| Friday,
January 30, 2009 That sound of panting comes from me trying
to catch up. I'm more and more convinced they aren't putting as many minutes
in an hour as they used to, and the days seem to be a lot shorter.
I need to get Mamelukes out the door, and I very much want to get done
the proposal for The Mask on the Wall. And of course there are the essays
for this spot. At least the subscriptions keep me from having to grab
journalism gigs; thanks to all of you who subscribe and renew.
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The Threat to America
I was recently at a conference on threats to the United
States. There were a number of us there, and it was an open ended discussion
to generate ideas. Participants came from a number of government and
non-government organizations, and subjects ranged from fairly obvious to
quite exotic.
Part of the conference had some of us stand up and comment
on what we'd heard, and add our own conclusions and observations. When it
came my turn to do that, I started off by saying that I would conclude with
what I believed to be the most dangerous threat to the United States I could
identify, and why I believed that Bill Gates might be a public enemy.
"I said that to make sure you'll stay awake for the rest of
my talk. And understand, I know Bill Gates, and he is not evil nor does he
have any bad intentions; my conclusions about him are connected to what I
believe to be the worst threat to the country."
I won't go into the main body of what I talked about, but my
conclusions were simple: I believe that the worst threat to the United
States is our failure adequately to educate the smartest 25% of our
students; that there are no hopeful counter trends; and the result will be
disaster. Add to that our failure to train or teach skills to the lower half
of the population, and the disaster is made worse. These trends have related
causes.
The underlying cause is our attempt to provide every public
school child with a university prep education. Bill Gates becomes involved
because his foundations promote the idea that "every American child deserves
a world class university prep education"; and the attempt to do that insures
that very few American children will receive a world class university prep
education, and most of the smarter children will receive an education that
is indifferent at best. The failure of our schools to educate the smart kids
will put the United States into a terrible competitive position that will
only get worse. We will continue to live off our capital, both intellectual
and financial.
The problem here is that I don't have any startling
information: everyone knows the facts here. One fact is that this is not
Lake Wobegone. Half of the American children are below average. That means
that the only way to make sure that no child is left behind is to see that
no child gets ahead.
It does not matter how much we want it to be so, roughly
half the children will not learn Algebra in high school, or indeed at any
other time of their lives. They will not be well served by an attempt to
give them a world class university prep education -- and the attempt to
provide it for everyone will insure that the students who could profit from
a university prep education won't get a good one. There are few teachers who
can give adequate attention to the brightest 25% of the class while trying
to give everyone in the class a world class university prep education.
This situation has developed over the years; but we were put
into an unrecoverable attitude by No Child Left Behind, which told teachers
that their goal was to see that every child in the class made some minimum
score on a national test. The result was predictable and predicted, but that
didn't stop it. Since the brightest half of the class would get the wanted
score, the way to improve the class average is to concentrate on those just
below average and get them to achieve passing marks. This happens all over
the country.
Repealing No Child Left Behind won't fix our education
system. The only thing that will fix it is to understand that half of the
American Children are below average. Below average children have no need for
a world class university prep education. They can't profit from it, and they
learn very little that is useful to their future lives from a world class
university prep education. That is not to say that there is nothing they
could be learning in school that would not be useful in their future lives.
There are many skills that can be taught in school that will be relevant to
the future lives of the half the children who are below average. It's just
that those skills are not part of a world class university prep education.
Note I said skills. Learning skills is important: but skills
are learned by practice; most are not relevant to what we call a university
education. (The skills that are relevant should generally be learned much
earlier than in high school: a good example are the addition and
multiplication tables, which are learned by rote. Everyone can and should
learn the addition and multiplication tables to 20. Some pupils will take a
long time to learn this, while others will learn them in no time.) This is
obvious, and quite relevant to the central axiom that half the children are
below average. A good part of early grade school should be skill training:
learn to read, learn to do arithmetic, learn the mechanics of writing. All
those are necessary for a university education; but there will come a point
at which half the children simply will not be able to learn what they must
learn in order to acquire a world class university education -- and while
there may be doubt about some of the pupils, it will for the most part be
obvious who belongs to which group.
Go further. Among the half of the children who are above
average, only about half of those will profit from a world class university
prep education, and only about half of those ought to go to universities at
all. The rest should go to what we used to call colleges, a role that the
community colleges are taking over. Sorting out who ought to be prepared for
the university and who for colleges is another topic for another time, and
it's a large subject. It's important but if we can accept the notion that
half the children are below average, we can begin to understand than not all
those above average are a good fit for university education. First steps
first.
That's pretty well what I said, and I meant every word of
it. I believe that the worst threat to the future of the United States is a
continuing trend: we are not properly educating the brightest 25% of our
young people, and that will being about disaster; while our failure to teach
relevant skills to the below average children contributes to the coming
disaster. A nation of uneducated bright people coupled with a large part of
the population who haven't been taught to do anything and thus are not only
pretty well useless but know it can lead to a number of scenarios, few of
them pleasant. And that, I put it to you, is where we are now, and those who
continue to promote the idea that every child deserves a world class
university prep education is an enemy of the Republic.
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