended in many school districts.  The result?  Well, I don’t think anyone is complaining the schools have too much discipline nowadays.

Why would they want that?

We can be assured that the Department of Education never educated a single kid, in fact whoever was responsible for my algebra homework was fired.  But they have been responsible for indoctrination with Leftist values.

If you listen to Pink Floyd and eat ice cream, you become comfortably plump.

The solution starts with saying no.  No to federal rules, no to federal money.  And if anyone wanted to actually improve education in the United States, the first thing to do would be to abolish the Department of Education and every single one of its rules.

After that?

Time to think about that pesky Department of Energy . . .

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

27 thoughts on “The Destruction of the American Education Society – On Purpose”

  1. Way back when, its progenitor was HEW – Dept. of Health, Education & Welfare. Education was split off into is own Cabinet Seat, and the remnant becme the Dept. of Health & Human Services. Another useless Cabinet Plop (Poop?).

    It’s pretty much self-evident that most of the cabinet depts. could be eliminated to the great benefit of the nation. But, as you noted, the “2nd Group” runs things, so that’s a pipe dream.

    Hopefully, when The Ukraine falls, things might get better. At least no more 10% for The Big Guy.

    1. Yup. And FDR started the original. I think the Department of Education that Carter did was a shameless ploy to get votes, “who could be against education?”

  2. @ TBC,

    I remember parents having a lively discussion about gov infiltration into EDU as a lil’ shaver.
    A couple of years later we got exposed to all the racism agitprop with some kids freaking out and crying, this at a rural route school in a town that is now wall to wall strip mall and particle board section 8 apartments with the same roads from back then.
    When I got home the parents set me straight with a beautiful rare antique book about the Civil War.
    Parents and siblings always asked so what did you learn at school today.
    The Heather has two mommies rainbow participation trophies were just getting started around the time of graduating and those it’s a black thing you wouldn’t understand shirts were popular.

  3. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy is pretty poignant… reminds me a bit of a book called “Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies”. Perhaps we need to send a Barbarian into the school administration to shake things up and weed out the non-hackers. I nominate Conan the Librarian…

    https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Bureaucrats-Corporate-Cycle-Strategies/dp/0449905268/

    Also, I think I found the soundtrack for this post: Pink Floyd’s the Wall for our side mashed up with Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive” for theirs.

      1. As for schools, dated my only ultra lib chick back in 1996. She was proud that both of her brothers were queer. One, Billy Salem, did the storyline & co-wrote “Kindergarten Cop”.

        I think reformation of pub skools is hopeless.

    1. Ha! Excellent mash-up! Hadn’t seen that one.

      And the barbarians are given shrimp and become bureaucrats.

  4. How many Feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

    Just one – she holds the bulb in place and then the world revolves around her.

    1. LOL, but sadly there are male bloggers that could also be so described.

      Self-adsorbed people are easy to ID, they are never wrong.

      I note that John our host often admits his mistakes, so I’d trust him to change a light bulb 🙂

    2. I’d heard this as “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

      THAT’S NOT FUNNY!!!!!!!

  5. There is a meme of Jimmeh Carta stating that since the Long March to destroy EDU at all levels the USA went from 1st to FUSA 24th in edumacations.
    The Broward County FLA shooter was one of those do not discipline cases under Barry Soetoro Sobama.
    You can look around and see the poisonous fruits of the CPUSA/Grand Old Politburo Uniparty Long March to burn down America by any means necessary.
    These things happen when a fifth column of quislings serves the global soviet and not the people.

  6. Way back in time, the term high school actually reflected the fact that it was a place of “higher” learning that not all young people were cut out for. IIRC fewer than half of teenagers actually completed high school as recently as the mid-20th century.

    They taught Latin. They taught Greek. They taught mathematics without any of the silly fluff about racism. They taught History of Western Civilization without the twin obsessions on this country’s former “peculiar institution” and the holocaust.

    As recently as the late 70s when I was in high school there was mandatory shop class for boys, and Home Ec for girls. Courses of study so blatantly patriarchal and sexist, by modern standards, that it seems downright quaint today.

    Now it is common core math, Critical Race Theory, BIPOC/Indigenous/gender grievance studies, no lessons in cursive script and no P.E. any longer. Is it any wonder Johnny can’t read, can’t write, can’t think for himself, can’t climb a rope, doesn’t understand how an internal combustion engine works and believes that his white skin is a curse? The most important meals of his day are carb-heavy and obesity-inducing, taxpayer-provided via the very institution that is twisting his impressionable young brain.

    We opted for Catholic schools for our children, which was at least a marginal improvement over the public indoctrination centers. Still no P.E. or shop class, but no grievance studies, either. Perhaps most importantly, they learned how (and why) to pray.

    1. Catholic schools […] but no grievance studies
      The major Western religions teach self-loathing, and that humans are guilty, and should pay reparations to a bureaucracy to use on their behalf. You don’t perceive religion as grievance studies because you fell for their big lie that there is a conscious creator taking a personal interest in you. Please describe the evidence for this theory of physics which didn’t originate from a PR release from the church.

  7. When my grandparents went to their country schools, the schoolmaster (there was only one, hired by the parents) assumed that the kids could read decently when they showed up for first grade..Most children learned by reading the Bible at home…And the older kids helped with the younger kids when necessary…It was a different country back then….Try taking the Harvard entrance exam from those days, it will show you the difference in education levels…

  8. Amazingly enough, with all the push for higher education, learning to pass tests instead of learning, giving high school diplomas to students that only really passed somewhere around third grade, and even the most ignorant realizing their schools are indoctrination centers, those that learn a trade can find their skills pay more than most fields that require a college education. It’s unfortunate, though, that in the larger cities, those trades are practiced by foreigners without any education to help them comprehend how the Constitution is probably the best leash ever placed on government. There is a solution to this problem, but too many “experts” will have to admit they’re functional idiots.

  9. Of course this makes perfect sense but there is no way in Hades that abolishing the Dept of “Education” has any support outside of a handful of Republicans in the House. Food for thought in the rebuilding time.

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